Mores and values change. Things like misogyny are still very prevalent, but we HAVE made some progress, albeit not enough. When we look back on the past, while we're understandably offended at a lot of things that aren't accepted anymore, but we can't judge people TOO harshly, as they simply didn't live in a time that forced them to confront or even consider ideas that we take for granted now. What's misogynistic now was simply the norm in the past.
So when I say that The Swinger is nauseatingly misogynistic, that's not a judgment made purely on the norms of the present day. After watching Ann Margaret dance around in what is actually a pretty cool into, we're treated to an opening scene where the men of an office actively try to rape (or at least seriously grope) the clearly unwilling women in the office. One woman is literally used in a tug-of-war. This is obviously intended to be light hearted, complete with sped up film that makes it look like the Keystone Cops, but...DAMN.
This makes early James Bond look downright respectful. I'm not just throwing that out there, I mean that there is literally no scene in any James Bond film that I can remember that even approaches this degree of contempt for women (and I know the Bond films inside out.)
I'm usually dismissive of people who leave a film early and call it crap. If they don't see the whole thing, how can they know the film doesn't improve, or even turn itself around and justify the "bad" beginning? Well, unless director George Sidney was making a post-modern deconstruction on society's attitudes, and was using the audience's acceptance of the offensive beginning as a way of showing how complicit we all are in accepting the unacceptable, I feel comfortable saying that The Swinger is sexist crap. And he wasn't.
I'm not even offended, just a bit caught off guard and shaking my head.Who knows, maybe I'm over-sensitive. But man, I don't think so.
So when I say that The Swinger is nauseatingly misogynistic, that's not a judgment made purely on the norms of the present day. After watching Ann Margaret dance around in what is actually a pretty cool into, we're treated to an opening scene where the men of an office actively try to rape (or at least seriously grope) the clearly unwilling women in the office. One woman is literally used in a tug-of-war. This is obviously intended to be light hearted, complete with sped up film that makes it look like the Keystone Cops, but...DAMN.
This makes early James Bond look downright respectful. I'm not just throwing that out there, I mean that there is literally no scene in any James Bond film that I can remember that even approaches this degree of contempt for women (and I know the Bond films inside out.)
I'm usually dismissive of people who leave a film early and call it crap. If they don't see the whole thing, how can they know the film doesn't improve, or even turn itself around and justify the "bad" beginning? Well, unless director George Sidney was making a post-modern deconstruction on society's attitudes, and was using the audience's acceptance of the offensive beginning as a way of showing how complicit we all are in accepting the unacceptable, I feel comfortable saying that The Swinger is sexist crap. And he wasn't.
I'm not even offended, just a bit caught off guard and shaking my head.Who knows, maybe I'm over-sensitive. But man, I don't think so.