Was it? Must have been 79. I was underage obviously. Same as when a group of us went to see Flesh Gordon and Mary Millingtons True Blue Confessions. Heady days, literally.
We went to see Naughty Nurses and Sex Clinic, as a double bill. Some sleazy old yank bloke was talking to us about Linda Lovelace in the foyer beforehand, and we thought he’d blow our cover and we wouldn’t be allowed in. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t our cover he wanted to blow.
Aye, those were the days. We all went to see Caligula as well, it was a thrill at the time but I saw it a few years ago, absolute pile of horse manure
Your ex was right. There's no ambiguity. He was never afraid of dying, he was a hard **** so when the priest asks him his initial reaction is to te him to fck off. But throughout the film he has a close relationship with those boys. He knows they look up to him and he cares about them. He sees himself in them at their age. And he realises the best thing he can do for them is to save them from the same fate as him and everyone who's lived the life he has in the film who ends up either dead or in the chair. He realises the priest is right. There is nothing in the film to suggest his character would bottle it. I agree about the jugs though.
Yeah, that’s what she said. I’m not having the argument again, twenty years later, with you. There was no precedent for that ending, no movie tough guy ever went out like that, certainly not one played by Jimmy Cagney. Audiences at the time were left shocked, open mouthed, and a little bewildered. People would have left movie theatres talking, and probably arguing, about that ending. Which director Michael Curtiz absolutely intended imo, hence the deliberate ambiguity.
You lookin to get slapped, you mug? Well, I oughta! I ain't no mug, see. Am telling like it is, see. The ambiguity was as deliberate as it was beautiful. The structure of the final sequences make it so. "What did you hear? What do you say?"
I'd say the structure of the final sequence does the opposite. The priest makes the point it's the greatest courage he can show. I think that's what's being missed here. He's not being 'yella' he's showing immense courage. And that's been Rocky's character throughout. It's the film highlighting his courage in every way, not his cowardice. And the two biggest giveaways that there's no ambiguity is firstly the scene with the guards after, when they mock him, that he was yellow after all and then the shot of the priest's face. And then when the street lads ask him if he was yellow and the way the priest puts Rocky down by saying 'every word of it' and 'he died like they said'. Everything points to the truth being the complete opposite.
I don't know mate I wasn't outside those theatres. How open were their mouths exactly? I reckon they all came out and talked about how immense and uncomfortable the ending was, in that nobody but the priest would ever know what Rocky did
...yet, in the end, you can't know. Ambiguous. Deliberately so. That's the point you're missing. Your interpretation is yours. That's the beauty of it. Am gonny be spending Sunday afternoon watching Jimmy Cagney movies now! Starting with "Angels with Dirty Faces"
Was going to post the same I went through a whole phase of watching every Cagney film, but after watching Angels with Dirty Faces, hoping for something similar no other film lived up to that, even though many were very good in their own right.
