I put this movie on my rental list because of the blurb CafeDVD had, saying this was the movie which caused our current movie ratings sytem to be created. From a guy point of view, especially a guy of a certain age, this is an old movie worth putting on your rental list, if not adding to your collection. Honestly, it was really well done. It’s also the last movie Alan Ladd made. Unless you live under a rock or are simply too young to be called an adult, you’ve heard of an old movie called “Shane” which made him a permanent fixture in both American culture and film lore.
Those of you who like really bad popular television shows from the 1980s will feel a certain familiarity with the actor playing Jonas Cord. George Peppard is more widely known as John ‘Hannibal’ Smith, leader of “The A-Team.” You know, that television show where they could fire 1,000 rounds during an assault without anybody ever getting hit and where simple corrugated roofing metal would easily deflect numerous automatic weapons rounds.
Watching this movie for the first time in 2017 I found it to be a fairly well made movie. In fact, it seemed like a made for TV movie. The sheer robes, verbal sexual content and occasional other scantily clad women were really well covered by today’s standards. Keep in mind that today we have free streaming porn right to whatever device is connected to the Internet and the swimsuits women choose to wear at the local pool/beach aren’t the full body battle armor of the 1950s.
Yes, there will always be a segment of the population which views this movie with more disdain than the “general porn” on the Internet. Not only was it the first to put such scantily clad women on the screen, it was also the first to openly talk about using sex for power and it was also the first (that I know of) to actually bring up the subject of homemade porn.
Please don’t be put off by the previous paragraph. All of this content which made the movie so shocking and played such a central role in the work is less than 10 minutes of the entire movie and it is sprinkled in 30-seconds to 1 minute at a time. Everyone focused on that 10 minutes and not the rest of the movie in 1964. The rest of it is a really well done movie with lots of plot and dialog in the script.
Viewing the movie today, in 2017, it doesn’t have the shock factor it had in 1964. That whole aspect seems quaint now. It almost seems like a wholesome movie of yesteryear.
