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FREEDOMWAYS          THIRD QUARTER 1969

dancing in the war gavotte in Vietnam, it's about killing and dying for nothing.  Now, that's manhood.

Womanhood is where brainless hussies go, incapable of either loyalty or industry, props on the stage of a destiny that is the property and province of men.  "Bitch!" growls William Holden, as he blasts the guts out of a comely wench whose sin was that she had dared to pick up a gun and meddle in men's business.  "Bitch!"

The critics loved it.  What racism?  Where?  Kaufman of the New Republic: "The contrast between the U.S. and Mexican cultures is important to Peckinpah...It's a handy way to juxtapose Europe and America..."  What glorification of mass killing?  Schickel of Life:  "It is only in these moments of mass death that the film is, ironically, completely alive, only in them that Director Sam Peckinpah's enormous talent seems...fully extended-so much so that I am sure that they rank among the greatest action sequences ever made."  Can any person of good breeding and fine tastes, can any civilized human being fail to see the beauty of the blood ballet?  Without fully realizing it Schickel is speaking of himself when he says that the film "has brilliantly concluded [the] search...for some historical correlative that [can] illuminate our present sense of des-perate psychological dislocation."  The critics are depraved:  they are bourgeois capitalist decadents.  In the interests of keeping body and soul together, they were compelled to assign to the film technical and dramatic excellence it does not possess in order to rationalize the thrill they got from watching all that slaughter.

And didn't the brothers love it too?  In they poured, fresh conks and Afros too, truckin' on down to get with The Man's orgy of death.  Didn't they stamp their feet, laugh and shout with glee, didn't they?  Greeted every shot with a "Go, baby. Wail on."  But that's all right.  It's a good thing they're digging it because when the real thing hap-pens in Harlem and Watts and East St. Louis, they'd better know their lines, know exactly how to play their roles, know precisely how to die.  That's where the message of this flick is at: suburban housewives, ad executives, rotund senators, hot dog vendors, tax inspectors, garbage collectors, come ye all and get ready to kill! "Niggers," get ready to die.

Jean Carey Bond

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 12:43:37