Sometimes in life, if you're good enough, you can get away with anything. Well, not anything. But more.
Hollywood's fabled Production Code allowed Clark Gable, as Rhett Butler in "Gone With the Wind" (1939), to utter what was to become probably the most famous line in movie history: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
Audiences knew to expect the line, and still, by all accounts, it prompted gasps. No one had said anything so pointedly daring, and with the D word, in a mainstream American motion picture up to that time or for some years afterward.
The exception was made for an especially prestigious epic -- it's still the Civil War romance -- based on a tremendously popular bestseller that contained the key line.
Three decades later, newspapers with scrupulous -- even prudish -- language standards reprinted verbatim some of President Richard Nixon's more candid remarks from the Watergate tapes.
The words in question were deemed to have sufficient historical significance.
To paraphrase real estate agents, it's about context, context, context.
I mention this because of the frequency with which Martin Scorsese's classic "Raging Bull" (1980) comes to mind while watching newer movies that offend purposelessly.
In "Raging Bull," Robert De Niro won the most-deserved acting Oscar in history for his unflinching, no-holds-barred portrayal of world middleweight boxing champ Jake LaMotta, who beat his wife, beat up his brother and savagely, sadistically attacked ring opponents. Add blistering verbal abuse.
De Niro and Joe Pesci, who plays Jake's brother Joey, exchange one of the highest quotients of vulgar vituperation in film history. Others join in periodically.
The film contains an unusually erotic sex scene. It involves Jake, who is trying to abstain before a fight, and amorous wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty).
Audiences offended by such content, without regard to context, reeled out of theaters in 1979-80. Trade papers at the time noted that an inordinately high percentage of attendees was male.
On countless occasions in the quarter century since "Raging Bull," I've slumped and squirmed while watching grossly offensive graphic violence and purely prurient sex scenes and felt worn down like a pencil in a sharpener by tens of hundreds of expletives. Boring. Exasperating.
Such excesses are not about the judicious characterization of imperfect people but about the appalling lack of restraint and common sense by filmmakers ferreting out and pandering to the worst appetites of an audience that can only become crass by giving time and attention to garbage.
What, then, of Jake LaMotta's blistering, subhuman behavior in many of "Raging Bull's" scenes⢠No offense thereâ¢
For many, absolutely.
I found it to be, more than any other movie, the one by which others would be measured because no matter what the leading character did and said, Scorsese and his actors never neglected for an instant that LaMotta was a guy who had spun off his axis.
Jake was shown to be a brutal, intimidating force of nature who, though fascinating to observe, invariably was dead wrong and who alienated everyone by behaving like a colossal jerk.
We felt his wrongness. The movie gapes at him. It observes him instructively. But it's careful not to romanticize him. We don't -- we can't -- admire him or find him amusing or want him to be part of our lives as we might, say, Paul Newman's Butch Cassidy or Robert Redford's Sundance Kid, who were romanticized heavies.
Scene after scene exposes Jake's obsessiveness and his irrationality.
It's not a film about the way life ought to be. It is instead a methodical depiction of the way life ought not to be. It acknowledges that difference absolutely.
That quality, that fine line, is what separates it from manure that enlists our affection for characters who have no business seeking it.
It's too much to hope that filmmakers would watch, much less grasp and embrace the values of "How Green Was My Valley," "Going My Way," "From Here to Eternity" and "On the Waterfront."
But if they can't learn from a picture as contemporary and in-your-face as "Raging Bull," they haven't any claim to our attention.
