My blog reviews movies as political, historical or social commentary with intentional disregard for their artistic or cinematic value. One foe of American political scientists and economists is that they ignore movies as sources to inform them on changes in American culture, view exoticism as a hallmark of "foreigness" and, at the same time, impart American values and judgment to foreign movies.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Undying appeal of the "Pretty Woman". Thirty years in the making.
The "whore with a golden heart" is as much of a Hollywood invention as a "gentleman gangster". Orson Welles who could not avoid knowing "the boys" as an entertainer in the 1930s New York had reported that compared with even smartest of them, a truck driver was an intellectual. I suppose that during after-Depression years, truck drivers were quite intelligent.
A real hooker meeting Richard Gere's character would probably concoct up a cockananny plot with her red neck boyfriend to part the amorous banker with his money. At least, a literary source for the Blau Angel, Professor Unrat, proposed exactly this outcome. Why then, with all its ridiculous improbabilities, the Pretty Woman remains a popular movie thirty years after the premiere? Obviously, because it is a Cinderella story sufficiently spiced for the modern audiences but insufficiently burdened with practical details to raise its parental warning label.
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