tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8823340817818385797.post4801458939348682208..comments2024-03-15T19:42:05.018-07:00Comments on Every 70s Movie: Corky (1972)By Peter Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11385971732301020652noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8823340817818385797.post-27534214181837935712020-06-08T05:35:38.499-07:002020-06-08T05:35:38.499-07:00This is a truly misunderstood and lost early 70... <br /><br />This is a truly misunderstood and lost early 70's gem, a little nugget of gritty hard-core deep-fried Southern anti-capitalist existentialism, with Robert Blake's greatest film performance. Neither a hero nor a villain, Corky Curtis is the sad refuse of a very conditional American Dream, innocent and deluded, gifted and corrupt, both a total product and total victim of the rigged down-home red, white, and blue system that he equally is exploited by and ruthlessly exploits in turn. Even the so-called reformation of his wife is on strictly working-class terms, peanuts thrown to the ignorant gallery to be satisfied with their small upward movement in life.....something Corky is smart enough and skilled enough to reject, but too emotionally damaged to effectively transcend. His relationship to young boys and his best male friend in this film is very important, as there are subtle hints of repressed homosexuality, child abuse, and psychological damage from a lack of love in his childhood, compensated for by a redneck machismo and a pathetic "fame fixation", which renders the whole film affecting in the most potent sociopolitical sense. Obviously sliced up and dumped as a drive-in actioner by MGM for precisely that reason, this film, and Blake's performance, deserves a major critical re-appraisal, all the way down to the flashy, gaudy, idolized, and symbolically pink '66 George Barris Plymouth Barracuda, which will fatefully become Corky's mutilated and incendiary coffin. Chilling also, in terms of Blake's actual life, and the ruinous event that destroyed him. <br /> <br />Barry Millerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16573287218366341637noreply@blogger.com