{"id":1011,"date":"2019-05-25T05:25:12","date_gmt":"2019-05-25T10:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/?p=1011"},"modified":"2019-06-15T20:42:21","modified_gmt":"2019-06-16T01:42:21","slug":"movie-review-the-affair-1995-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/2019\/05\/25\/movie-review-the-affair-1995-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: The Affair (1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Note: This is an older post from my Blogger days.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In “The Affair” Courtney Vance (Travis) gives a strong performance as a Black G. I. stationed in England during W. W. II who meets and falls in love with a married Englishwoman (Maggie). It is a compelling story because it dramatizes how dangerous love, whether extra-marital or not, could be between a Black man and a White Woman. It should be recalled that during W. W. II black and white soldiers in the U. S. still served in separate divisions. Racism, though somewhat less pronounced, still was rampant within the U. S. military and with that came the usual strong prohibition against sexual relations between the races. However, war, perhaps more than any other setting, allows for all kinds of situations. It was within this volatile mix of war and entrenched racism that a Black G. I. meets and falls in love with White Englishwoman Maggie.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, things do not end well. Maggie, through social pressure and the jealous rage of her usually distant English military officer husband (who is having an affair with his secretary), is forced to denounce Travis to the military authorities who,\u00a0 in tandem with their civilian counterparts, find the young man guilty of rape. In the most powerful and heart-breaking scene in the film,\u00a0 Travis pleads with Maggie that he’ll hang for this. Waiting on death row, the doomed man writes a letter which is delivered years later to the now aged Maggie whom he had an affair. Maggie collapses while reading the latter realizing the enormity of what she had done. She not only condemned a man to death through her, granted coerced, false testimony, but now, after being trapped in a loveless marriage for years,\u00a0 is hit with the full weight of having lost the greatest love of her life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a movie that engages its audience at many levels. It can be seen as a Romeo and Juliet type of love tragedy, as a cautionary tale of the effects of war on both soldiers and civilians alike or, finally, as a reminder of the long road that U. S. society has yet to travel on the road to racial equality. The end of the\u00a0road in the US\u00a0 has not yet been reached unfortunately. But, perhaps, engaging movies such as this one can spur faster movement toward that end of the road where there lies the racial equality that MLK spoke of so eloquently forty years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: This is an older post from my Blogger days. In “The Affair” Courtney Vance (Travis) gives a strong performance as a Black G. I. stationed in England during W. W. II who meets and falls in love with a married Englishwoman (Maggie). It is a compelling story because it dramatizes how dangerous love, whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,13,165,110],"tags":[89,85,168,87],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cult","category-pol","category-race","category-society","tag-culture","tag-politics","tag-race","tag-society","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnniequezada.me\/jqme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}