To the editors:
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If political correctness of this sort were really such a huge problem in American movies, they probably wouldn’t be quite so filled with portraits of women as prostitutes and maniacs (e.g., Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Pretty Woman, Honeymoon in Vegas, and Indecent Proposal).
Similarly, the problem with movie portrayals of black people is hardly that they’re excessively evenhanded. Typically, Mr. Rosenbaum misses the point by complaining about the “political correctness” of having both black and white villains in Cliffhanger. Cliffhanger’s real offense is not political correctness but old-fashioned stereotyping: the African American man as sexually rapacious animal. The white villains are in it for the money, but the filmmaker seems to regard his black villain as being of a lower order, giving him the obligatory threatening lines about what he will do to the “bitch” (a white woman, of course) as soon as Stallone is out of the way.
Jonathan Rosenbaum replies:
