What was the audiences reaction to the movie The Crying Game?
If you lived in a blue state (though the term didn’t exist as such then), you weren’t shocked, just surprised; and the movie wasn’t that good compared to the hype… “Sixth Sense” was much better. I disagree with every element of this. My wife and I saw it in New York City (as blue as it gets) when it was first released, with no idea there was supposed to be a surprise (we were walking down Broadway near Lincoln Center and on the spur of the moment decided to see a movie—”This looks good, let’s try it”), and like springload said, there was a gasp and a certain amount of murmuring. It was definitely a shock (note: shock does not = ‘bad’), and we were glad we had had no foreknowledge (unfortunately, we spoiled it for at least one person afterwards by emphasizing so strongly how shocked they were going to be that they figured out the surprise). And it was a much better movie than Sixth Sense, which is completely built around the surprise; in Crying Game, it’s just another spice in the ste
The marketing campaign for The Crying Game was one of the first things I worked on at Miramax. It was my first job out of college, and I was a lowly assistant. I remember being disappointed that we were choosing to market around the “don’t tell the secret” thing, when I thought the film was so much more than that, such a more nuanced look at the questions of identity and what it means to hide in plain sight – nationality, race, gender, political affiliation, etc. Clearly if I’d been designing the campaign, about 12 people would have gone to see the movie. Instead, it broke all records for the highest grossing independent film in the US to date. (Remember that in the early 90s, Miramax was in fact independent, and pretty much the only independent distributor at the time). This was also one of the first instances where journalists and critics were asked at screenings not to reveal the twist – this later became sort of standard practice for any “twisty” movie, and started to annoy critics
I hadn’t heard the spoilers and was completely surprised. I loved the movie, although the first section of it still stands out in my mind as one of the greatest moments in filmmaking ever. The whole rest of the film, with the gender-bending shit, was cool but not earth-shattering. At the time what took my breath away was the first third. Another person I know said “what a transvestite” the second Dil appeared on the screen. I remember a lot of talk about there being a “surprise” and not a lot of talk about transexuals in general. I guess the college-age crowd I was hanging with just considered it a SURPRISE like any other film surprise, and not a big deal unto itself. I’ve never gotten the sense from G/L/B/T friends that the film represented any kind of “moment” for them, either. It’s all from the perspective of a frumpy straight guy, after all.
