Cringeworthy, watching this 1980 movie in 2020.
John Travolta's character Bud is violent, jealous, & petty. He meets Kitty, who is portrayed to be an independent woman with ideas of her own because she works at a job and wants to ride the mechanical bull at the bar everyone in town goes to every night. They date for about one week, and should be clear to her that he is hot tempered. He slaps her in a fight, they wrestle in a dirty puddle in a parking lot, and naturally the next step is to get married and move into a trailer together. At every step, I hoped she would come to her senses and run. Spoiler: She does run at one point, and starts living with convicted bank robber Wes, and so Bud starts seeing another random woman to make her jealous. When Bud discovers that Wes has beat Kitty, (no man hits my wife but me) he goes after Wes in one final fist fight, receives the glory of inadvertently stopping Wes from getting away after robbing the bar, and everyone cheers as Bud and Kitty are back together.
If this is what real men were like, why would anyone want them? The conclusion of the movie may have made sense if Bud had changed, but the movie did not show this. He solves his problems with violence. His heart-felt apology to Kitty goes "all the way back to the very first time I hit you." Gee Thanks, we're all good now.
If this is what real men were like, why would anyone want them? The conclusion of the movie may have made sense if Bud had changed, but the movie did not show this. He solves his problems with violence. His heart-felt apology to Kitty goes "all the way back to the very first time I hit you." Gee Thanks, we're all good now.