Please Help Find A Movie With This Theme...

[Tikisoo]

When I was a kid, I never understood my parent's prejudices-to a kid-all kids are equal. Once I became a classic movie fan, I started seeing movies that illustrated that other opinion, especially from the oppressed point of view. 

Gentleman's Agreement, In The Heat Of The Night, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner for example are great illustrations of some American racist attitudes. They are illogical & shocking to younger people who have no idea how preceding generations thought. (Nothing can explain why they thought this way) There are plenty of films that illustrate the idea not every Mother is a perfect one: Now Voyager, Kramer Vs Kramer, etc.

I would like your suggestions on movies with a different theme: making a bad decision (usually the easy one) and the harder struggle dealing with the consequence you caused yourself.  (I'm thinking along the same lines as films like Angels With Dirty Faces or Kitty Foyle) Thanks!

[metamorpheus]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Fargo

Blow (2001)

[DougieB]

Maybe Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) in All About Eve? She concocts the running-out-of-gas scheme to "teach Margo a lesson" by making her miss a matinee performance so the Eve can go on. Eve later uses that fact to blackmail Karen into encouraging her playwright husband to give Eve the part in his new play which was written for Margo. Karen was in a lot of distress and it's unclear what she would have done if Margo herself hadn't opted out of doing the play, though probably she would have 'fessed up.

Some other "bad decision" Bette Davis movies come to mind too. In In This Our Life a husband-stealing Bette kills a kid when driving recklessly and then frames someone she knows to be innocent. When it starts to catch up with her she pleads for help from a relative and then runs from the police and crashes her car and dies. In The Big Lie she bargains with a woman who is pregnant with the child of Bette's husband, now presumed dead, to give her the baby. When he turns up alive, Bette maintains the secret but finally comes clean when threatened with exposure. The man sticks by her. In both A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer Bette played women who chose to assume the role of a sister who had died and in both cases found herself estranged by the deception from a man she now realized she loved. In Dead Ringer she had actually killed her sister, so by convention she had to go to prison without ever reconciling with the man she loved. In A Stolen Life it was more of an impulsive weak moment when she realized everyone assumed she was the sister who had died, so she eventually is allowed to get her man. A lot of so-called "women's pictures" centered on bad decision making, like Madame X and Back Street.

 

[Tikisoo]

Thanks! I've already shown ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST to the person in question...still thinks he's outsmarted the system.

I want to illustrate through charactors that the road back is harder than just doing the right thing in the first place. Cagney movies are the best for that -actually most WB movies- with Bette as the female version. I certainly learned about decent morality illustrated by old WB movies as a young adult.

[JitneyJane]

I would suggest A Place in the Sun, one of my favorites.  To me it's the essence of the pitfalls of being lured by beauty and high society to abandon ethical responsibilities -- and how that can lead to tragedy.