most repugnant line in film history

Lol!
In a film with a lot of great dialogue - much of it straight from Jim Thompson's 1963 novel - this acidic little gem was a stand-out. It's original to the film, too.
When you read this scene in the book; the absence of the line is striking. It almost seems like censorship, over a quarter of a century before the film was even made.

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I wouldn't say it's repugnant, but it's definitely memorable. I recently watched The Grifters, a movie I had heard good things about but had never quite got around to seeing. And it is a great movie. A few nights after, a funny thing happened to me because of this line. A one in a thousand coincidence, but when you've been walking the Earth for fifty-plus years like me, a few of those are bound to happen along the way.

Some friends and I are rewatching the 1970s miniseries, Centennial, which was based on James Michener's novel of the same name. So, just a few nights after seeing The Grifters, I was at my friend's apartment, and we were watching "The Shepherds" episode of Centennial. There's a character, Levi, who grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to Colorado in the 1840s, where he lived ever since. Now, it's forty or so years later, he's an old man, he hasn't seen his family in decades, and he decides to take a trip back east. And in the episode's last scene, two of Levi's friends have seen him off and are watching the train depart.

Now, I've gotta say, Centennial is a good miniseries, but they went a little over the top with the angle, "Colorado is the most beautiful place in the world, why would anyone ever want to live anywhere else?" -- although I'm not disputing that the state has some knock-your-eyes-out scenery, the Rockies and all that -- but characters too frequently would wax rhapsodic about it ... including the aforementioned Levi and these two buddies of his. "There's no place I'd rather be," gets repetitive.

So anyway, here these two are silently watching their friend's train roll away ... and they've both got facial expressions and such that can best be described as, "Levi's a good man, and I'm sure he knows what he's doing, but I don't understand it and I'm not even sure I approve of it." And then ...

... one of these solid, reliable, taciturn men of the Old West turns to the other and says, with a sorta puzzled tone, "Must be strange, going back to where you came from."

-- and I, with The Grifters still echoing through my head, busted out laughing. Strange, indeed! My friends looked at me like I was nuts; all I could say was, "you wouldn't get it, never mind ..."

It's definitely one of those lines where you go, "WHAT was that????!!!!" and your hair curls a bit.

The screenwriter for this film was Donald Westlake, who also wrote the very effective THE STEPFATHER....which is a B movie, but taut and intelligent.

He was a solid, classically professional writer.
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I thought it was gross too. But it was also a ridiculous suggestion. I would say it was one of the most bizarre taunts ever thrown in a movie.

This film gets down into the grimy nasty parts of the human psyche more than most others that I've seen, that I can remember. "The Last Seduction" is also up there. Anyway, I was really glad when Myra f__king got it.