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Reviews
Jupiter's Wife (1995)
If You Overlook Damage From Drugs, You Are Cheating Kids
I would like to add a detail that other reviewers are overlooking. It's easy to say Maggie Cogan, the protagonist, lives in a fantasy world. But what about damage she easily could have sustained while doing drugs in the 1960s and 1970s ? The narrator and Maggie mention it briefly. The filmmaker includes a black & white newsreel from 1967 that has been repeated in many documentaries on the Vietnam War and rock & roll. It's NOT the one you see about the young Maggie working as a horse & carriage driver for the Plaza Hotel in New York.
No, it's a newsreel of the first hippies in Seattle. They didn't have beads and headbands available to wear yet. You see them holding hands and cavorting in daylight in a Seattle park. A young woman's long blonde hair flies so wildly that you can't see any of her face. At any rate, the filmmaker includes this newsreel to show younger viewers that Maggie worked for the Plaza at the time of the counterculture. In the late 1960s you didn't know if someone's weird behavior resulted from drugs, love of music, anger about the Vietnam War or joy about the end of racial segregation. (You mean I can make friends with "those people ?" Wow!)
The viewer must presume that Maggie's drug use messed up her job, but of course the filmmaker can't possibly find Plaza Hotel personnel from the 1960s who would tell their side of the story. New Yorkers would find that intrusive. The point is ... would Maggie still have become homeless without drugs ?
Clearly, Maggie doesn't do drugs while she is homeless in Central Park in 1993. You can't get free samples from any New Yorkers. She is too old and physically weak for contact sport with a dealer.
So Maggie has been clean and sober for the long amount of time that she has been homeless when the movie starts in 1993. Maybe fifteen years ? But what about the damage from the 1960s and 1970s ? The odds that it was permanent are great enough that this film works as a great anti - drug movie for young people. Young people often say that a sudden fatal overdose is the only danger of using a drug. They overlook homelessness as a danger. Unless pay phones and Single Room Occupancy apartments return to Manhattan, then homelessness is as permanent as death for 99 percent of New Yorkers with issues. You are alone until you die slowly from exposure.
I recall doing a search of "maggie cogan" in the Lexis Nexis data base and finding a blurb in a New Jersey paper from about a year AFTER "Jupiter's Wife" was released. It said she had been forced to leave the apartment she shared with her beloved animals in Long Island City -- the one in which viewers of this film can see a cat riding on Maggie's vacuum cleaner while she vacuums -- and she was homeless again.
Such a tragedy couldn't have happened to a more fascinating person. She has every right to pursue her fantasies, but I am concluding that drugs made her unable to combine the fantasies with a job. If a person -- male, female, gay or straight -- cannot marry into money, then a job is necessary for survival. Like most fifty - year - old homeless people, Maggie's history is so hard to nail down completely that we don't know why her career driving horses and carriages ended.
The narrator, who depends totally on four people for information, says Maggie's best years on the job resulted in the 1967 black & white newsreel about her and the 1968 color videotape of her on "What's My Line?", but what happened in Maggie's life after that ? He says she got into drugs, left the Plaza horse job and then returned to it for a short while in the 1970s. Did her drug use mess it up the second time ?
We should tell juvenile viewers of this film that yes, drugs messed it up again and again, and they messed up everything eventually. The schedule Maggie has for fantasizing is a result of her being totally broke and unable to attract husband material. Presumably she wouldn't want to shack up with a homeless man or another man who would lie to her and hurt her. She still had a parent in 1993, but her decision to avoid the parent is understandable. Once the drugs make you a loner, then you are alone for life.
Why did Maggie move to Texas in the 1970s and then return to New York City ? It probably had to do with people she thought were friends and turned out to be anything but. Few substance abusers can avoid the harsh reality of "friends" who are actually enablers, and they disappear for whatever reasons you never find out. (Prison? Death? A new dealer?)
This film proves that every homeless person with a substance history sustained permanent damage to the brain. You can't prove that a schizophrenic who has gotten drunk or high still would have ended up schizophrenic without the sauce or the powder.
Use the film to demonstrate to young people that if you avoid drugs and binge drinking, then your chances of ever becoming homeless go way down. Look for natural highs. Notice how Maggie seems to enjoy nature ? Cannabis is just one plant. There is also the tomato plant, and the fern, and the ... What other warning can you possibly give a juvenile who watches "Jupiter's Wife ?" That you might end up fantasizing while you go to the bathroom in your pants, and nothing you do can prevent it ? That's a self - fulfilling prophecy. Pursue hugs, not drugs.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Ahead Of Its Time
This movie was way before its time. It shows you a conspiracy in progress. The plan is to assassinate a presidential candidate. What's cool is that we don't see this candidate until the hit man needs to see the target.
Lawrence Harvey does a great acting job playing the hit man, Raymond Shaw.
This film was released when Kennedy was president. Immediately after his assassination, Frank Sinatra, who starred in and produced the film, banned it from any further screenings. Nobody saw it again until 1988. There were no DVD's then, but young people flocked to multiplexes to see ... an old black & white movie! Has that happened since?
Five Aces (1999)
Both Touching And Erotic
This was lot of fun to watch. I'm touched by the stories they tell about how their previous relationships and marriages broke up.
The film is also very erotic. It gets even more erotic when the guys all put on suits and ties for a visit to a bar in the mountains. The character of Ray, played by David Sherrill, became my favorite. he's really really sexy in a suit and tie.
Maybe Charlie Sheen can hire his fellow cast members from this movie to make guest appearances on his sitcom Two And A Half Men.
Some Google - ing tells me something espexially poignant that you don't find on the DVD. It says much of the mountain scenery in the long shots is gone now. It was shot on location in Big Bear Mountain near San Bernardino, CA. Fire has gutted most of it since filming in 1996.
What's My Line? (1950)
Enjoy It For What It Is -- Remember The Importance Of Education
Reruns of this series on GSN work well as entertainment, but people are overstating its historical value. Where are historical figures like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Luther King, Clare Booth Luce, Rachel Carson, Beryl Markham, etc. ?
Out of 800 - some surviving black & white episodes, you get the rare treat of seeing Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Sandburg and Herman Wouk. Wouk, an Orthodox Jew, looks uncomfortable sitting on the panel in 1956 when the contestant turns out to be somebody who "boxes kangaroos" for a living. He never appeared on What's My Line again.
Besides Wouk, another intelligent person who did What's My Line and possibly no other TV show comes to mind: U.S. Senator George Smathers. Then I found him on a dumbed - down 1985 BBC documentary / amazon.com product "Marilyn Monroe: Say Goodbye To The President." Oh well, easy come easy go.
I'd love to talk more about Eleanor, Frank and Carl, but everybody in the Yahoo and Google discussion groups wants to talk instead about the movie stars and the goofballs who make nail polish for dogs.
Don't get me wrong, I love most of the banter between Bennett Cerf and John Daly. Arlene Francis gives people a cheery lift. The tension between John and Dorothy Kilgallen is fascinating when she tries to break through his filibuster. Maybe the tension between those two was so essential to the show's success that her death made the show fail.
If a schoolteacher wants to screen What's My Line for her social studies students, that's fine. It's okay as long as he / she chooses just a few episodes -- the right ones.
So many baby boomers are saying online that they recall fondly getting permission to stay awake until 11:00 Sunday nights for this show as long as their homework was done. What they forget is that the primitive technology of the 1950s / 1960s forced them to take What's My Line in small doses. It worked great as a little icing on the cake of their Sputnik - inspired competitive education.
But too much icing is bad. These days if you Tivo, say, 25 episodes and watch them back to back, you get the false impression that the Manhattan sophisticates of yesteryear were obsessed with celebrities and movie stars. Wrong. It just seems that way when your need for sleep at 3:30 in the morning (when GSN shows reruns) makes you depend totally on Tivo. Then you have other commitments that make you catch up on several episodes at a time. Then you go to the grocery store check - out line and you might think that What's My Line was a precursor to all those horrible magazines. Something like what Benjamin Bradlee (1970s Washington Post editor) calls "the birth of celebrity culture." Please don't do that to What's My Line.
TODAY people are obsessed with celebrities. But New Yorkers and their followers were NOT in the 1950s / 1960s. They knew how to read books written by serious writers, NOT Kitty Kelley. Watching What's My Line in that era hardly put a dent in that reading. Today if you overload your Tivo you can dumb down your life. Don't just listen to Bennett joke about the Tilton School in New Hampshire. Learn a little of what the Tilton boys learn. Read the nice things Gertrude Stein said about Bennett even though he couldn't understand a word she wrote. Can you?
The mystery guest round was a little icing on the cake once a week. That person was sometimes called the "mystery celebrity," but celebrities hardly mattered to Dorothy, Arlene, Bennett or John.
Dorothy Kilgallen didn't make her gossip a priority; she was really a crime reporter. Arlene Francis acted on Broadway, which was then considered high - brow sophisticated culture. During World War II she played the part of a Russian woman who could fire a rifle very well. Can you imagine Vanna White doing such a thing today ? Bennett Cerf published Faulkner, for heaven's sake. Please don't remember him totally for his zealous questioning of the mystery guests. He was just being competitive; he knew the TV western "Rifleman" wasn't something kids should study in school. Even the star of that western, Chuck Connors, sat on the What's My Line panel and proved that Reading Is Fundamental.
Franklin Heller was the director of What's My Line. Don't confuse his job with Mike Nichols' job. A TV director of a quiz show broadcast live is a technician who switches cameras at precisely the right moments during the live feed. Then consider what job Mr. Heller took on after CBS axed the show in 1967: literary agent.
Please don't remember John Daly for narrating an episode of Green Acres. That's the treatment he gets in online discussion groups.
Please don't dumb down these high achievers in the era BEFORE "The Closing of the American Mind" (title of a 1987 best - selling book). Just enjoy these black & white reruns for what they are: evidence of a witty game that entertained people for 27 minutes each week.
Then improve your reading, especially if you have kids. Sputnik doesn't matter today, but look at what Buddhist and Islamic countries are doing to us. Their people immigrate here and the kids do better in school than kids named John Smith. Johnny can't read very well, but Lu Ping Zhu can discuss Confucius AND Ray Bradbury AND Stephen King. And people wonder why "What's My Maginot Line?" can't get on television today ...