Suddenly (1954)

I showed my mother another movie featuring her old nemesis, the theater student who sexually harassed her around 1950 and went on to enjoy modest success in Hollywood.

We watched Suddenly (1954). The guy had a supporting role as a cop who shoots it out with one of the criminals.

It starred Frank Sinatra as a deranged war veteran who, with a couple of accomplices, takes a woman hostage along with her son and father-in-law. Their house overlooks the train station where the President of the United States will soon be stopping.

They never explain who hired him. Frank Sinatra himself says that the vice president will take over and nothing will change. It seems pointless to him, but someone was paying him to do it, so okay.

The only logical explanation is the vice president (then Richard Nixon) or maybe the president's wife (Mamie Eisenhower) put out the hit on the Chief Executive. A more interesting plot would be if the Secretary of Transportation plotted the simultaneous murders of the president, vice president and the dozen others ahead of him in line of succession between him and the Oval Office.

I was in high school when Reagan was shot. A lot of kids were happy about it or at least amused by it. I think I was skipping classes that afternoon and missed the announcement. I didn't see the teachers telling the kids that there were people happy about Kennedy getting shot, too, and they later felt bad for not concealing their glee.

I was indifferent. Reagan was a horrible person. I don't know how many people he ultimately killed, but I saw no advantage to having George Bush take over. I was far more radical than any of my classmates, but that may be why I didn't see it as a good thing. The only real effect of Reagan being shot was the gutting of the insanity defense.

I walked into school after being off somewhere. I was in a good mood about something else and didn't even know about the shooting, and someone accused me of being happy about it.

Tying it together with current events, I don't want Trump impeached. At least there's resistance to him. If Pence takes over, the Democrats will have gotten what they wanted and feel obliged to compromise with him.