Change Your Image
puddingoftame
Reviews
Rawhide: The Captain's Wife (1962)
Another outstanding episode written by John Dunkel
John Dunkel wrote for many television Westerns, but overall he did his best work for Rawhide. This is an outstanding story, helped along by Barbara Stanwyck's powerful performance.
This is an inventive story that you haven't seen before and will keep you guessing.
Also in the 1961-62 television season, Dunkel wrote an episode for Gunsmoke called The Widow. Like The Captain's Wife it was about a military wife gone bad, although the two stories are very different. The Widow was based on an episode Dunkel wrote for the Fort Laramie radio series called The Lieutenant's Wife.
Stanwyck was at her best playing femme fatales and comedic figures,and so was largely wasted in playing the bland family patriarch in The Big Valley. Here she's in her element, and thus dominates the screen.
The Secret of Carlos Castaneda (2018)
Let it go, folks
It's much easier to scam people than to convince them they're been scammed. If you try, they'll hate your guts and continue to love the scammer. Why? Because he told them what they wanted to hear, and you're not.
Castaneda told his anthropology instructors at UCLA that he had discovered a Yaqui shaman who had super-powers and was teaching his methods to Carlos. That was exactly what they wanted to hear, and besides, people on the whole were more naive back then.
Nobody but Castaneda ever saw Don Juan or the many other characters in his books. He never even provided photos or audio recordings of them. You just had to take his word for it all. He was a very gifted writer of fiction and could have made a good living in Hollywood, but then he wouldn't have lived the life of a guru.
Warren Buffett's main advice is that if something sounds too good to be true, it's probably false. This applies exactly to Castaneda's outlandish claims.
Gunsmoke: Old Yellow Boots (1961)
AlsExGal is wrong
That reviewer criticized Old Yellow Boots on the grounds that it inaccurately depicted Beulah because she was shown from a 1961 perspective, and women are so much hipper now that they were back them. Nope. Just about every guest star in John Meston's scripts was abnormal somehow, and Beulah was abnormal too.
Hey, there are abnormal women right now who are just like Beulah.
A regular feature in Meston's scripts was the compassion he displayed for beaten-down female nesters on the frontier.
And BTW, Meston's wife was a bullfighter in Mexico and Spain. Meston didn't see women at all the way AlsExGal imagines he did. Look it up.