The Other Other Woman
When I was a pre-teen I watched the 1954 Marlon Brando film, "Desiree," and didn't realize that I did. That happened to me often while watching a Saturday afternoon film. I didn't realize I was watching, "The Godfather," for the first time until I was at least an hour into it and wondered why I couldn't keep my eyes off of the screen. I was hardly interested in the weirdly overly-hyped but unrealized love affair of Napoleon Bonaparte and Desiree (what a little turd, amirite?), but was taken totally with Michael Rennie's portrayal of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (known historically as Charles XIV John of Sweden). This film isn't great (the costumes are wonderful to see when you're living on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, though), but I found myself thinking of this character days after the film ended. I think I felt that there was this sense of injustice regarding the lack of acknowledgement of the nature of this character and the