Ruby

Jack Ruby was an individual that epitomized the plight of someone who became perpetually victimized by his environment. Growing up in a tough and tumble south side neighborhood in Chicago, Jack Ruby had to earn everything the hard way! His testosterone driven theatrics were always justified under the belligerent premise that he loathed and excoriated all caitiff behavior and mannerisms which lurked in his threatened existence! Actor, Danny Aiello, was extremely well suited to the role of Jack Ruby. Desultarily assembled and jagged around the edges, Aiello portrayed the role of the disgruntled owner of the Dallas strip club lounge, Jack Ruby, with an absolutely powerful and well articulated perfection. The mindset of Jack Ruby was one in which he had an emblematic adoration of John F. Kennedy. Ruby was keenly aware of the fact that the assassination of Kennedy was a conspiracy! Knowing this, Ruby's conception of the entire fiasco was one whereby he felt that it was incumbent upon him to implement a simple eye for an eye endeavor of vigilante justice. This being Ruby's objective, Lee Harvey Oswald became his prime target! Love, lust, collusion, money, violence, and organized crime were elements in Ruby's life that ended up becoming a lethally inconclusive and ephemeral obsession with him! Nothing ever made sense in Jack Ruby's world, and, as a result, his adversarial circumstances made him respond accordingly! The intensity with which this film depicts Ruby's rudimentary defense mechanisms, wound up being incredibly thought provoking. Jack Ruby's life became one big tenet for convoluted sensationalism; Killing John F Kennedy and killing Lee Harvey Oswald, were actions which were induced by the prevailing agitation which emanated from the megalomania cal underworld! All in all, the intertwining integral facets of implication in this aggregate potpourri of political tumultuousness for all of this violence, eventually collaborated as a scenario for situational pandemonium. This politically high profile charade brought about a pejorative pique for a bevy of fame famished reprobates to thrive on. Throughout history, this has always been the nefarious scourge; Who was John Wilkes Booth? Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? Who was Sirhan Sirhan? And, of course, it goes without saying; Who was Jack Ruby? What made them famous? The heinous ordeal of murdering, or being related to the murder of a highly prominent political leader, has given all of these men an indelibly dreadful notoriety! The film "Ruby" authenticates the prevailing rancor during the Kennedy assassination escapades in a very scathing, yet poignant manner! The aspects to the Dallas strip club paradigm during the early 1960's was something which the directors and producers of this film executed flawlessly! Films which are candidly cogent about genuinely dire reactions tend to garner my favor far more readily than a high budget Hollywood bombshell flick with a myriad of special effects. The film "Ruby" is a one of a kind diamond in the rough which manifests an unpleasant amelioration concerning the vicious circle of assassinations during the Kennedy era. This movie did not just simply depict the occurrences pertaining to John F. Kennedy's and Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination, they also encompassed the visceral and motivational depravity behind these occurrences as well! Ultimately, cerebral vindication amongst many felonious misfits, as well as people who dealt with these sordid walks of life, became the intellectually diabolical villain which vitiated any respect which these people should have had for law and order in our American system of democracy! Having been to Dallas many times, the historical correlation this film makes to this city is very fascinating! The strip club which Jack Ruby owned is located in one of the nicest hotels in downtown Dallas! As a matter of fact, what was once Jack Ruby's strip club, is now a sports bar, that is somewhat amusing, isn't it? The assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the demented wiles associated with it, all have the dubious distinction of putting Dallas on the map for political terrorism! This movie is covertly compelling, and, I would recommend to any history buff, as well as all movie viewers, that they should see this film whenever they possibly can. "Ruby" is a difficult movie to find, and, it may only be available on video cassette, as in the thing you put in a -VCR- -YES, THAT ANTEQUATED MONSTER!!- Nevertheless, people should try to get a hold of it and view the movie, mostly on account of the fact that the film "Ruby" is very insightful and emotionally innovative! I give it a definite and resounding thumbs up!

John Mackenzie directed this speculative drama that stars Danny Aiello as Jack Ruby, the man who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and the events that led him there, where he was the owner of a Dallas strip club who hires popular headliner Candy Cane(played by Sherilyn Fenn) who ends up under the wing of the mafia, and becomes a mistress of President Kennedy. Ruby does favors for the mafia while simultaneously informing on them for the FBI, and eventually is used by a mysterious hit man for either the CIA or Mafia to kill Oswald, though he suspects he's as much a patsy as Oswald seems to be. David Duchovny co-stars as police officer Tibbet. Despite a good performance by Aiello, film is a pale knockoff of the far superior "JFK". Not bad, but entirely forgettable.

When Oliver Stone decided to make his controversial "JFK" he knew his film would be debated since he was presenting countless challenges on facts concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. What Oliver couldn't predict was the appearance of films that followed his conspiracy theories on the same subject, although none of these films, including "Ruby", caused impact on anything. More than that, none of these films had the same material quality "JFK" had, a film with so much to handle in terms of characters and situations that never gets boring or complicated.

Now, John Mackenzie's "Ruby" is a wildly confusing film focused on Jack Ruby, the mysterious nightclub owner who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who (some say) shot Kennedy in Dallas, in 1963. Ruby, played with some good effort by Danny Aiello, is presented as someone similar like Oswald, a ingenuous patsy who joined the wrong people (the Mafia) for one cause and for reasons unknown was betrayed by his so-called friends who opted for killing the president. The movie gets even deeper by showing that Ruby was some sort of a informant for the government pretending to be part of the Mafia, meeting guys like Gambini and other powerful mobsters, who were plotting to kill Fidel Castro but for some reason they changed planes and decided to take Kennedy out of the picture. To make things worst, the movie chooses to include a fictional character, the stripper Candy Cane (Sherilyn Fenn) who works for Ruby, and in terms of script she's a composition between Marilyn Monroe, Ruby's girlfriend and a woman who had affairs with mobsters and even Kennedy. We hardly know who is she in the picture and how important she is besides being the wildest thing on Jack's club. What about the mysterious Maxwell (played by Arliss Howard, very good here)? Who was that guy? Part of CIA? Mafia? He always bothers Ruby but never reveals himself except the original planning about dealing with Castro. The connections between characters and situations might have worked in real life but in the film it fails at horrible levels, to the point of unbelievable.

Compared with "JFK" this film is easy to follow but it never achieves greatness; it doesn't shine a light to new facts on Kennedy's and Oswald's murders; it can only confuses with more and more things. Structurally speaking, the whole film is a mess, slow at the beginning and very rushed towards the ending and that combination ruined the suspense and made a boring drama who had some good moments. The lamest of contradictions presented was the fact of Ruby being a patriotic man, who deals with the Mafia, a bad job for his country and at the same time cries out loud when he finally realizes his own people will kill the President. It's okay to do illegal things, not pay taxes and the government but you can't kill this nation's leader.

It's quite watchable but when you analyzes the material the director had in the hands you know he could have done better than this. 5/10

A fascinating subject, that just didn't grab the audience. It flowed like molasses, and left me feeling as flat as the movie. I'm one of those who can't get enough of this subject, but there was very little here at all, and with the current trend to change the true stories, just to make them look better, you begin to wonder just how much, and which parts, are really true.

It'd be difficult to pick a winner between Oliver Stone's JFK and the film Ruby in terms of judging a race between the two movies as to which flick took more liberties with...er, um, 'historical interpretation' of the known facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination. I'd perhaps have to give it to Stone's JFK, if only because that movie had a longer run time.

Ruby was really no less ridiculous than Stone's JFK, nor less laugh-inducing. With both movies, as to how the amount of patently ridiculous conclusions ended up in the screenplays it always helps me to remember the axiom of many a conspiracy theorist, in that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' Or, put another way, just because there's no proof something didn't happen doesn't mean it didn't happen.

At least with the movie Ruby, the scope of the story is appreciably smaller than that of Stone's JFK. I suppose by necessity any movie concerning Jack Ruby would be, since Ruby was a fringe player.

Anyway, onto the plot. In a nutshell...Jack Ruby is a nightclub owner in Dallas, Texas in the early 1960's. Originally hailed from Chicago, had a life of low-level crime in the Windy City in the 1930's. Small-time stuff. Doubtless had some accomplices back then who were affiliated with organized crime associates along the lines of street level soldiers in the Mob. So far, that much is verifiably true. From there, Ruby the movie goes on to infer that somehow Jack Ruby is also simultaneously an informant for the Dallas Police Department as well as an informant on organized crime for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a civilian undercover capacity. In addition, Ruby has also been entrusted to break out a high-level Mafia don out of a Cuban prison. Also, Ruby has been tapped by a Central Intelligence Agency agent to assassinate Fidel Castro with a rifle. Along with all this, apparently Jack Ruby was also on a familiar enough basis with the leading Mafia figures of the country to both dine and socialize with them on an infrequent basis.

I could keep going on re: itemizing the outlandish claims the movie Ruby makes regarding the activities and involvements of Jack Ruby. Rather than bother doing so, I'll just start asking questions about what I've already listed.

If Ruby was so connected with so many important people, why does he keep whining throughout the movie about tax problems he has concerning his nightclub? Shouldn't he have been able via his connections to have had those problems taken care of? Unless, of course, he wasn't nearly as connected with ANY of the important people the movie claims he was.

Why could the CIA entrust the assassination of Fidel Castro to a nightclub-owning, street-level hustler from Dallas, Texas? Conversely, if Ruby were as important in mafia circles as the movie claims he was, why would the CIA entrust the assassination of Fidel Castro to such a person as that?

Would President Kennedy have had so much difficulty getting laid that he would have found it necessary to fly to Las Vegas to have a tryst with a stripper procured for him by the Mafia via Jack Ruby? I know there are shades of Judith Campbell Exner in there, but it wasn't as if JFK was attending an Appalachia-style conference in order to hook up with Exner.

Does David Ferrie strike anybody as the kind of individual with whom one would confide a plot to murder the president to? Or as the kind of individual who would be on a first-name basis with leading organized crime figures?

Wouldn't one think that a policeman guarding the entrance of the Texas School Book Depository in advance of the presidential motorcade arriving (a circumstance that, like so many others in the movie, never happened) would have remembered being told by Lee Harvey Oswald that it was okay to let an unidentified man into the TSBD because he was there to watch the motorcade with Oswald?

The above are just a few of the many, many questions one asks oneself while watching the movie. Just general inquiries that question the logic and rationality of the inferences Ruby the movie makes. I suppose if one is predisposed to believe President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy then it is fairly easy to buy into what Ruby the movie is trying to sell. Myself, I can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all, hence the 8 out of 10 stars: honestly, I look at Ruby (1992) as a comedy.

The kicker is that in the end according to Ruby the movie, Jack Ruby ends up deciding to shoot Oswald entirely of his own volition anyway. Not because the Mafia ordered Ruby to do so as a means of silencing Oswald, as so many other theories suggest. Nope, in Ruby (1992), Jack Ruby shoots Oswald because in doing so he will "blow the whole conspiracy wide open". As to exactly how shooting Oswald was supposed to accomplish this the movie doesn't explain. Nor does the movie explain why, if it wasn't a murder of opportunity re: Ruby being by happenstance physically proximate to Oswald during the basement parking garage transfer but was something Ruby planned, Ruby left his beloved dog in his car when he went to shoot Oswald. Nor does the movie chronicle how Ruby stalked Oswald at the police station throughout the 48 hours between Kennedy's shooting and Oswald being shot. The movie DOES depict Ruby as somehow being able to view Dealey Plaza and the assassination from his vantage point at the Dallas Morning News building, even though in reality that building was several blocks away and didn't have a view of Dealey Plaza.

Sherilyn Fenn plays a character named 'Candy Cane' which is a composite of real-life Carousel Club stripper Candy Barr along with JFK mistress Judith Campbell Exner and self-proclaimed JFK assassination witness Beverly Oliver, a crank who emerged in 1970 claiming at the tender age of 17 to have been standing across the street from the Grassy Knoll when Kennedy was shot and photographed the whole thing using a type of camera that didn't exist in 1963. I mean, that the co-lead character in the movie is somebody who not only didn't exist but has composite elements of a known fabricator and fantasist tells one all one needs to know about credibility and Ruby (1992).