How this film tipped Maureen Reagan to her father's Alzheimer's

In the late 1990s, Maureen Reagan wrote a guest column in Newsweek in which she discussed her father's battle with Alzheimer's disease, and recalled the incident that convinced her that something was seriously wrong with him.

She wrote that whenever she had dinner with her father, the converstaion would invariably drift to Hollywood reminiscences and his own film career. One of the movies Reagan most liked to talk about was Prisoner of War, because of its depiction of Communist atrocities and the fact that it had had a profound effect on Reagan's own evolving political thinking, as he was moving rapidly from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican at the time he made the film. Apparently this picture came up frequently in their conversations.

It was while having dinner sometime in 1993, Maureen wrote, that she noticed that her father was unnaturally silent and disengaged, which concerned her. In an effort to get him talking, Maureen herself raised the topic of Prisoner of War, discussing the points about it that had made it such an important film to her father, and how much he liked it. When she finished talking about it, she wrote later, her father just stared at her blankly for a few moments, then said, "Mo, I have absolutely no recollection of making that movie." It was then and there, she said, that she realized that something was terribly wrong with her father...an unease that was finally confirmed the next year when the former president was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

An interesting, and sad, story; ironic also in that, just a few years after writing that article, Maureen would herself die of cancer at age 60, three years before her father's death in 2004.