The Manchurian Candidate

by Marcus, Greil

• ISBN13: 9780851709314
• ISBN10: 0851709311
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-26
• Publisher: British Film Institute

Summary

" It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," Pauline Kael wrote of The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, the film is also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. There are unforgettable performances in The Manchurian Candidate from Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury as an incarnation of murderous perversity. But Frank Sinatra is at the heart of the film, horrified, then devastated, by what he has to see until, finally, for Greil Marcus, he is " a man almost dead with sorrow and guilt. " As Marcus reconstructs the drama, this is a movie in which the director and actors were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. He shows how The Manchurian Candidate has burrowed deeply into American culture, becoming at once an ineradicable piece of folklore and a mystery yet to be solved. Illustrated

Author Biography

Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train (1975), Lipstick Traces (1989), The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1997/2001) and Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in the Land of No Alternatives (2000). In 2001 he taught an American Studies seminar on 'Prophecy and the American Voice' at Princeton and the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	7	(12)
A Little Solitaire	12	(2)
In 2001	14	(2)
In 1959	16	(3)
In 1954	19	(14)
In 1962	33	(11)
The Pleasure of its Violence	44	(16)
In 2000	60	(11)
Remembering the Future	71	(6)
Credits	77	(2)
Sources	79