Memo To - Website browsers, fans & clients >From - Jude Wanniski Re - #9 "The Manchurian Candidate"
Continuing with the "movie list," here is number nine of the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my favorite films. They are the movies I've seen that have had the greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each entry. Try to think of your own experiences with films and how they influenced the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday NYTimes "Arts and Leisure" section had a piece on how difficult it is to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, which had a scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in the ways that I have. Films don't move masses. They move individuals who move masses.
9. "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) I'd been a lefty in my political tastes from as far back as I could remember. In my first presidential vote, 1960, I cast my ballot for JFK over the hated Richard Nixon. In 1962, I was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and had my first disillusionment with "liberals." At the same time, my editor, Robert L. Brown, persuaded me that I was being unjust in my evaluation of Nixon, and my Ox-Bow incident experience forced me to swallow hard and read Nixon's Six Crises. Then, along came The Manchurian Candidate with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, about how the COMMUNISTS were able to scheme in ways that could actually capture the American presidency. The movie hit me at a vulnerable moment and may have helped push me toward an eventual vote for Nixon in 1968. Thirty-five years later, I'm skeptical about genuine conspiracy theories that come from the left or the right, although I do appreciate their potential.
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