Tuesday, October 11, 2022

The Greatest Monologue in Movie History?

If anybody called Lansbury's famous speech the greatest monologue in movie history, I wouldn't ever object. It is so terrifying on so many levels - not just the obvious disgusting one, but in the way it seems to foreshadow everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Trump-Russia collusion and shows just how easily we could become a place not unlike Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. The Manchurian Candidate is one of those movies so great that it always seems two steps ahead of us, and like many of the great works, it was too controversial for its own time. It was released in 1962 and President Kennedy, obviously friends with its star (Frank Sinatra), saw it and immediately declared it his favorite movie. Then he got killed. The movie was vaulted and couldn't be watched for thirty years. The US has made 44,000 movies in a little over a hundred years, there are really just a handful that get to the heart of what it means to be from here. The Manchurian Candidate is about a lot of things, but at the core, it's about how a very small number of people actually run this country, and we all basically exist at the luck of them not being psychopaths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3ZnaRMhD_A&fbclid=IwAR2EV4zmbupMwG84zcmP7pnoYnG0IwI2nLfS6ijkI5MIX3M1xss-n0AveIE 

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