It had been a while since I visited my home from home. I had avoided the festival which took place during turismo altogether. I didn’t have the energy. I was travelling, I was rehearsing, I was too busy and the truth is that Cinemateca isn’t the same in the festival . Of course the festival has its charms, but I prefer Cinemateca without the hype. A screening of The Manchurian Candidate, the Monday after the festival, the night before I left for London, was ideal. Cinemateca was back to being half full, with familiar faces, the cinema tragics, como yo.
The Manchurian Candidate is a funny old film. Paranoia, war, humour and some crackerjack neo-HItchcockian dialogue between an oddly sympathetic, low status, Sinatra and a criminally underused Vivian Leigh, oozing screen charisma, even if her relationship with Sinatra’s Major Marco is completely superfluous to the plot. A film that came at the start of the sixties and predicted everything, from Kennedy to Trump, yet doesn’t seem to want to take itself nearly as seriously as those paranoid thrillers of the seventies, when the true extent of Frankenheimer’s Cassandran powers were revealed.
And now am sitting in Carrasco airport, looking out over the runway, where military planes share the space with a handful of passenger jets, and think about how in ’62, when the Manchurian Candidate was made, this view would have seemed equally mundane, with little intimation of the events which the film foreshadowed. Events which would destroy this tranquility and devastate whole generations.
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