| Manchurian
Candidate (1962): A complex paranoid political horror story about a
brainwashed American platoon and a decorated soldier programmed to assassinate
political enemies. Seasoned cast delivers strong performances, with an uncharacteristically
hard-bitten Sinatra, a maliciously identifiable Harvey, and a frighteningly
overbearing Lansbury. Political juxtaposition and factual plausibility lend
terrifying realism. Based on Richard Condon's harrowing novel. (Starring,
Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansberry, Janet Leigh, Director:
John Frankenheimer, Producer: George Axelrod, Composer: David Amram, Writer:
George Axelrod, Academy Award Nominations: Best Film Editing, Best Supporting
Actress: Angela Lansbury.) |
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The Handmaid's
Tale (1990) :Written
by Margaret Atwood with Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway,Aidan Quinn,
Elizabeth McGovern
In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing
pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across
the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered
99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Natasha Richardson)
sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape
across the border. Kate herself is transformed into a handmaid -- a surrogate
mother for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country's
fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the
bizarre cult of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and
misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon
finds herself ensconced at the home of the Commander (Robert Duvall) and
his frosty wife, Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway). Forced to lie between Serena
Joy's legs and be penetrated impersonally each month by the Commander,
Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns that since many
of the nation's powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she may have
to risk the punishment for fornication -- death by hanging -- in order
to sleep with another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that
has become her sole raison d?être.
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Dr.
Stangelove (1964): Stanley Kubrick dared to make a film about
what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button -- and played
the situation for laughs. Dr. Strangelove's jet-black satire (from a script
by director Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern) and a host
of superb comic performances (including three from Peter Sellers) have kept
the film fresh and entertaining, even as its issues have become (slightly)
less timely.
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Potemkin
(1925) :) Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government
to make a film commemorating the Uprising of 1905. Eisenstein's scenario,
boiled down from what was to have been a multipart epic of the occasion,
focussed on the crew of the Battleship Potemkin. Fed up with the extreme
cruelties of their officers and their maggot-ridden meat rations, the sailors
stage a violent mutiny. This, in turn, sparks an abortive citizen revolt
against the Czarist regime. The film's centerpiece is staged on the Odessa
Steps, where in 1905 the Czar's Cossacks methodically shot down rioters
and innocent bystanders alike. To Eisenstein, this single bloody incident
was the crucible of the successful 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the result
was the "Odessa Steps sequence" that is often considered the most famous
sequence ever filmed; it is certainly one of the most imitated, perhaps
most overtly by Brian DePalma in The Untouchables (1987).
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