There is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy's assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President's assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an emotionally unstable man returns from a mysterious stay in a Communist country to shoot the President-to-be with a rifle. It's not surprising, then, that the film acquired its own myth - that it was too sensitive to be screened, at least until the late 1980s (in fact its disappearance had more to do with a falling out between the producers and United Artists). As with everything to do with the Cold War, it mutated in the imagination. As Greil Marcus suggests in his short study, the film 'prefigured the sense that the events that shape our lives take place in a world we cannot see, to which we have no access, that we will never be able to explain. If a dream is a memory of the future, this is the future The Manchurian Candidate remembered.'

LRB 21 August 2003 | PDF Download