A Lecture by Greil Marcus, following a screening of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

5:30 pm, Saturday, November 22, 2003 at the PFA Theater in Berkeley

Greil Marcus, noted cultural critic and author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975), Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), and Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000), has written a monograph on The Manchurian Candidate for the "Classics" series published in 2002 by the British Film Institute.

Mr. Marcus will appear at Pacific Film Archive at a screening of The Manchurian Candidate at 5:30 pm on November 22nd-the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He will speak about the film after the screening, and engage in discussion with the audience. The event will take place at the PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way near Bowditch Street, on the southern edge of the University of California campus in Berkeley. General admission is $8. Advance tickets are available during weekday business hours at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, evenings at the PFA Theater Box Office, or by telephoning (510) 642-5249. For more information, please phone (510) 642-1412.

The Manchurian Candidate, directed in 1962 by John Frankenheimer, presents stunning performances by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, and Laurence Harvey in a harrowing tale of brainwashing, assassination, crafty Communists, corrupt politicians, and paranoia. Marcus calls it "the most exciting American picture from Citizen Kane to the first two Godfather pictures . . ." Released in the U.S. before the assassination of President Kennedy and numerous other public figures killed thereafter, the film doesn't predict assassinations but, as Marcus has written: "What The Manchurian Candidate did prefigure - what it acted out, what it played out, in advance - was the state of mind that would accompany the assassinations that followed it. . .It 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. . ."

The Manchurian Candidate was based on a novel by Richard Condon, which is currently being adapted for another motion picture, which will star Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. A recent article by Adair Lara in the San Francisco Chronicle speaks with C.J. Silverio, a Bay Area software engineer, about her suspicions that Condon plagiarized portions of his Manchurian Candidate novel from Robert Graves's I, Claudius.

The Manchurian Candidate (BFI Film Classics), by Greil Marcus, is available in the U C Berkeley Art Museum Store for $12.95.