By Stone Martindale Jan 6, 2007, 17:44 GMT
Variety V-Life recently polled the top echelon of people in every conceivable sector of society, and found political player John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona, to have distinctive tastes and opinions on some iconic American films.
US Sen. John McCain (Republican- Arizona) EPA/STEFAN ZAKLIN
Regarding the arena of political films, the senator picked a controversial one. "I enjoyed both versions of 'The Manchurian Candidate,' but in the firstversion Angela Lansbury was just phenomenal," he says.
"I bet most Americans today probably don't realize that there were 30-someAmerican prisoners in Korea who decided they wanted to live in China and were not repatriated. By the way, every one of those came back eventually. America was just shocked that people would decide to live in a Communist country."
Credibility was found by McCain in John Frankenheimer's 1962 thriller: "It was very plausible at the time -- perhaps more than now.
"The phrase 'brainwashing' was coined because of the very extensive indoctrination the Chinese gave American prisoners in Korea, so it was very plausible that they could have brainwashed one, sent him back to the United States and given him the triggering mechanism.
"My other favorite political film is 'All the King's Men' (1949) because I think that Huey Long was a larger-than-life figure in American politics.
"He was one of the real populists in American political history. He was able to galvanize the masses of poor, underprivileged Americans in a way that very few politicians in history have. He had these slovenly ways, and he was a caricature of himself, but the fact is, he was one of the most effective and impactful politicians on the American scene. He scared the hell out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
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