* Playwright George Kaufmann famously defined satire as “what closes on Saturday night” and these days you might as well define political thrillers as “what doesn’t get greenlit unless a bunch of big stars really want to do it, and then bombs.”  “The Manchurian Candidate” is both political thriller and a satire and it didn’t fail at the box office, though it was kept out of circulation for nearly twenty years after its initial release for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to this day.

I’m hardly alone in feeling this is probably the best political thriller ever made and possibly the second best political satire after “Dr. Strangelove.” Long after the end of the Cold War which spawned it, it’s continues to resonate with our political culture and it’s title still gives peoples the willies. Just ask John McCain.

Directed by John Frankenheimer and based on a novel by the mordantly comic suspense novelist Richard Condon of “Prizzi’s Honor” and “Winter Kills,”, you might know that it’s the story of what happens when a Soviet/Red Chinese brainwashing unit gets its hands on a group of captured soldiers, including Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey, who makes aloof bitterness very cool), the highly estranged step-son of a Joe McCarthy-like senator. Frank Sinatra does maybe his best acting work as a traumatized fellow soldier who realizes something might be up because of some very strange and very bad dreams he’s having — and the fact that he keeps calling the unpleasant Shaw “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

It’s a brave blend of politics, off-the-wall black comedy (what was called “sick humor” back then), suspense, and borderline Jacobean classical tragedy. Frankenheimer had a knack for making political material work dramatically, and also for drawing out strong performances. Janet Leigh (“Psycho“) was perfect as the female love interest, who was written so oddly by Richard Condon and screenwriter/playwright George Axelrod that many have theorized she’s actually an operative of some sort — an idea capitalized on in Jonathan Demmes’ disappointingly morose 2004 remake. The greatest casting coup here, however, is Angela Lansbury’s absolutely chilling turn as Raymond Shaw’s hated extremist Washington-hostess mother. She wasn’t the only less-than-pleasant character Lansbury ever played, but there’s something about what happens when actors who make a career largely playing nice people play extremely not-nice people that can be electrifying.

I also can’t resist mentioning the fight scene between Sinatra and Henry Silva as a North Korean spy, which Frankenheimer was often proud to mention was the first use of martial arts fighting styles in an American film. Seeing it again, it’s not only more brutally effective than I remembered as Sinatra and Silva all but destroy Laurence Harvey’s Washington apartment, but — especially in the initial moments when Sinatra instinctively begins fighting the Silva character without even knowing who he is — it’s pretty obvious to me now that it had to be one of the main inspirations for the terrific first fight scene in “Kill Bill, Volume I,” in which Uma Thurman and Vivica A. Fox lay waste to a Pasadena living room.

The Blu-Ray is, by the way, not a deluxe restoration, but it includes all of the excellent features that earlier DVDs have included and the print has been kept in excellent enough shape that a new restoration isn’t really necessary. It looks great. Super highly recommended, though pricey.

* 1961’s “The Comancheros” is getting a deluxe-packaging with plenty of extras and a Blu-Ray presentation that is really nifty. This high-end Western starring John Wayne is another film that’s been kept in decent enough shape to look great in high-definition without a major restoration to-do.

In terms of film history, though, “The Comancheros” is probably best noted as the final directing credit for that somewhat under-valued if uneven craftsman, Michael Curtiz, whose credits included two absolutely classic examples of polished Hollywood entertainment at its greatest, “Casablanca” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”  Sadly, he fell ill and faltered during the production and John Wayne, by then a highly experienced hand around movie sets, completed the production.

Pairing Wayne with the then-rising young star Stuart Whitman in a part that might have once been filled by Clark Gable, this is essentially a buddy western in which grizzled Texas Ranger Jake Cutter (Wayne, of course) must escort courtly gambler and accused murderer Paul Regret (Whitman) to his not-so-just reward. As the two battle Comanche Indians and non-native gun-runners (the “Comancheros” of the title), they naturally forge one of those unlikely movie friendships we all love and Cutter starts to wonder whether or not Regret should really hang.

Some almost unconscious racism towards Indians aside, this is an effective enough big budget Western. On the downside, Stuart Whitman, who spent most of his career making television (8 appearances on “Fantasy Island”!), is really nowhere near the same acting ball park as Wayne. On the other hand leading lady, Ina Balin, who apparently angered Wayne with her Method acting ticks, does a rather fantastic job as an alluring and oddly flexible criminal heiress. Lee Marvin also pops up as a disfigured bad man, which is always good for a laugh.

* Coincidentally, “The Horse Soldiers” gets a less deluxe and slightly less gorgeous Blu-Ray treatment. Made two years earlier, this production also pairs John Wayne with a younger co-star in another story of adversaries who eventually become friends. Though directed by perhaps the greatest director in American cinema and co-starring one of my favorite classic era leading men, this John Ford directed Civil War drama starring Wayne as the leader of a Union cavalry division, who clashes with an heroic army doctor played by William Holden, never really takes off. Viewers should definitely check out Ford’s earlier grand entertainments around the cavalry, “Fort Apache” and “Rio Grande,” first — though neither film is yet available in high definition.

* Finally, I have an assortment of DVD-on-demand titles from MGM. The most interesting of these is another western, “Man from Del Rio” from 1956. It’s a not entirely successful but intriguing attempt at a noir-influenced, politically progressive low-budget “High Noon” of sorts. It stars the always entertaining Anthony Quinn as a galoot of a reluctant Mexican-American gunfighter trying to hang up his guns for the love of the vastly underused Katy Jurado.

Less succcessful is 1952’s “The Captive City,” a Robert Wise-directed semi-noir starring John Forsythe as a crusading reporter taking on small town organized crime. It’s not terrible but a bit clunky. It is interesting as it is a sort of anti-mobster propaganda film from the days when Senator Estes Kefauver, who appears in the film, was alerting the nation to the existence of organized crime even as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was denying it.

Wise did a lot better in other noirs, but “Captive City” film is a masterpiece of disciplined cinema compared to the bizarre “Cop Hater,” a 1958 misfire which is maybe worth a look for nuts like me as it stars a very young Robert Loggia (“Big”) with much smaller parts for an even more wet-behind-the-ears Jerry Orbach (“Law & Order“) and Vincent Gardenia (“Moonstruck“). It’s also the first adaptation of one of Ed McBain/Evan Hunter’s 87th Precinct novels. A few great cast members notwithstanding, “High and Low” it ain’t.

Indeed, even a momentous event  like the death of Osama Bin Laden could just barely penetrate TCM’s  mix of Hollywood fantasy and scholarship. For me, the news first came as I overheard another filmgoer during an intermission of “West Side Story,” which I had popped in on just to see how good the 70mm print was, say to another. “No, he’s really dead.” I figured it was another classic film star gone forever. George Chakiris, who played Sharks leader Bernardo, had introduced the screening, but how were Jets Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn doing?

Walking away from the theater and heading toward the closing night party, I saw a lone car driving quickly down Hollywood Boulevard with its occupants yelling and waving American flags. Had the U.S.A. won an important soccer game or something? I eventually figured out what had happened, but it took hours for the news to sink in and, while people were mentioning it, most of the conversations I heard at the closing night party were about movies, understandably enough. The weird part was how several of the films I had seen dealt with the bloodier aspects of 20th century world history, which doesn’t seem to be letting up all that much here in the 21st.

Though you could see both “The Godfather” and “Taxi Driver” this year at the festival, in a funny way no film was more shockingly honest about violence than a film I’d managed to catch a second screening of just a few hours prior. “Went the Day Well,” a shockingly blunt and hugely effective piece of British wartime propaganda from 1942. Well regarded in England, the film, from the famed Ealing studios, was to some degree overtaken on its initial release by good news in the allied war effort and has become obscure even among the cinephile set. That may change as it is about to be re-released by Rialto Films. Directed by Brazilian expatriate Alberto Calvacanti and drawn from a short story by Graham Greene, “Went the Day Well” opens with a resident of a British town proudly telling us how several German names ended up in the town cemetery after it was the focal point of an abortive invasion.

From that opening, you’d have every right to expect to a tale of plucky Brits keeping a stiff upper lip as they bravely outwit the cruel Nazis. That’s what you get, more or less, but the surprise here is howviolent the film is by standards of the time and place it was released — enough to draw audible gasps from a modern day audience. The English have historically been much harsher on film violence than most other countries and it’s easy to imagine that the film might well have been effectively banned or severely cut if it wasn’t government sanctioned propaganda. It’s far from graphic, of course, but it’s bluntness is a real surprise to anyone familiar with films of the era.

More conventionally for a British propaganda film, it’s one with a collective protagonist, in this case an assortment of ordinary British people of various classes. The cast features numerous actors that looked vaguely familiar to this classic film fan, but few I could pick out of line-up. That doesn’t matter because most of them are doing very good work creating well-rounded charactes. I did recognize David Farrar from “Black Narcissus,” an actor with slightly odd rhythms,  and was wowed by a young Harry Fowler, a real treat as a borderline juvenile delinquent with heroic tendencies that I would have loved to see an entire film about. (Today, Fowler is probably best known for his uncredited bit in “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which Peter O’Toole teaches a disbelieving William Potter the not-so easy “trick” to putting out a match with your fingers.)

Perhaps surprisingly for a classic film festival, it’s possible that this year tales pitting the West against Soviet-style communism seemed to outnumber movies about World War II’s fight against fascism. 1934’s “British Agent,” made by a l0w-budget division of Warner Brothers, is the sort of curiosity only a real film geek can love and a real relic of pre-war confusion about where the Soviets fit it into a quickly realigning Europe.  Despite two very good leads in Leslie Howard and Kay Francis, who is assigned a next to impossible role, and first class production values overseen by director Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood”) the movie only works as a historical curiosity, though on that level it’s pretty darn interesting.

Technically an espionage tale, “British Agent” is really more of a romantic melodrama about a British diplomat (Howard) whose careless habit of decoding foreign cables in a loud voice leads to his new girlfriend (Francis) hearing some sensitive news. Since she’s not just his ladyfriend but Nikolai Lenin’s secretary, and he’s willing to foment a counter-revolution if it’ll keep Russia in World War I, it becomes a sticky wicket. The film is often criticized as jingoistic because of Howard’s ruthlessly Angl0centric behavior.

However, “British Agent” been better written, I think it would be read today as more as a realistic depiction of real politik from a frankly British point of view. It certainly makes no clear attempt to demonize the Soviets, who were still a year or two away from launching the infamous “great purges” of the 1930s, which killed millions. In fact, it’s oddly soft on the already not-so-swell human rights record of the early Soviet Union and even portrays a Stalin-like character as a not entirely bad bloke.

A very different kind of outsider’s take on the Russian revolution is offered in “Reds,” but here the movie itself was somewhat eclipsed by a very rare post screening appearance by the film’s director, co-writer and star, Warren Beatty, being interviewed by Alec Baldwin. It was high comedy as fans of Beatty were treated to the actor-producer-director’s apparently inborn inability to answer a simple question with a straight answer. He did, however, promise a return to filmmaking now that his children were old enough to be tired of him.

The movie itself is a romantic melodrama-cum-biopic, starring Beatty as radical American writer John Reed, who wrote the acclaimed history, 10 Days That Shook the World — which I actually managed to wade through after seeing “Reds” the first time — and wound up being the only American buried in the Kremlin. Co-starring Diane Keaton as his sometimes estranged life partner and fellow writer-activist, Louise Bryant, “Reds” is fairly straightforward in its depiction of both the ups and downs of radicalism and relatively blunt about the state-sponsored terror that arose early on in the Soviet Union. It won’t surprise Beatty’s many conservative detractors that it’s also pretty blunt about the lack of real civil liberties in Woodrow Wilson’s America.

As an ambitious Hollywood entertainment, the first half is thoroughly engaging and high on witty dialog. The second half is a bit more of a slog as the story takes us to more chilly emotional and geographic climes, but the entire effort is peppered with strong supporting performances. Chief among them is a restrained Jack Nicholson, before he’d developed some of his more recent bad acting habits, as playwright Eugene O’Neil, Maureen Stapleton as legendary anarachist earth-mother Emma Goldman, and the ever-great Gene Hackman in a two-scene cameo as a not-at-all-radical newspaper editor. Keaton and Beatty don’t make any attempt to veer away from their usual star personas and are not afraid to play up the comedic aspects of the story, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

If Warren Beatty was reasonably honest about the inhumanity of Soviet-style communism, Billy Wilder waged a hilarious iced Cold War against it in his semi-forgotten classic, “One, Two, Three.” As the very entertaining Michael Schlesinger pointed out in a funny live intro, it’s the kind of late-career summing up film for Wilder that “North by Northwest” and “Rio Bravo” were for Wilder’s peers, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. True, it’s a lot less well known than those two classics and perhaps just a hair or two lower on the rung of absolute cinematic greatness — except I don’t quite believe that. Like Schlesinger, I love this movie beyond all reason, even it’s too-silly, reality-breaking jokes.

Drawn from a one-act play by Hungarian author Ferenc Molnár, which I’d love to read or see in translation, “One, Two, Three” stars James Cagney as a manic Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who is not about to let his bosses’s teen daughter (Pamela Tiffin) and her sudden marriage to an ardent East German commie (Horst Buchholz) drag down his corporate ambitions. Aside from what it bought from Molnar, it features borrowed and refurbished characters and plot elements from such past Wilder classics as “Ninotchka,” which Wilder co-wrote in 1939, as well as “Some Like It Hot,” which was only a few years old in 1961.

Like “Hot,” it’s one of the very few true film farces — a very specific type of comedy — that actually works. (“A Fish Called Wanda” might have been the last really effective movie farce.”) Central to its genius is an absolutely brilliant performance by Cagney that fuel’s the film’s breakneck pace, which is vastly more caffeinated than a case full of Coke. It’s exhililirating to watch but apparently the filmmaking process — made more difficult by the reported obnoxiousness of co-star Horst Bucholz and the fact that the film was actually made as the Berlin Wall was being constructed, setting the stage for an actual Cold War crisis — was so exhausting that when Cagney heard a friend talk about taking a relaxing boat trip, he was so envious he decided to retire for the next twenty years.

It was one very well-earned retirement. Watch “One, Two, Three” and you’ll see why. True, he already had some competition from a certain James Brown, but every moment Cagney is on screen he’s the hardest working man in show business.

Since the individual scenes have been apparently all been disabled for embedding (why?), we’ll give you the trailer instead.

Bullz-eye/Premium Hollywood boss man Gerardo Orlando recently interviewed the ultimate girly mag’s honcho emeritus about a fortnight back. Check it out.

* The non-extra initial Blu-Ray/DVD release of “Avatar” has, guess what, done very, very well.

* Thanks, Hef! He saves the world for heavily retouched naked women, pays writers more than just about anybody, and now he ponies up the missing funds to save the Hollywood sign.

* One item I don’t actually have to link to report on is that the TCM Classic Film Festival is going to be back next year, with the idea of being an annual event. I can do that because I was present at last night’s big screening of “Metropolis” where none other than Robert Osborne announced it to the assembled multitudes at the more beautiful than ever Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

What was interesting about the way this festival was marketed is that people who live in Los Angeles were clearly not the primary target. Individual ticket prices were roughly double what film geeks like myself are used to paying to see similar presentations — actually more than double when you consider that most repertory programs are actually double bills. With the exception of fellow press and a USC film student who had picked up one of thirty free tickets that has been donated, everyone I spoke to was from elsewhere, and usually a place where the opportunity to see such frequently revived cinematic warhorses as “Casablanca” and “Some Like it Hot” on the big screen are nevertheless beyond rare.

The crowds were older, far less exclusively male and as far as I could tell a lot happier than the usual folks who one finds at revival screenings though absolutely no less enthusiastic or devoted than us usual film geeks. They were, in fact, kind of great.

Another observation worth making is the rock-star like status of TCM host Robert Osborne at the festival. Jen Yamato puts it perhaps even more accurately. I saw this myself.

…As I left the closing night party on Sunday I happened upon Mr. Osborne holding court in the middle of the dance floor, intently chatting up a fan. Behind that fan stood a massive line of more fans, all Osbornites waiting patiently for their chance to meet the man. As one made his exit, the next stepped up and took Osborne’s outreached hand and I had a sudden vision of Robert Osborne as the Pope of Movies…

* It’s an unfortunate juxtaposition with the word “pope,”  but I think it’s safe to say that having your DP arrested for child sexual assault is about the worst thing you can think of for morale on a movie like “Moneyball.”

* If you want to make a movie about a real life convicted criminal, it might be better never to approach them about it. At least that’s what Danny DeVito might tell you now regarding trying to make his “Crazy Eddie” movie.

* I’m embargoed, I guess, from saying anything review-y about it, but I have seen “Iron Man 2.” Regardless of what I think, “Iron Man 3” looks to be a few years off yet. And, hey, it’s just possible that Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys and Aliens” will be a better film than either “Iron Man” made so far. (I know, heresy!)

* I’ll be talking to documentary king Alex Gibney tomorrow for an upcoming feature here. The guy is definitely keeping busy. He’s following up his current upcoming film about the Jack Abramoff scandal, “Casino Jack,” with a new film about sex scandal plagued ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer that seems to be getting quite a reaction.

* I’m supposed to be the indie-friendly cinephile guy around here, but I don’t “get” everything. For example, the love which Sylvain Chomet’s “The Triplets of Belleville” received a few years somewhat baffled me a few years ago — so much so that I didn’t feel I could review. It was clearly not a bad movie, but why wasn’t I, you know, enjoying it? The appeal of the films of hugely acclaimed French comedian/auteur Jacques Tati have baffled me as well in a similar way, at least so far. (I’ve been known to change my mind and I always try to keep an open one.) Still, it’s looking like I might be doubly baffled by the animated art-house release, “The Illusionist.”

To be specific, the wondrous Self Styled Siren, who recently emerged as one Farran Smith Nehme of New York City, is co-curating with Lou Lumenick of the New York Post, Shadows of Russia. It’s a series of classic and rarities dealing with the former Soviet Union and it’s complex relationship with the United States and the West. Tonight’s centerpiece, showing at 10:00 Eastern/7:00 Pacific, is “Mission to Moscow,” one of a few pieces of World War II-era wartime propaganda requested by the U.S. government in order to create a better image of our wartime ally to the East. Despite the fact they had basically been made to please the U.S. government and assist the war effort, these films later came under suspicion from the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as the Cold War heated up again almost immediately after the end of the war.

I’ve never seen “Mission” but it’s apparently a faux-factual, completely absurd whitewash of the very real evil of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Making it a lot more interesting is the fact that this was no cheapy, but a glossy A-picture directed by Michael Curtiz and written by Howard Koch, both of whom had extremely illustrious careers on their own and whose most famous effort together was arguably the best American propaganda film of all time, “Casablanca.” No one thinks it’s a great movie or even a particularly good one in any normal sense of the word, but apparently its sheer wrongness makes it a really interesting movie experience. If you even one bit interested in mid-century history, this is one you won’t to miss.

The Siren and Lou Lumenick have more on “Mission to Moscow,” another interesting sounding tale called “The North Star” which you’ll have to be very quick on the trigger tonight if you want to see it (it’s 5:00 Pacific/8:00 Eastern) and some other possible goodies showing later on, including “The Kremlin Letter,” a hard-to-find 1970 spy thriller directed by John Huston I’ll have a hard time resisting.