The Screengrab

Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare.  And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch?  Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases.  The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes.  Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually completed before that fatal day in Dallas; but its release was unluckily ill-timed to just after November 22nd, 1963.  It was almost immediately pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era.  It was a generous decision:   the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate.  The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

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As character actors go, they don't come much more iconic than Warren Mercer Oates. A tall Marine Corps vet from rural Kentucky's Muhlenberg County, Oates came west in the 1950s and, after working a number of menial jobs, started to get a string of acting jobs in western movies and televisions shows, thanks largely to his hunched six-foot frame, throwback looks, and thick rustic accent. But it was his acting chops that won him the attention of some of Hollywood's greatest directors; over the years, he worked with, among others, Norman Jewison, Monte Hellman, Stephen Spielberg, John Milius, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, and Philip Kaufman. But it was with Sam Peckinpah that Oates found his greatest success; the two shared a no-nonsense approach to filmmaking and a similiarly straightforward (and sometimes abrasive) personality. After first working together on Ride the High Country, Peckinpah and Oates worked together repeatedly over the years, and Peckinpah even gave Oates one of his few leading man roles in the controversial and underrated Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Extremely prolific during his 25 years in Hollywood, Warren Oates and his sneering, crooked smile became one of the few character actors as immediately recognizable as many lead actors of his day. Sadly for the many fans of this gifted actor and storyteller, he didn't live to enjoy his greatest success: he died unexpectedly of a heart attack just months after completing Stripes. His role as the straight-edge Sgt. Hulka won him legions of new fans and scored him more money than he'd made in any of his previous movies, but he would make only three more films, both of which were released after his death. Since then, a posthumous cult has grown up around Warren Oates, and it's hard not to read various bits of casting without imagining what he'd do with the role. Luckily, he left us with a lot of good work to chew on.

Where to see Warren Oates at his best:

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Outside of Stripes, Warren Oates' best-known, and most beloved, film role is that of the bandit Lyle Gorch in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Gorch combines Oates' two most common roles in western genre pictures — the craven and the brute — into an incredibly memorable, whore-chasing, washer-stealing character.

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Andy Serkis has joined the cast of the Spielberg/Jackson Tintin. Looks like this thing is really happening. As a Tintin diehard from days past, I have mixed feelings about that, but we'll just have to see.

The Golden Compass is performing a lot better in those godless "other countries" you've heard so much about; go figure.

Paramount is charging extra for theaters to run Sweeney Todd, and at least one chain is boycotting in protest. Folks, I've seen Sweeney Todd, and it has way too much arterial spray to capture that precious family-holiday mammon. Woe to the family that walks in there by accident.

Morgan Freeman draws nearer to his long-standing goal of adapting Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. That's a very oblique, mysterious book, without a huge amount of action. The only director I can imagine honoring it is (well, duh) Stanley Kubrick. The rumored director — David Fincher — not so much.

— Peter Smith