Film Studies: Slim volumes for all those deep thinkers out there

There are movies that stain the waters of life – so every time the queen of diamonds falls in a card game, you check to see if you've shot your wife yet. Or, as Greil Marcus puts it, "What The Manchurian Candidate did prefigure ... was the state of mind that would accompany the assassinations that followed it, those violations of American life. 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. If a dream is a memory of the future, this is the future The Manchurian Candidate remembered."

That's from a new book in the BFI Classics series, a treasury that keeps on delivering. Ten years ago, Ed Buscombe was the launching editor, and now Rob White keeps a cool hand on idiosyncrasy and finding authors with a fresh response on familiar movies. And if the original target list of 360 classics was a touch conservative, why, Modern Classics was the pragmatic response to a young readership eager to take The Exorcist, Titanic or Se7en seriously.

I should add that Marcus is a friend, but his pained rhapsody on the 1962 John Frankenheimer film also took my eye because of Frankenheimer's recent and unexpected death. That he could be good was beyond doubt (Candidate, Seconds, Seven Days in May); that his material coarsened in later years (Ronin) is equally true. So is The Manchurian Candidate a director's film, or one that grew out of the zeitgeist? Marcus prefers the latter way of thinking, but that's natural in someone so inspired with movie and music, and so able to operate on the corpus known as American studies.

He places The Manchurian Candidate in a set of ways: as Richard Condon's wild, cold-blooded novel flipped onto the screen; as a mirroring of the odd souls of Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey; as a forerunner of American political life becoming a vortex of TV coverage and vicious spin. Which still says nothing of Angela Lansbury, the mother/lover/operator who suggests that her son Raymond play a little solitaire and makes it sound like their precious sex game.

Marcus feels shattered at the close of the film. I'm not so sure. It remains lethally funny and exuberant in subversive ways that still elude grasp. America suffered tragedies in the Sixties if you take those years solemnly. But if you see the country as a crazy house gradually getting into gear, then maybe the film is most shocking in introducing macabre glee and intellectual slapstick. The idea of a brainwashed Laurence Harvey was always too redundant not to be comic.

Nothing is more welcome than these slim books shaking us up. It happens that Modern Classics has also just delivered another account of blood in the water. I refer to the lyrical tribute to Jaws by Antonia Quirke.

Jaws has receded a little, I suppose. Steven Spielberg has been so busy with more grown-up pictures – hasn't he? The neat summer thriller from 1975 can seem a little old hat – until you see a fin slice through the warm water. Ms Quirke comes on to tell us the hat is new and smart. She thinks this is Spielberg's best film, the happiest mixture of his energy rush, his humour and his youthful urge to build the most evil roller coaster.

Quirke writes like a pirate's daughter – she adores the salty ham of Robert Shaw's Quint (is there a "Qui" gene?). Her gusty response carries you away with larky jokes, whiplash insights and the feeling that she is writing in the dark with that great monster, the screen, writhing above her. It's as if the skinny-dipper who was the shark's first victim had turned into Tuesday Weld, determined to talk until the creature's teeth fall out: "Right before our eyes, Spielberg is inventing the almost aggressive purposelessness of his Indiana Jones mode. Jaws is perhaps the most tonally comprehensive thriller ever made – sheer exhilaration at lacking an agenda or a subject in any classical dramatic sense. The film is sometimes nothing more than a dance to music. Spielberg never meant anything really. But neither did Fred Astaire." Happy the day when a film institute can be so carefree and smart. It even tempts me to forgive Ms Quirke for not spelling out how the marketing of Jaws (that's where agenda got a grip) changed the business. Equally, Greil Marcus might have said more about Suddenly and how that and later events confused tyrant Sinatra's feelings about presidents. But these books are meant to be slender and suggestive; they're turn-ons, not the last word. And here is proof again that any film person needs the whole collection.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk