Tonight's technicolor musical accompaniment is being provided by Frank Sinatra's The Wee Small Hours of the Night. My first memories of Sinatra, of being vaguely aware of his iconic status and appeal, were formed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida sometime in the mid-70's. My Grandma lived there then, in a gated community where the speed limit was 10 mph and every few blocks there was a swimming pool with shuffle board courts. And Grandma dug Frank. It took me another 20 years- but that's when I first enjoyed the magnificent creepiness of the paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate and came to dig Frank for myself through his work on the big screen playing a troubled soldier who's slowly awakening to the fact that he's been brainwashed by Chinese and Russian agents. No crooning or nothing, not even so much as a Theme Song From The Manchurian Candidate. Just a couple hours of perfectly pitched anti-Communist hysteria with a knowing wink.
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