I'm rushing to finish this, so I've no time to do any thinking now, only the time to jot down something I thought earlier.

Last night I encountered on TV a documentary about film-maker Woody Allen. In it, Allen made a rather startling confession. He's a sports nut, he said, and if of an evening there was a conflict between going to the ball game he had tickets for, or doing that extra shot of the scene that would get it just perfect, instead of merely okay, he'd as likely as not go to the ball game.

Now okay, this was probably Allen trying to sell himself to TV land as an all-round okay guy with his feet on the ground, who definitely does not do weird things to his adopted children. But it might explain something, which is that when I say I like Woody Allen's movies a lot, what I really mean is that I like a lot of the scenes in Woody Allen movies.

There's the scene where Goldie Hawn recommends haute cuisine as the way to improve the atmosphere in prisons, and the scene in the same one where an adolescent boy gets smacked on the head and becomes right wing. There's the scene where he inserts Marshal McLuhan into a cinema queue to help him win an argument with a fellow queue-er. There's the scene where he chats up Diane (Annie Hall) Keaton, with subtitles which say what they're both thinking. There's the scene with the aliens who "like your early funny ones". There are the scenes where the Greek Tragedy chorus in Mighty Aphrodite sings show tunes, and the scene where the same chorus gets answered not by Zeus, but by the answering machine of Zeus. And who could forget the Volkswagen Beetle which starts first time after about three centuries?

Each favourite scene is unique and uniquely memorable. But the movies just merge into each other in memory, and often I can't remember which Woody movie "that great scene where …" was actually in, which can make digging them up and re-enjoying them rather tricky.

What this says to me is that Allen is a hit-or-miss kind of movie-maker. As he himself famously once recommended, he keeps on showing up, in his case showing up with another movie, and another, and another … So every so often he hits the bullseye. But the bullseye seldom takes the form of an entire movie.

Maybe if he wasn't such a sports nut he might have hung around at work and made more movies that were entirely superb, rather than just superb in flashes.

After that Woody documentary, I put John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate on my DVD machine, and suddenly I was watching the real thing, a movie that is superb and superbly memorable in its entirety. When I first saw it, the nightmare scenes hit me for six, but every time I watch this movie again I'm struck not only by the excellence of the scenes I had already registered as excellent but by new stuff of equal excellence. This time, I found myself noting with particular pleasure the facial close-ups, and the skill with which all the faces are lit and photographed. I don't know the name of the director of photography or the lighting boss, or even if they are two separate people, but whoever he (they) is (are) he is (they are) very, very good at it.

As is so often the case with movies I admire, the political message being put in front of me is one I utterly despise, and the message of The Manchurian Candidate is that both sides fighting the Cold War were as bad as each other, and egging each other on – that Joe McCarthy was as bad a person as Joe Stalin. In MC the two sides are actually conspiring together! Bollocks. If our most serious Cold Warriors had been hand in glove with their psychopath monsters (i.e, them in their damned entirety), how come our guys went to all the bother of actually winning the Cold War instead of merely keeping it going indefinitely?

But to hell with that. Maybe half the people who made this movie spent their lives in well-deserved (because morals trump art in my book) Black Listed obscurity. Maybe they were trying to sell me an ideological piece of nonsense. Maybe, morally and politically (as opposed to artistically), Top Gun is worth ten Manchurian Candidates. And I just don't believe for one second that "brainwashing" could ever be made to work half that terrifyingly well. But again I say, to hell with that. The Manchurian Candidate is a great, great movie.

With a DVD player you can do something you never used to be able to do in a cinema, or even on an old-style video like mine with any great effect. You can freeze on one frame. And if you do this at random during The Manchurian Candidate you always get something beautifully composed and photographed, and just downright memorable. The thing is uninterruptedly superb from start to finish.

Whoever the guys were, aside from Frankenheimer himself, one thing I do know. They were willing to skip ball games to get their scenes absolutely right.

Damn. Did more thinking. Now I'm late.