“If history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.” So said noted businessman and ace problem-solver Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. Onscreen, he makes (and follows through) on this declaration in 1959, but Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning film was released in 1974 — and it’s the space between that gives the line its frisson.

“When I would ask my students what he was talking about, they all said ‘the Kennedy assassination,’” says Kevin Courrier, film critic and author of Randy Newman: American Dreams. “The scene takes place before Kennedy was even elected, but it’s played like it already happened — those are the associations.”

Courrier says that this scene will figure into the new screening series he’s devised for the revitalized Revue Cinema. Titled “Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism,” the program parses the links — explicit, unconscious, and otherwise — between American films and their contemporaneous presidential administrations. The lectures begin this Saturday morning (April 26) with a look at the Kennedy era, which will be followed April 30 by a screening of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. The series will continue in the same format for eight months, through Johnson, Nixon and onwards through Bush II.

“I originally had the idea for a book based on the idea that certain key movies of a particular presidential era could tell you about the political and cultural aspects of that time,” says Courrier, who ended up shaping the material into a sold-out course at Ryerson’s LIFE Institute. “I wanted to begin the book in the Kennedy era because I thought that the emergence of pop culture and television media had a dramatic effect on the way movies were made — there were a lot of directors coming out of live television, like Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet.”

The choice to begin the series with The Manchurian Candidate has more to do with its director’s pedigree, of course. Startlingly violent, blackly comic and uncomfortably prescient, Frankenhimer’s jazzy 1962 thriller — about a hypnotically programmed assassin being at the beck and call of communist agents — challenged (and baited) viewers on both sides of the ideological divide. That there hasn’t been a film quite like it in the past 45 years speaks to the boldness of its conception and also perhaps the partisan predictability of so much political filmmaking — which is why Courrier’s lectures will juxtapose can’t-miss-’em counterculture titles like Easy Rider with under-the-radar films like Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather (1987), which slyly prodded Reagan-era values in the guise of a slasher flick.

Courrier can’t give too many specifics, as the screening portion of the series is subject to print availability. But he does want to be very clear on one thing — that entering into the “hall of mirrors” means checking one’s prejudices at the door.

“I’m not playing partisan politics,” he says. “I want to open people up — as The Manchurian Candidate did — to the possibilities that people aren’t always what they seem to be. It’s easy to cater to partisan views, and it’s happening more and more in political discourse. People are getting received wisdom — they’re getting the answers before they understand what the questions might be. So I’m trying to raise questions.”