ASSASSINS HUNTED

FAMOUS ASSASSINATION GIVEN DETAILED TWISTS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The assassination of United States President Abraham Lincoln altered the pace of reconstruction following the American Civil War.

The conspirators were hunted though with lightening speed.

Writer Monica Beletsky creates the story around the efforts made by the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to capture John Wilkes Booth over a 12 day chase in the Apple TV+ Original Series, Manhunt (Series 2024).

Director Carl Franklin spins in the back story over 7 episodes to provide the history behind the assassination while following a narrative that moves from intimate moments with Stanton and the efforts underway to discover the full scope of the assassination plot.

Several short vignettes in the form of flash backs are provided of Lincoln reasoning through various issues related to the civil war with the Southern secessionist states and to the emancipation of the slaves in the South.  

Tobias Menzies plays Stanton acting through the trauma as best he can so as to prevent Booth from becoming a hero for the recently defeated South.

Stanton is a bit difficult to like at first and so the story initially follows Booth to uncover what Booth’s reasons and motivations were for such a horrendous deed.

Anthony Boyle as Booth shows the assassin as a Confederate loyalist with a bit too much narcissism that misdirects him to want more fame than he had as an actor. Booth was able to access Ford Theatre in Washington DC because of his popularity as an actor.

Famous as an actor perhaps, but not a hero of the South, which Booth found to be a more important motivation.

Franklin pushes the main narrative through the various stages of the escape while showing just how far behind Stanton was to figuring it all out, just in time.

Boyle portrays Booth as desperate to escape and also desperate to be a hero, while writhing in pain with a broken leg from jumping onto the stage from the presidential booth, but also because he is smart enough to know that he only has finite time to find safe refuge with his Confederate loyalists.

Stanton is determined all along, but he becomes more and more resolved as he gains a more complete understanding of the conspirators’ assassination plot.

The narrative shifts from time to time to subplots, such as the evidence of Mary Simms, a slave who was privy to Booth obtaining medical treatment for his broken leg.

Dr. Samuel Mudd is more than an uninterested bystander.

Lovie Simone shows how Mary was subservient and silent, but that once she obtained a bit of freedom, she was able to gain enough courage to speak out about the doctor’s involvement being a bit more than a doctor providing treatment according to his hypocritic oath.

The series is a bit of a slow starter with the well known assassination having few surprises, but the little not so well known details about the manhunt begin to gather up a lot of momentum until everything hangs on how they are caught, not necessarily when and where, which everybody has known already, perhaps for over one hundred years.

Writer Beletsky and director Franklin also take an interest in the historical accuracies of the uniforms, the guns and the modes of transportation, which adds to the intrigue, like a second back story to an important historical tragedy.

The corpus of historical literature on the subject is explored like an autopsy of all the lives involved, living and dead, as the assassins are hunted.