The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film)

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For the novel by Richard Condon, see The Manchurian Candidate. For the 2004 film, see The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film)
The Manchurian Candidate
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Produced by George Axelrod
John Frankenheimer
Written by George Axelrod (screenwriter)
Richard Condon (novelist)
Starring Frank Sinatra
Laurence Harvey
Janet Leigh
Angela Lansbury
Henry Silva
James Gregory
Leslie Parrish
John McGiver
Khigh Dhiegh
Release date(s) October 24, 1962
Running time 126 min.
Language English
IMDb profile

The Manchurian Candidate is a film adapted from the 1959 thriller novel written by Richard Condon. It was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh. The central concept of the book and the subsequent 1962 film is that the son of a prominent political family has been brainwashed into becoming an unwilling assassin for the Communist Party.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

During the Korean War and the Second Red Scare, the Soviets have developed a technique based on "brainwashing" and akin to hypnosis, whereby a person could be snapped into and out of a trance, ordered to do things with full compliance, and have no memory of such actions afterwards. The Soviets kidnap a patrol of U.S. soldiers fighting in Korea, take them to Manchuria in the People's Republic of China to be brainwashed and then covertly release them back to the American forces. To cover their tracks, the Communists implant false memories in the American soldiers' minds and provide a subconscious trigger whereby one soldier, Raymond Shaw, could be snapped into and out of hypnosis. Even after full reintegration with American society, the soldiers have no conscious knowledge of their experience.

Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and the rest of their platoon believe Shaw saved their lives in combat, for which he receives the Medal of Honor when they return to the US. They also believe he was much-beloved in the unit, when in fact he was despised as cold and arrogant. After the war is over, Marco begins to have a recurring nightmare in which Raymond, under a trance during a bizarre demonstration before the Soviet and Chinese brass, kills two of his comrades. He tries to investigate the mystery but receives no support from Army Intelligence for whom he now works because there is no proof to support his position. This changes when he learns that another platoon member has been having the same nightmare and identifies the same Communist personnel. Marco then sets out to uncover the mystery with Army Intelligence support.

The Communists intend to use Raymond as a sleeper agent. They use the queen of diamonds in a deck of playing cards as a subconscious trigger to compel him to follow their orders, which he doesn't remember afterwards. Raymond is controlled by none other than his own domineering mother (Angela Lansbury), who is working for the Communists.

She is the driving force behind her husband and Raymond's step-father, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory), a bombastic McCarthy-like demagogue. She uses Raymond to assassinate another senator, the main opponent to Iselin's vice-presidential candidacy (in the process, Raymond also kills his own wife, the senator's daughter). Mrs. Iselin then primes Raymond to assassinate their party's presidential candidate at the nomination convention. In the aftermath, Senator Iselin, having been the vice-presidential candidate, would become the presidential nominee by default and would make a fiery speech (prepared ahead of time). The assassination would cause mass hysteria, paving the way to the White House and justifying the new president's emergency powers "that would make martial law seem like anarchy." Senator Iselin would thereby be controlled by the Communists, a candidate made in Manchuria.

Marco, however, figures out a way to block Raymond's subconscious triggers. Although Marco's attempts seem to fail at first, Raymond regains control over himself at the party convention and kills the Iselins, and then himself.

Janet Leigh plays Marco's love interest. A bizarre conversation on a train between her character and Marco has been interpreted by some as implying that Leigh's character, Eugenie, is working for the Communists to activate Marco's programming, much as the queen of diamonds activates Shaw's. Frankenheimer, however, in the DVD commentary, points out that he had no idea whether or not "Rosie" was supposed to be an agent of any sort; he merely lifted the train conversation straight from the Condon novel, in which there is no such implication.

[edit] Critical response

Angela Lansbury was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, and Ferris Webster was nominated for Best Film Editing. In addition, Lansbury was named Best Supporting Actress by the National Board of Review and won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

The film is consistently in the top 100 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films (#69 as of July 2006). It was #67 on the American Film Institute's "100 Years, 100 Movies," and #17 on its "100 Years, 100 Thrills" lists.

The film received a rare 100% rating from Rotten Tomatoes [1]. Prominent American film critic Roger Ebert ranks The Manchurian Candidate as an exemplary "Great Film", declaring that it "is inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a 'classic' but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released."[2]

[edit] The Kennedy Assassination

Hollywood rumor holds that Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, though the evidence for this is conflicting. Certainly the film was rarely shown in the decades after 1963. But it did appear as part of the Thursday Night Movies series on CBS on September 16, 1965 and again later that season. It was also shown twice on NBC, once in the spring of 1974 and again in the summer of 1975. Sinatra did not acquire distribution rights to The Manchurian Candidate until the late 1970s. He was involved in a theatrical re-release of the film in 1988. Following the remake starring Denzel Washington, the film has been aired on a fairly regular basis on the American Movie Classics cable network.

[edit] Trotsky parallels

Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940, by Ramón Mercader. Mercader, who was raised by his mother to be a Soviet agent and assassin, was visiting Trotsky's home as a sleeper agent when he killed him with an ice axe in the skull.

[edit] Trivia

  • The film has the first-ever Karate fight in an American motion picture.
  • The famous interrogation sequences in the film are the rough cuts. Frankenheimer and his editor liked them so much that they didn't polish or change them.
  • Although Angela Lansbury plays Raymond Shaw's mother, in reality she was only three years older than Laurence Harvey.

[edit] 2004 Film Version

Main article: The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film)

Director Jonathan Demme adapted Condon's novel into a film which starred Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. Demme's adaptation made substantial changes to Condon's story (replacing Cold War tension with an anti-corporation perspective), but the film received generally positive reviews and did a fine job at the box-office.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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