The Manchurian Candidate

(1962 film)

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	Novel: Richard Condon Screenplay: George Axelrod
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 (1962) is a Cold War political thriller film adapted from the 1959 thriller novel, by Richard Condon, directed by John Frankenheimer, and features Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, and Janet Leigh. The central concept of the film is that the son of a prominent, right-wing political family has been brainwashed as an unwitting assassin for the International Communist Conspiracy. The Manchurian Candidate was nationally released on Wednesday, October 24, 1962, at the zenith of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Plot

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 can 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 U.S. They also (literally) automatically describe him as the "kindest, bravest, warmest most wonderful human being" they have ever known in their lives. Deep down, however, they know that he is a cold, sad, unsociable loner. As Marco puts it, "It isn't as if Raymond's hard to like. He's impossible to like!"

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. As a Manchurian doctor, seen earlier in Marco's nightmare, explains, Shaw's brain "hasn't been 'washed,' as they say; it has been dry cleaned." To test their unwitting assassin, the Manchurian doctor and a Soviet operative have Shaw murder his employer, a newspaper publisher.

Raymond's mother (played by Angela Lansbury - the character is named Eleanor Iselin in the novel but no first name is mentioned in the film) is the driving force behind her husband and Raymond's step-father, Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a bombastic McCarthy-esque demagogue, whom most people dismiss as a fool. Raymond hates them both, especially Iselin, but also his mother who has such a domineering personality. In one scene, John Iselin-as-McCarthy-clone is established when (with the approval of his wife) he interrupts a televised Congressional briefing of the Secretary of Defense and accuses him of knowing that some 207 Defense Department employees are Communist agents, which sets off a chaotic reaction among journalists and a shocked, enraged reaction from the Secretary.

In fact, unknown to even Raymond, the Iselins are Communist agents with plans to go all the way to the White House. Mrs. Iselin herself is the American operative who is to use Raymond in the final step of the operation.

For a while Raymond does find happiness with Jocelyn Jordan (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of one of his step-father's political rivals, Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver). What starts as a joke along the line of Romeo and Juliet turns into genuine romance and the young couple marry. Although he is pleased with the match, Senator Jordan makes it clear to Raymond's mother that he will still stop her husband's bid for the U.S. Vice-Presidency. She in turn uses Raymond to assassinate Jordan and, in the process, Raymond also kills his own wife (he was programmed to kill any witness to crimes he committed while under the direction of his operative).

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, will become the presidential nominee by default and will make a fiery speech (prepared ahead of time). The assassination will cause mass hysteria, paving Iselin's way to the White House and justifying the new president's emergency powers "that would make martial law seem like anarchy." President Iselin would thereby be controlled by the Communists, a candidate made in Manchuria.

In a moving scene, Mrs. Iselin admits, to an apparently still hypnotised Raymond, that she has been a Communist agent for years. She required an assassin for the final step of taking over the U.S., but had no idea that it would be her own son. After all, the world has plenty of killers who hardly require brainwashing to carry out their assignments. Raymond was chosen because it meant the Russians and Chinese increasing their hold on Mrs. Iselin and, once the deed is done, she intends to take her revenge on them all.

Marco, however, figures out a way to block Raymond's subconscious triggers, presenting him with a trick deck made entirely of queens of diamonds and telling him to ignore any future orders. Although Marco's attempts seem to fail at first, Raymond in fact keeps control over himself at the party convention and takes his revenge by killing his mother and Iselin. He then commits suicide wearing the Medal of Honor which he now truly merits.

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 Rose Chaney, is working for the Communists to activate Marco's programming, much as the queen of diamonds activates Shaw's. It is a rather strange conversation between people who have only just met, and almost appears to be an exchange of passwords. In his DVD commentary Frankenheimer himself admits 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.

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 IMDb's list of top 250 films (No. 72 as of February 2007). It was No. 67 on the American Film Institute's "100 Years, 100 Movies," and No. 17 on its "100 Years, 100 Thrills" lists.

The film received a rare 100 per cent 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]

The Kennedy Assassination

Hollywood rumour holds that Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the John F. Kennedy assassination, 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. The film has aired on a fairly regular basis on the Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics cable networks.

Similar rumours and treatment surround the film Suddenly! in which Sinatra himself starred as a Presidential assassin.

Trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

The claim that the film has the first-ever Karate fight in an American motion picture (at least according to Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary) is untrue. The 1955 MGM film Bad Day at Black Rock starring Spencer Tracy has a short Karate fight scene between Tracy and Ernest Borgnine.

During the fight sequence, Frank Sinatra broke his little finger when he smashed his hand through a wooden desk.

The fight takes place in Raymond's apartment between Marco and Raymond's Korean manservant (Henry Silva) who is a Communist agent. It is similar to the later battles between Inspector Clouseau and his Oriental manservant Cato in The Pink Panther movies.

The famous interrogation sequence where Raymond and Marco confront each other in the hotel room opposite the convention are the rough cuts. When first filmed Sinatra was out of focus and when they tried to re-shoot the scene he was simply not as effective as he had been in the first take. Frustrated, Frankenheimer decided in the end to simply use the original out-of-focus takes. Critics praised him for showing Marco from Raymond's distorted point-of-view. (Source: Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary.)

For the scene in the convention hall prior to the assassination, Frankenheimer was at a loss as to how Marko would pinpoint Raymond's sniper nest. Eventually he decided on a method similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. In his DVD audio commentary, Frankenheimer notes that what would be plagiarism in the 1960s would now be looked upon as an homage.

For Raymond's mother, Sinatra had wanted Lucille Ball, but Frankenheimer had worked with Lansbury in a mother role in a previous film, All Fall Down, and insisted on having her for the part. (Source: Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary.)

Although Angela Lansbury plays Raymond Shaw's mother, in reality she was only three years older than Laurence Harvey.

Nu metal band Slipknot make reference to the film in their song Wait and Bleed. These lyrics were then adopted by the band Manchurian Candidate [3]. References to the film were also mentioned in the self-titled song Manchurian Candidate.

In April 2007, Angela Lansbury's character was selected by Newsweek as one of the ten greatest villains in cinema history.

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 was successful at the box office.

External links

Films directed by John Frankenheimer

The Young Stranger • The Young Savages • All Fall Down • Birdman of Alcatraz • The Manchurian Candidate • Seven Days in May • The Train • Seconds • Grand Prix • The Fixer • The Extraordinary Seaman • The Gypsy Moths • I Walk the Line • The Horsemen • The Iceman Cometh • 99 and 44/100% Dead • Story of a Love Story • French Connection II • Black Sunday • Prophecy • The Challenge • The Holcroft Covenant • 52 Pick-up • Dead-Bang • The Fourth War • Year of the Gun • The Island of Dr. Moreau • Ronin • Reindeer Games

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