Roger Ebert’s Great Movies
The title of The Manchurian Candidate has entered everyday speech as shorthand for a brainwashed sleeper, a subject who has been hypnotised and instructed to act when his controllers pull the psychological trigger. In the movie, an American patrol is captured by Chinese communists during the Korean War, and one soldier is programmed to become an assassin; two years later, he’s ordered to kill a presidential candidate.
The Manchurian Candidate feels astonishingly contemporary; its astringent political satire still bites, and its story has uncanny contemporary echoes. The villains plan to exploit a terrorist act, “rallying a nation of viewers to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy”. The plot cheerfully divides blame between right and left; it provides a Right- wing demagogue named Sen. John Iselin, who is clearly modelled on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and makes him the puppet of his draconian wife, who is in league with foreign communists. The plan: Use anti- communist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover.
The movie is based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon, who must have been astonished that it became a film with big stars like Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey — and still more astonished that Frankenheimer and Axelrod did not soften its wicked satire. Frankenheimer says on the commentary track that he is proudest that the film hammered McCarthyism; there’s a scene where the hard- drinking Sen. Iselin can’t decide how many communists he thinks are in the state department, and settles on 57 after studying a ketchup bottle.
Frankenheimer used his TV experience to give The Manchurian Candidate a quick- moving, hard- edged urgency. Filming in black and white, incorporating inside details about political campaigns and journalism, he sweeps the story along with such conviction that its utter implausibility is concealed.
The film trusts its viewers to follow its twisting, surrealistic plot, especially in the way fragmented memories of the Korean brainwashing leak into the nightmares of the survivors of that patrol. A flashback shows us what happened: After being hypnotised by their Chinese captors, they think they’re attending a meeting of a garden club in a New Jersey hotel, while we see their communist hypnotist lecturing a room of other party officials. To show how strong the programming is, he orders Staff Sgt. Raymond Shaw ( Harvey) to strangle one of the Americans and shoot another; the film’s point of view cuts freely between the different versions of reality.
Back in the United States, Raymond is given the medal of honour and greeted by his smothering mother ( Lansbury) and her second husband, the weak, alcoholic Sen. Iselin ( James Gregory). It’s a running gag in the film that Raymond is constantly referred to as the senator’s son, and keeps repeating, “I am not his son.” Mrs Iselin has incestuous feelings for Raymond. Raymond hates her, hates himself and has a bitter speech about how he is not lovable.
Sinatra plays Maj. Bennett Marco, another member of the Korean patrol, whose fragmented nightmares lead him to suspect the brainwashing. He leads an Army investigation that determines Raymond may have been programmed as an assassin — but cru- cially fails to bring him in for questioning, because he believes Raymond’s romance with Jocelyn, daughter of a liberal senator, may cure him. The climax plays out inside Madison Square Garden, where Mrs Iselin has ordered her son to shoot her party’s presidential candidate during his acceptance speech; Sen. Iselin, the vice- presidential candidate, will catch his falling body and then, she says, deliver “the most rousing speech I’ve ever read. It’s been worked on, here and in Russia, on and off, for over eight years.”
The film moves freely between realism and surrealism. Frankenheimer shows Iselin at a press conference and Senate hearing, with details lifted directly from the ArmyMcCarthy hearings; as Iselin waves a list of “card- carrying communists”, TV sets in the foreground show the same scene being carried on the news.
Lansbury’s Mrs Iselin, nominated for an Academy Award, is one of the great villains of movie history. Fierce, focused, contemptuous of the husband she treats like a puppet, she has, we gather, plotted with the Russians and Chinese to use the Red Scare of “Iselinism” to get him into office, where she will run things from behind the scenes. But it comes as a shocking surprise that her own son has been programmed as the assassin. That so enrages her that, in another turn of the corkscrew plot, she tells him: “When I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously underestimating me.” So let’s get this straight. She plans to have her son assassinate a presidential candidate so that her husband can become President, and she can then use his power to grind down the people who worked with her on this plan in the first place. Do not look for logic here.
Frankenheimer uses a heightened visual style to underline the byzantine complexity of his story. There are tilt shots, odd angles, and the use of deep focus for his favourite composition, in which a face is seen in closeup in the foreground while action takes place behind it in the middle distance.
This look is matched by Axelrod’s dialogue, which often jumps the tracks of reality. Consider the peculiar first meeting between the Sinatra character and Rosie ( Janet Leigh), who will become his fiancée. He’s so shaky on a train that he can’t light a cigarette. She follows him to the platform between cars, lights his cigarette, and then says, “Maryland’s a beautiful state.” “This is Delaware,” Sinatra says, and she replies: “I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter.”
Soon she has broken off an engagement and taken up with Marco, leaving us to wonder what in the hell that dialogue was about. Was it in code? Was Marco hallucinating? It seems strange that the Chinese brainwashed the entire patrol, but needed only Raymond as an assassin. Why, then, spare the others with their nightmares and suspicions? Is Sinatra’s Maj. Marco another Manchurian sleeper, and is Rosie his controller?
The Manchurian Candidate 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. “It may be”, Pauline Kael wrote at the time, “the most sophisticated satire ever made in Hollywood”. Yes, because it satirises no particular target — left, right, foreign, domestic — but the very notion that politics can be taken at face value.