THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
A political thriller that’s never been more timely
WHAT’S FUNNIER THAN an idiotic right-wing Presidential candidate working with the Russians to help bring down his own country? Not much, thought Richard Condon. Published in 1959, Condon’s second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, was inspired by a brace of lunatic Cold War screeds: The Politician, by anti-communist John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, which posited that President Eisenhower was a Red agent, and Brain-washing In
Red China, in which CIA propagandist Edward Hunter argued that US Korean War POWS had been “brainwashed” in Manchuria as Communist sympathisers.
Centred around an American war hero programmed by the Communists to kill a US Presidential candidate, Condon’s satire was Hollywood catnip. Directorscreenwriter team John Frankenheimer and George Axelrod snatched up the film rights. Frankenheimer, who came from New York TV, was schooled under the cold, efficient style of Sidney Lumet. Axelrod had written The Seven Year Itch, and was Rat Pack pals with Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra dug the book, and gave a copy to President Kennedy, who liked that the war-hero’s mother was a Communist operator, using her drunken Senator husband as the patsy. Most thought the buffoonish Senator Iselin was modelled on Joseph Mccarthy but JFK guessed at his own 1960 Presidential rival: Richard Nixon. Either way, with Kennedy and Sinatra’s support (Frank took the lead ‘hero’ role, of Major Bennett Marco), filming began.
Shot rapidly in New York and LA early in 1962, The Manchurian Candidate still buzzes with iconoclastic energy. The first Hollywood movie to show non-strobing TV screens on film (during a press conference where Iselin announces there are 207 Communists in the US military), this is a film of frames within frames, where image and reality are separate things. Actors play versions of previous roles, with something missing or damaged: so Laurence Harvey is
The Alamo’s chilly hero Bill Travis, reborn as brainwashed killer Sergeant Raymond Shaw; Angela Lansbury is the domineering American mom from Frankenheimer’s previous film, All Fall Down, now working for the Communists; and Janet Leigh plays her character, Rosie, like some redeemed ghost of Psycho’s Marion Crane, her abstract romantic words never truly connecting with those of the real world.
Similarly, symbols and visual puns are repeated until they fly free of meaning, like the American flag made of Polish caviar, or the images of Abraham Lincoln (as bust, lamp-stand and fancy-dress costume) — sick satire closer to the deviant New York humour of Lenny Bruce and Jules Feiffer than the political thrillers that followed it.
In the film’s opening scenes, where Shaw and Marco pull their troops from a Korean brothel, someone has chalked
“God Bless America” over the doorway. A Korean prostitute reads a movie magazine whose cover star is Janet Leigh. It unfolds like a dream where everything is slightly off, until we arrive at the film’s first bravura scene: Major Marco’s nightmare.
It begins with a slow, 360-degree pan. Shaw’s platoon are dozing in a hotel lobby as a Mrs Whittaker gives a lecture to an old ladies’ garden club. Then the troops are in a modernist auditorium, backed by Warholian portraits of Mao and Stalin. A fat, bald Chinese doctor, Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), tells Communist party officials that the platoon have been “brainwashed”. He laughs. Cracks jokes. It’s funny. Pop art. Then through jarring edits, “dream” and “reality” clash. Mrs Whittaker asks Sergeant Shaw if he’s ever killed anyone. An old garden-club dear gaily waves a handkerchief which Shaw uses to strangle one of his platoon members. Marco yawns, then wakes up screaming.
A possible reference to the CIA’S mind-control experiments, Marco’s nightmare might be the first effective on-screen depiction of a bad acid trip.
That bad acid pulses through the film. Set-pieces shift from comedy to horror, culminating in the scene where Shaw is sent to kill Senator Thomas Jordan (John Mcgiver), the father of his wife, Josie (Leslie Parrish). Shaw shoots Jordan while he is holding a carton of milk. The effect, of the good man bleeding milk, is a fun visual trick, later appropriated in Spielberg’s
Munich and Season 3 of Fargo. Then, as Shaw puts another bullet in Jordan’s brain, his daughter, Shaw’s new bride, runs towards him in her nightgown. In one cold, fluid movement, Shaw puts a bullet through her forehead. Both Shaw and the audience never truly recover.
The Manchurian Candidate was released on 24 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Commie conspiracy was no laughing matter. For years the rumour spread that Sinatra removed the film from circulation after JFK’S assassination, a falsehood later superseded by the equally mistaken belief it was withdrawn in 1975 following a dispute with United Artists. Both myths still circulate, but then, it is a film bound up in false intelligence. Re-released in 1988, it remains an artistic one-off, a film its director, and stars, never bested, depicting a political world so absurd, so unlikely, it could only exist as nightmare.