The Manchurian Candidate (1962 Film)

''The Manchurian Candidate'' is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed and produced by John Frankenheimer. The screenplay is by George Axelrod, based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel ''The Manchurian Candidate''. The film's leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, with co-stars Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, and James Gregory.

The plot centers on Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw, part of a prominent political family. Shaw is brainwashed by communists after his Army platoon is captured. He returns to civilian life in the United States, where he becomes an unwitting assassin in an international communist conspiracy. The group, which includes representatives of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, plans to assassinate the presidential nominee of an American political party leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The film was released in the United States on October 24, 1962, at the height of U.S.–Soviet hostility during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was widely acclaimed by Western critics and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actress (Angela Lansbury) and Best Editing. It was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

Soviet and Chinese soldiers capture a U.S. Army platoon during the Korean War, taking them to communist China. Three days later, Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Captain Bennett Marco return to UN lines. Upon Marco's recommendation, Shaw is awarded the Medal of Honor for saving his soldiers' lives in combat, though two men were killed in action. Shaw returns to the U.S., where his heroism is exploited by his mother, Eleanor Iselin, to further the career of her husband, Senator John Iselin. When asked to describe Shaw, the other soldiers in his unit flatly respond, "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." In contrast to this description, Shaw is a cold, sad, unsympathetic loner.

After Marco is promoted to major and assigned to Army Intelligence, he has a recurring nightmare: a hypnotized Shaw blithely murders the two soldiers from his own platoon before an assembly of communist military leaders to demonstrate their revolutionary brainwashing technique. Marco learns that another soldier from the platoon, Allen Melvin, has the same nightmare. When Melvin and he separately identify photos of the same two men—leading figures in communist governments—from their dreams, Army Intelligence agrees to help Marco investigate.

During captivity, Shaw was programmed as a sleeper agent, who obeys orders to kill without any memory of his crimes. His battle heroism is a false memory implanted during the brainwashing. Agents trigger Shaw by suggesting he play solitaire; the queen of diamonds activates him. Eleanor masterminds the ascent of John, a demagogue who makes baseless claims that communists work at the Defense Department. Shaw repudiates his mother and stepfather by taking a job at a newspaper published by their critic, Holborn Gaines. Communist agents have Shaw murder Gaines to confirm that his brainwashing still works.

Chunjin, a Korean agent who posed as a guide for Shaw's platoon, comes to Shaw's apartment asking him for work. The unsuspecting Shaw hires him as a valet and cook. Marco recognizes Chunjin when he visits Shaw's apartment; he violently attacks him and demands to know what happened during the platoon's captivity. After Marco is arrested for assault, Eugenie Cheyney, a woman he met on a train, posts his bail and breaks her engagement to date him.

Shaw rekindles a romance with Jocelyn Jordan, the daughter of liberal Senator Thomas Jordan, the Iselins' chief political foe. Eleanor arranges their reunion to garner Senator Jordan's support for John's vice-presidential bid. Unswayed, Jordan insists he will block Iselin's attempts to seek the party's nomination. After Jocelyn inadvertently triggers Shaw's programming by wearing a queen of diamonds costume at a party for her thrown by the Iselins, they elope. Furious at Senator Jordan's rebuff, Eleanor—who is Shaw's American handler—sends him to kill Jordan at his home. Shaw also kills Jocelyn when she stumbles upon the murder scene. Afterward, he has no memory of the killing and is grief-stricken upon learning they are dead.

After discovering the card's role in Shaw's conditioning, Marco uses a forced deck to deprogram him, hoping he will reveal his next assignment. Eleanor primes Shaw to assassinate their party's presidential nominee at the height of its convention so that Iselin, as the vice-presidential candidate, will become the nominee by default. In the uproar, he will seek emergency powers to establish a strict authoritarian regime. Eleanor tells Shaw that she requested a programmed assassin, never knowing it would be her own son. She vows that when she takes power, she will exact revenge upon her superiors for selecting him.

Shaw enters Madison Square Garden disguised as a priest, taking up a sniper's position in an empty spotlight booth high above. Marco and his supervisor, Colonel Milt, race to the convention to stop him. At the last moment, Shaw aims away from the presidential nominee and instead kills Senator Iselin and Eleanor. When Marco arrives inside the lighting booth, Shaw tells him that not even the Army could have stopped them, so he had to. Then Shaw, wearing the Medal of Honor around his neck, commits suicide. That evening, Marco, speaking to Eugenie privately, mourns Shaw's death.

Cast

Production

Sinatra suggested Lucille Ball for the role of Eleanor Iselin, but Frankenheimer, who had worked with Lansbury in '' All Fall Down'', insisted that Sinatra watch her performance in that film before a final choice was made. Although Lansbury played Raymond Shaw's mother, she was, in fact, only three years older than Laurence Harvey, who played Shaw. An early scene in which Shaw, recently decorated with the Medal of Honor, argues with his parents was filmed in Sinatra's own private plane.

Janet Leigh plays Marco's love interest. In a short biography of Leigh broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, actress Jamie Lee Curtis reveals her mother had been served divorce papers on behalf of her father, actor Tony Curtis, the morning that the scene where Marco and her character first meet on a train was filmed.

In the scene where Marco attempts to deprogram Shaw in a hotel room opposite the convention, Sinatra is at times slightly out of focus. It was a first take, and Sinatra failed to be as effective in subsequent retakes, a common factor in his film performances. In the end, Frankenheimer elected to use the out-of-focus take. Critics subsequently praised him for showing Marco from Shaw's distorted point of view.

In the novel, Eleanor Iselin's father had sexually abused her as a child. Before the dramatic climax, she uses her son's brainwashing to have sex with him. Concerned with the reaction to even a reference to a taboo topic like incest in a mainstream film at that time, the filmmakers instead had Eleanor kiss Shaw on the lips to imply her incestuous attraction to him.Director John Frankenheimer's audio commentary, available on ''The Manchurian Candidate'' DVD

Nearly half the film's $2.2 million production budget went to Sinatra's salary for his performance.

Reception

Critical response

Film critic Roger Ebert listed ''The Manchurian Candidate'' on his "Great Movies" list, 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".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, ''The Manchurian Candidate'' holds an approval rating of 97% rating based on 60 reviews, with an average rating of 8.70/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "A classic blend of satire and political thriller that was uncomfortably prescient in its own time, ''The Manchurian Candidate'' remains distressingly relevant today." On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film has a score of 94 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Awards and honours

In 1994, ''The Manchurian Candidate'' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film ranked 67th on the " AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies" when that list was first compiled in 1998, but a 2007 revised version excluded it. It was 17th on AFI's " AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills" lists. In April 2007, Lansbury's character was selected by ''Time'' as one of the 25 greatest villains in cinema history.

Releases

According to a false rumor, Sinatra removed the film from distribution after John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. Michael Schlesinger, who was responsible for the film's 1988 reissue by MGM/UA, has helped debunk the rumour. According to him, the film was not removed, but public interest in it was small immediately before the assassination. The autumn 1962 release had run its course. Box-office successes in the U.S. immediately before the shootings in Dallas were comedies, notably ''It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World'', and movie distributors avoided reviving a thriller with a bleak ending that millions of people had seen barely a year earlier. Newspaper display ads indicate that after the assassination, ''The Manchurian Candidate'' was not rereleased as frequently or as widely as other 1962 movies, but it was indeed revived and never banned. The movie played at a Brooklyn cinema two months after the assassination (January 1964), and that same month, in White Plains and Jersey City, New Jersey. It was televised nationwide on ''CBS Thursday Night at the Movies'' on September 16, 1965.

Sinatra's representatives acquired rights to the film in 1972 after the initial contract with United Artists expired. The film was rebroadcast on nationwide television in April 1974 on ''NBC Saturday Night at the Movies''. After a showing at the New York Film Festival in 1987 increased public interest in the film, the studio reacquired the rights and it became again available for theater and video releases.

See also

* List of American films of 1962
* List of assassinations in fiction
* Conspiracy thriller
* Hypnosis in popular culture
* Spy film

References

External links

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''The Manchurian Candidate''
at AMC Filmsite. Background, detailed storyline, and key dialogue excerpts.

''The Manchurian Candidate''
a
''The Manchurian Candidate: Dread Center''
an essay by Howard Hampton at the Criterion Collection
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Ann Hornaday, "The 34 best political movies ever made" ''The Washington Post'' Jan. 23, 2020)
rank #3

The Manchurian Candidate
essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, Bloomsbury Academic, 2010 , pages 582-584

{{DEFAULTSORT:Manchurian Candidate
1962 films
1960s spy films
1960s psychological thriller films
American black-and-white films
American political thriller films
Cold War spy films
1960s English-language films
Fiction about mind control
Films about altered memories
Films about assassinations
Films about elections
Films about fictional presidents of the United States
Films about McCarthyism
Films about the United States Army
Films about veterans
Films based on American novels
Films based on mystery novels
Films critical of communism
Films directed by John Frankenheimer
Films featuring a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe-winning performance
Films about hypnosis
Films scored by David Amram
Films set in New York City
Films with screenplays by George Axelrod
Korean War films
Matricide in fiction
Murder–suicide in films
United States National Film Registry films
United States presidential nominating conventions in fiction
Uxoricide in fiction
Films about mind control
1960s American films