The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Directed by John Frankenheimer

Film Review

One of the unequivocal highpoints of John Frankenheimer's prolific and notoriously variable filmmaking career is this masterful satire on paranoia and political intrigue, a film that is both chilling and blackly comedic and which somehow still has a profound resonance.  Frankenheimer was at his creative peak when he made The Manchurian Candidate.  He had just completed the powerful prison drama Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and would go on to make two other notable films, Seven Days in May (1964) and The Train (1964).  Subsequently, his output would vary wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous, something that harmed his reputation as a serious filmmaker and prevented him from receiving the lasting recognition he was due.  A groundbreaking realist fantasy, The Manchurian Candidate shows Frankenheimer at his best, a master craftsman with a flair for imaginative storytelling.

The film is very much a product of its time.  It was released in October 1962, the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest that humanity has so far come to nuclear obliteration.  This was the height of the Cold War, and America was experiencing a resurgence of anti-Communist paranoia of the kind that had deeply scarred the nation in the 1950s, through the efforts of one Senator Joseph McCarthy.  The Manchurian Candidate captures the mood of the era brilliantly and is one of the most effective political satires of all time, showing us that the left and right ends of the political spectrum are indistinguishable and leaving us in no doubt that no politician can be trusted with anything, not even a deck of playing cards.

Directed and edited with a razor-sharp precision, photographed in a way that suggests a bleak and murky Kafkaesque pseudo-reality, The Manchurian Candidate is as visually arresting as it is dramatically intense.  In the last great performance of his career, Frank Sinatra is harrowingly convincing as the flawed military man who tries to thwart a conspiracy whilst fighting against mental collapse and the complacency of his peers.  Laurence Harvey is sinister and sympathetic as the programmed assassin who finds himself ruthlessly exploited by villains on both sides of the Iron Curtain.   Sinatra and Harvey each turns in a gripping performance here but both are pretty well eclipsed by Angela Lansbury, who is truly terrifying as the mother from Hell, a kind of grotesque amalgam of Hillary Clinton and the wicked mother in every Hitchcock film, with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in for good measure.  The fact that Lansbury was only three years older than Harvey and yet is supposed to be playing his natural mother emphasises the creepily Oedipal aspect of the mother-son relationship, making the film even darker and quirkier than it may have been intended.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy thirteen months after the film's first release has invited comment and speculation of the degree to which The Manchurian Candidate may or may not have influenced events.  Certainly, there are some striking similarities between the film's climactic execution sequence and Lee Harvey Oswald's killing of the American president.  The view has been posited that Oswald, like Laurence Harvey's character, was brainwashed into assassinating Kennedy by either foreign or home-grown agents.  Such theories are almost as far-fetched as the events depicted in the film itself, and yet...

Film Synopsis

During the Korean War, a platoon of American soldiers are captured by Soviets and flown to Manchuria in Communist China.  Several months later, the same soldiers return to their home country, to receive a hero's welcome.  Sergeant Raymond Shaw is rewarded with the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving the lives of his men, who swear unquestioning allegiance to him.  One of these men, Captain Bennett Marco, is appointed to the position of intelligence officer, but he soon begins to experience disturbing nightmares.  He sees himself and his fellow soldiers being subjected to brainwashing experiments in which, before a gathering of high-ranking Soviets, Shaw is conditioned to kill two of the men under his command.  When he learns that another man in his platoon is experiencing the same nightmares, Marco deduces that he and his fellow soldiers are pawns in some fantastic Communist plot and immediately begins his own investigation.   He quickly realises that Raymond Shaw has been programmed as an assassin.  But who is to be his intended target...?