The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film)


The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American neo noir psychological political thriller film about the Cold War and sleeper agents. It was directed and produced by John Frankenheimer. The screenplay was written by George Axelrod and was based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate. The film's leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh, with Angela Lansbury, Henry Silva and James Gregory in supporting roles.
The plot centers on the Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw, the progeny of a prominent political family. Shaw was a prisoner of war during the conflict in Korea and while being held was brainwashed by his captors. After his discharge back into civilian life, he becomes an unwitting assassin involved in an international communist conspiracy. Officials from China and the Soviet Union employ Shaw as a sleeper agent in an attempt to subvert and take over the United States 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 well-received by critics and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actress 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

During the Korean War, in 1950 the Soviets and Chinese capture a U.S. Army platoon and take the men to Manchuria in communist China. Three days later, Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Captain Bennett Marco return to UN lines. Upon Marco's recommendation, Shaw is awarded the Medal of Honor for saving their lives in combat. Shaw returns to the United States to a hero's welcome where he is exploited by his ambitious mother, Mrs. Eleanor Iselin, to further her husband U.S. Senator John Yerkes Iselin's political career. When asked to describe him, Marco and the other soldiers automatically respond that, "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." In fact, Shaw is a cold, sad, unsympathetic loner.
In the following years, Marco, since promoted to major and assigned to Army Intelligence, suffers from a recurring nightmare. In it, a hypnotized Shaw blithely and brutally murders the two missing soldiers before an assembly of military leaders from the communist nations, during a practical demonstration of a revolutionary brainwashing technique. Marco is compelled to investigate, but with no solid evidence to back his claims, fails to receive his superiors' support. However, Marco learns that another soldier from the platoon, Allen Melvin, has had the same nightmare. When Melvin and Marco separately identify photos of the same two men from their dreams who are leading figures in communist governments, Army Intelligence agrees to help Marco investigate.
when his programming was accidentally triggered
Meanwhile, Eleanor drives the ascension of Iselin, a McCarthy-like demagogue stirring domestic turmoil and climbing the political ladder based on claims that constantly varying numbers of communists work within the Department of Defense. Shaw, who broke with his mother and step-father immediately upon his return to America, is gradually revealed to have been programmed by Russian and Chinese communists as a sleeper agent who will blindly obey orders without any memory of his actions. His heroism was a false memory implanted in the platoon during their brainwashing in Manchuria. His programming is triggered by seeing the Queen of Diamonds card while playing solitaire after being induced by his handlers.
Several years pass before Shaw finds happiness when he rekindles a youthful romance with Jocelyn Jordan, the daughter of liberal Senator Thomas Jordan, one of his stepfather's political rivals. Mrs. Iselin had previously broken up the relationship, but now facilitates the couple's reunion to garner Jordan's support for Iselin's bid for the Vice Presidency. Although pleased with the match, Jordan states he will block all of Iselin's to seek their party's nomination. Jocelyn, wearing a Queen of Diamonds costume at a party for her thrown by the Iselins, inadvertently triggers Shaw's programming and elopes with him. In response to the senator's rebuff, Mrs. Iselin, who is revealed to be Shaw's American handler, triggers him to kill Jordan at his home, shooting Jocelyn as well when she enters the scene. Afterwards, Shaw has no knowledge of his actions and is grief-stricken upon learning of the murders.
Eventually discovering the card's role in Shaw's conditioning, Marco uses a forced deck in an attempt to deprogram him and reveal his next assignment, which appears imminent. Mrs. Iselin primes her son to assassinate their party's presidential nominee at the height of the ongoing political convention so that Senator Iselin, as the vice-presidential candidate, will become the nominee by default. In the uproar, he will immediately seek emergency powers that when elected will, in Mrs. Iselin's words, "make martial law seem like anarchy". Mrs. Iselin tells Shaw that while she had requested a programmed assassin for the task, she never knew it would be her own son, who was selected by the communists in order to bind her more closely to their cause. Kissing Shaw on the lips, she vows that once in power she will exact revenge for her son's selection as an assassin.
Shaw enters the convention hall disguised as a priest and takes up a sniper's position high in its farthest reaches. Alarmed by Shaw's failure to call by the appointed time, Marco and his supervisor, Colonel Milt, race to the hall to find and stop him. When the moment to shoot comes, Shaw instead kills his mother and Senator Iselin. When Marco arrives an instant later, Shaw tells him he failed to call to prevent anyone from interfering with his change in plans. Shaw then fatally turns the rifle on himself.
In an epilogue, Marco and Eugénie privately mourn Shaw's death. Marco reads citations for two Medal of Honor winners, and composes his own:

Cast

For the role of Mrs. Iselin, Sinatra suggested Lucille Ball, but Frankenheimer, who had worked with Lansbury in All Fall Down, countered with her, insisting Sinatra watch her 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 Raymond 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 of the scene where she and Sinatra first meet on a train.
In a 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 original. Critics subsequently praised him for showing Marco from Shaw's distorted point of view.
In the novel Mrs. Iselin had been sexually abused by her father as a child. Before the dramatic climax, she uses her son's brainwashing to have sex with him. Concerned with blowback over even a reference to such a taboo topic as incest in a mainstream motion picture of the time, the filmmakers instead opted for Mrs. Iselin to simply kiss Shaw on the lips to imply her incestuous attraction to him.
Nearly half of the film's production budget of $2.2 million went on Sinatra's salary for his performance.

Reception

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Manchurian Candidate holds an approval rating of 96% rating based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 8.66/10. 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".
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".

Awards and honors

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 at No. 67 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 also No. 17 on AFI's "AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills" lists. In April 2007, Angela Lansbury's character was selected by Time as one of the 25 greatest villains in cinema history.

[American Film Institute] recognition

According to a false rumor, Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963. Michael Schlesinger, who was responsible for the film's 1988 reissue by MGM/UA, has helped debunk the rumor. According to him, the film was not removed, but there was little public interest in it immediately before the assassination. The autumn 1962 release had run its course. Box office successes in the United States 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 creepy 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 movies from 1962, but it was indeed revived and never was banned. The movie played at a Brooklyn, New York cinema two months after the assassination and subsequently 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 successful 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.