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   Pros: A dark, funny, exciting political thriller with echoes resounding to this day.

Cons: Some people may not care for its message or bleak vision.

The Bottom Line: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is the most artistically renowned (if least influential) political thriller ever made in America because few people were able to see it for 25 years. 
 

Some films have a kind of internal life. I recently discussed one such in a long meditation on Alfred Hitchcock's *VERTIGO (1958). Another such is THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), John Frankenheimer's first important film. 

  The film attracted an American Public which still remembered the trauma of the Korean War. It was the first "war" referred to by some in lower case; the first war since The Spanish American War about which we expressed serious doubts, real misgivings and puzzlement.  [I remember in those years that I had to explain endlessly how I had served in the United States Army during "The Korean Emergency," but that I had not actually been in Korea, had not really seen an angry shot fired.]  The idea of the Public being tricked by the Korean "war," somehow appealed to many viewers.

   But suddenly, as if by political manipulation and psychological post-hypnotic suggestion, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE disappeared, and most of us forgot that the very costly Korean War had ever taken place.

    POOF!! 

   THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a picture about a U.S. Intelligence Officer, who uncovers a plot, hatched by the Communist Chinese Military, to place a "brain-washed" sleeper agent, an apparent American Korean war hero, scion of a distinguished American political family, who had never revealed secrets when tortured as a prisoner in during Korea.  He has been hypnotically programed to assassinate a presidential candidate, according to a predetermined psychological "trigger."  It is the Intelligence Officer's task to stop him.

  The decade between the end of the Korean War, 1953, and the Kennedy Assassination  was full of movies about mentally disturbed American men, even  lone nut assassins. 

In the year VERTIGO came out, Orson Welles was making his last studio movie, *TOUCH OF EVIL, based on Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil. (Did you recognize that pun and  homage in LA CONFIDENTIAL?) For the role of the motel clerk, Welles hired Dennis Weaver, a young actor then playing "Chester" on TV's Gunsmoke. After watching him rehearse a scene or two, Welles, as was his wont, closed down the set and took Weaver for a long lunch. According to Weaver, the motel clerk's hyper-neurotic character, his appearance, his movements, mannerisms, twitches, were worked out during that lunch. 

Two years later, Alfred Hitchcock directed PSYCHO, in which Anthony Perkins created Norman Bates, the much more famous motel clerk, a lone nut murderer who said: "A boy's best friend is his mother." 

The point is that in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, two years later yet, we have the mother dominated Raymond Shaw (Lawrence Harvey, all stares and twitches), the supposed war hero,  the psycho, the lone nut raised to the National political stage. (It may go too far to note that near the end of his career, Harvey worked for Orson Welles, in a never released film, THE DEEP [1967- ], about . . . a lone nut murderer marooned on a boat at sea, thus closing the circle.) THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is one of few films among many that the Lithuanian-born gay actor Harvey made in which he is effective, perhaps because, through much of the film, he has to show so little emotion, must hide so much. 

And of course, in TOUCH OF EVIL, PSYCHO, and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, there is beautiful blonde Janet Leigh. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE even has two beautiful blondes, but the other one is Raymond Shaw's girlfriend (Leslie Parrish), and he murders her.  

The political half-life of the movie is well known now, too. President John F. Kennedy was an obsessive reader of political thrillers. (He practically created the market for James Bond, when upon his election in 1960, he made it known that spy novels by Ian Fleming were among his casual reading.) He kept a keen eye, for more important reasons, on TV and Motion Pictures. He encouraged the making of several films and was fascinated with the power of his TV image. Both later movie directors Arthur Penn (BONNIE AND CLYDE, 1967) and John Frankenheimer, director of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE,  had worked as media consultants in his successful campaign for the Presidency. 

One day, at the White House, in 1961, President Kennedy asked Producer/Writer George Axelrod, and Director Frankenheimer, who had just moved from TV to movies, what they were going to do next. Frankenheimer said he was reading a bizarre novel by Richard Conden, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, and thought it might make a good movie. Kennedy had read it, of course, and urged him to do it, wanted to be kept informed. And so, we can see that, in a way, Kennedy arranged for a kind of blueprint for his own murder two years later. 

No doubt the President's friendship with Frank Sinatra helped bring the singer-actor phenomenon on board. Sinatra's performance as guilt-hurt Major Bennett Marco is one of his strongest performances, stronger than his come back role in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953) or in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1956). Here he is quiet, contained, and more compelling for his restraint. 

George Axelrod made his reputation with his stage play, The Seven Year Itch, about a beautiful blonde (Marilyn Monroe, in the movie adaptation). One might reflect that in his outrageous, rule bending comedy, the hero considers murdering the girl [Monroe] to avoid exposure to the wrath of his wife, whom he identifies with his mother. Axelrod wrote the screen play for THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, and it is the best work he ever did for the movies. Several years later, he wrote and produced a movie for Jack Lemmon, HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE (1965), but in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, he was more subtle. 

The pivotal character in the film is the devious, power-mad wife of Senator Iselin (James Gregory), hated step-father of Raymond Shaw. As played by Angela Lansbury, she is really the emotional engine that drives this macabre psycho drama. Daughter of a former leader of the British Labor Party, Lansbury seems to relish all the political in-jokes. (Her part is said to be modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy's wife, who summed up her husband after his death from alcoholism by railing at people who talked of McCarthy's passionate causes: "The truth about Joe is the poor SOB didn't believe in anything!") 

And so, we have a film about hidden secrets, hidden in personal lives, hidden in our National Life. It leads, in a way, to one of the enduring mysteries of our time: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Was there a conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? and if so, why? And who took part in it? 

Frank Sinatra, a man rumored to have mob connections, later felt betrayed by his friend President Kennedy. Sinatra was also a friend of Joe Di Maggio, a guarded man, also with mob ties, bitter towards the Kennedys for their treatment of the love of his life -- DiMaggio's former wife Marilyn Monroe, who died the year THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was made. After Kennedy's Assassination, Frank Sinatra bought the rights to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and did not it allow to be shown for the next 25 years. He evidently thought it had some influence, at least on the climate that produced another tough, bitter little man: Lee Harvey Oswald. 

No doubt it is all a matter of coincidence. And yet it is uncanny . . . . 

 We forget that Sinatra, a decade before the Kennedy Assassination,  had played a would-be Presidential Assassin, a hired gangster, in SUDDENLY (Lewis Allen, 1954)

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UPDATE FOR THE RED ROOM EDITION:  Recently, two scurrilous stories have revived the phrase "Manchurian Candidate."  One is that Democratic Candidate Barack Obama was somehow not really raised by his white grandparents, but was actually schooled in far, sinister places  -- Africa, Indonesia -- were he was groomed by forerunners of al-Quaeda as an Islamic secret agent, a "Manchurian Candidate," to become a traitorous President, who would betray us, if he is not stopped.  The other story is that Naval War Hero John McCain, after he was shot down during the Vietnam War, did not succeed keeping vital secrets by resisting torture, but turned traitor.  Though he did refuse to be released without his fellow prisoners, thus creating an "espionage legend," according to the story, he spent the last two years of his captivity in Communist Czechoslovakia, being psychologically briefed on hypnotically implanted missions, the nature of which neither he nor we have any real knowledge.  The stories are absurd . . . yet there are books coming out about them.

 In other words:  "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE Rides Again!"