The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

60s cold war cinema didn’t get much chillier or more paranoid than John Frankenheimer’s masterly adaptation of Richard Condon’s 1959 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. Released in the States on 24 October 1962 just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching its climax the film – scripted by co-producer George Axelrod – perfectly captured the paranoid zeitgeist of the time.

The plot follows Condon’s original closely: during the Korean War a platoon of US troops is captured by the Soviets and taken to a facility in Manchuria where they are subjected to a revolutionary brainwashing technique that turns them into silent and unwitting assassins. Released two days later, most of the platoon makes it back to the States where they credit Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) with saving their lives and where Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) is awarded the Medal of Honor. Suffering a recurring nightmare in which he murders the two members of his platoon that didn’t return home, Marco begins to suspect what really happened to his men in captivity. What he doesn’t count on, however, is the role played in the conspiracy by Shaw’s mother, Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury) who is both the power behind the rise of her right-wing husband Senator John Yerkes Iselin and the secret Communist agent overseeing the brainwashed soldiers.

The film culminates with the attempted assassination of a presidential nominee and the real life killing of John F. Kennedy less than a year later forced the film into limbo where it remained for many years, eventually re-emerging in the late 1980s to great critical acclaim. The popular myth has it that Sinatra was introduced to the novel by Kennedy and it was the actor himself who had the film pulled from circulation. Its return in the late 80s came at a propitious moment – with Ronald Reagan in the White House and anti-Communist rhetoric more virulent than it had been since the film’s original release, it’s re-emergence just made it seem all the more relevant.

The film is full of strange, unsettling and often darkly humorous sequences: the brainwashing scene that cuts back and forth between what the troops think is happening (they believe they’re attending a women’s gardening group) and the sterile lecture hall in which their conditioning is taking place; the bizarre meeting aboard a train between Marco and Rosie (Janet Leigh), the dialogue so off-kilter (Rosie: “Maryland’s a beautiful state.” Marco: “This is Delaware.” Rosie: “I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter”) that some, Roger Ebert among them has interpreted this as evidence that Rosie is Marco’s “controller”, just as Eleanor is Shaw’s; and the notion that “card carrying Communists” use an actual playing card, the Queen of Diamonds, as the trigger that activates Shaw.

The cast is mostly excellent. Harvey is a little too clean cut to be the unlikable Shaw and struggles somewhat opposite Sinatra (giving arguably his finest non-musical performance) and particularly Lansbury who bagged a well-deserved Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Her chilling but also rather witty performance steals the show and manages effortlessly to convince us that she really is the mother of a character played by a man only three years younger than her!

The film was remade in 2004 with Denzel Washington in the Sinatra role and Meryl Streep stepping non-too-effectively into Lansbury’s shoes. Inevitably it’s an inferior copy, updated to the Gulf War with “Manchuria” now a global technology corporation and the brainwashing replaced by nanotechnology implants. Frankenheimer and Sinatra teamed up again for another paranoia-ridden thriller about political assassination, the excellent Seven Days in May (1964). Seconds (1966), made with Rock Hudson in the lead, was similarly neurotic. Sadly, later genre films included the dull eco-thriller Prophecy (1979) and the disastrous The Island of Dr Moreau (1996) which he inherited from Richard Stanley and made a complete hash of.