Directed by John Frankenheimer
The machinations and paranoia that grow out of political ambition are nothing new and this may be why a movie like The Manchurian Candidate continues to feel contemporary. Although some visual elements (mainly the awful title sequence) seem dated, the story certainly does not and John Frankenheimer’s visual style does not. And the choice of going black and white is appropriate to the subject.
An American military patrol is captured in Korea. Unconscious, they are taken away – I’m not sure the film ever says where. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that while captive they undergo psychological conditioning. They are “brainwashed.” One in particular, Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is conditioned to be an assassin.
They are then sent back. In the United States, Sgt. Shaw is a hero receiving medals and accolades though he seems oddly put out by it.
We know Sgt. Shaw has been conditioned to kill on command but we do not know who or what his target is.
His ambitious mother (Angela Lansbury) seizes the moment to help promote her husband and political puppet Sen. John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), eventually for the country’s highest office.
Meanwhile other members of the patrol have returned and experience recurring nightmares, including Maj. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra). Because of the way the film begins, we know his nightmares reflect memories of the conditioning experience he had while a prisoner. We see Marco struggling with his nightmares and eventually follow him as he uncovers their meaning.
All of this is played out against a background of Communist paranoia (McCarthyism), which Angela Lansbury and her husband are exploiting to achieve their ends.
Frankenheimer’s direction and the George Axelrod script capture the paranoiac feel of the story by interweaving the realistic and the surrealistic. There is a great early scene where the prisoners, following their conditioning, are tested by their captors. Frankenheimer cuts between what is real and what the prisoners think they are experiencing (a ladies’ flower show) in a way that jumbles your impression of what is true and what is not.
The camera also captures the movie’s theme of disjointed reality with off-centre camera angles and a claustrophobic look to many scenes. There are a lot of close-ups and medium shots where we see characters, like Sinatra, with faces gleaming from nervous perspiration.
And all the performances are excellent, including Sinatra’s confused and anxious Major Marco.
The best performances though belong to Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury. They are both riveting.
Harvey plays his mother-dominated Sgt. Shaw supremely and his transition to someone under the influence of another’s psychological suggestion is scary.
Lansbury, for her part, is also scary in her portrayal of a woman single-mindedly determined to achieve her ends. She is almost sociopathic in her indifference to the welfare of anyone else, including her own son, as she pursues her goals.
The Manchurian Candidate is that rare cinematic beast, a movie in which style and content not only coexist but inform one another to make a better film. It’s also rare in that it is a political film that is actually interesting, perhaps because it resists the desire to be didactic.
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