Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s superbly chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) moments.
The Day of the Jackal borrowed quite a bit of The Manchurian Candidate’s cold deliberate approach, but we always knew that the hitman in that movie was aiming to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. Here we know next to nothing, though early scenes make clear that a platoon of US soldiers in Korea has been abducted by the enemy, brainwashed by nefarious Communists – pictures of both Mao and Stalin apportion blame – and then decanted back to the USA.
Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) gets the hero’s welcome as he gets off the plane and soon, back in civilian life, is working on a newspaper, unaware that his mind has been tampered with and that he’s now a guided missile – though guided towards what?
Shaw’s old buddy, Major Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra), has stayed in the military, but all is not well. Marco seems to in the middle of a minor breakdown. The army medics are concerned by the strange dreams Marco keeps having, in which he sees Shaw committing unspeakable acts, so they’ve put him out to pasture doing press work.
A procedural detective thriller essentially plays out, with Marco as the cop on the case and Shaw as the unwitting perp. Adding layers of psychological complexity are Shaw’s mother (Angela Lansbury), the scheming and manipulative wife of a bovine Republican senator (James Gregory). And, in a flashback side plot which humanises the otherwise robotic Shaw, a relationship for him with the pretty daughter (Leslie Parrish) of an avuncular Democrat senator (John McGiver).
This is the first of Frankenheimer’s “paranoid” trilogy, with Seven Days in May and Seconds following in 1964 and 1966. All three were shot, fittingly, in black and white, and all three are marked out by remarkable performances that play to the actors’ strengths.
Chilly and aloof Laurence Harvey as chilly and aloof Lawrence Shaw looks like type-casting, until the sideplot with Parrish swings into play and then we see Shaw warm up and Harvey turning on the charisma.
There’s a very humane turn by Sinatra, who is both troubled detective and father confessor figure. But everyone always says it’s Lansbury who’s the standout, and they’re not wrong. Entirely against her dotty do-goody image, she’s brilliant as the flint-hearted matriarch – and she doesn’t overact.
It’s easy to lose Parrish, Gregory and McGiver in the slipstream of Lansbury’s performance, but they all deliver, and Henry Silva (as a Korean who arrives unannounced in Shaw’s life back in America) and Khigh Dhiegh (playing brainwasher-in-chief Dr Lo as 50% Fu Manchu) also do good work.
Perhaps stranger than any of the other characters in this is Eugenie Rose Chaney, played by a very coquettish Janet Leigh. Eugenie, or is it Rose?, is a pretty woman who bumps into a sweating and distressed Major Marco on a train and makes a play for him that makes no sense at all. Perhaps she’s drawn by the fact that it is, you know, Frank Sinatra. Perhaps Frankenheimer reckoned a bit of Hitckcock-style Cary Grant/Eva Marie Saint action was called for (North by Northwest was only about two years in the past when Frankenheimer started work, and Leigh is a Hitchcock blonde, after all). Or maybe, though there’s no real supporting evidence, Chaney is hiding something too. Leigh somehow makes the nonsense plausible.
This is the movie that pushed brainwashing into the popular consciousness. It would play a central role in many a 1960s and 1970s thriller to come – The Ipcress File, The Parallax View, The Confession, A Clockwork Orange. By the time Jonathan Demme made his remake of this movie in 2004, brainwashing was played out as an idea and the Cold War had ended. For all Demme’s movie’s many pluses (Denzel Washington, plus Meryl Streep in the Lansbury role), it does not work nearly half as well as the original, not least because this Manchurian Candidate also seemed to foreshadow the assassination of President Kennedy a year later.
As to that rumour that an appalled Frank Sinatra, a friend of JFK, had the movie taken out of circulation after the assassination, there’s no truth in that at all.
The Manchurian Candidate – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
