April 16, 2012
It's both exciting and disheartening that a 42 year-old satire like this still works as pointedly as it does. Even crazier to think that The Manchurian Candidate probably wouldn't have gotten made at all if it weren't for its star, Frank Sinatra. Studios were reluctant to touch t... read morehe politically sensitive book, dealing as it does with the Soviet brainwashing of an American citizen into becoming an instant assassin, studios fearing it might interfere with the U.S. Government's relations with Russia at a crucial period in history. But Sinatra was a friend of then-President John F. Kennedy, and when he asked the President what he thought about the idea of making the movie, Kennedy said to go for it. Ironically, when Kennedy was shot a year or so later, the studio and Sinatra insisted the movie be removed from circulation, and for over a quarter of a century it remained withdrawn, not appearing again until its rerelease in 1988. In any case, its MIA years only enhanced its reputation. When it resurfaced, it was a legitimate, concrete classic. Not to mention that 1987 audiences, inundated with Beverly Hills Cop II, Three Men and a Baby, etc., realized that nothing currently playing quite packed the punch of this 25 year-old relic. What's more, its story -- centered around a Joseph McCarthy-like senator attempting to shake up the American public via fear of Communism and a coup to steal the presidency -- easily translated to modern-day, post-Nixon political paranoia.
Sinatra does his bes as the heroic but tortured Major Marco, a man who first thinks he might be going mad and then slowly catches on that something outside himself is amiss. Laurence Harvey is good as the seemingly indomitable Shaw, a hardnose with few or no friends, who seems tough and self composed on the outside yet is easily twisted around his mother's clinging finger as well as the Communists'. Harvey portrays a character of strength and weakness simultaneously, a neat accomplishment.
But the real standout in the show is Angela Lansbury, who was nominated for, but did not win, a Best-Supporting Actress Oscar. (She did win a Golden Globe, but who remembers?) Lansbury is brilliant as the nasty, evil, sinister, conniving mother who has her own personal plans for her son as well as for her lamebrain senator husband. Her son constantly resents her, yet he ceaselessly complies with her will. It's only toward the end of the film, when we see the mother plant a big wet one on the son's lips, that we begin to understand the full import of the situation.
Yet another part of the film's fine madness is that Ms. Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey when she played his mother, and nobody seems to notice! Still, Hitchcock beat Frankenheimer on that front a few years earlier by casting Jessie Royce Landis as Cary Grant's mother in "North By Northwest." Landis and Grant were the same age.
All that said, the film isn't without its flaws. The karate fight between Marco and Henry Silva is ridiculous and sluggish, with no tension to be found, and Janet Leigh's character adds nothing to the plot. Of course, none of the film makes the least bit of logical sense. It's not meant to. But while it's happening, it seems rational enough. One of the beauties of the script is that no matter how high it's piled, we go along with it. But, really, a whole patrol is completely brainwashed in only a few days? Shaw is programmed to obey any command he's given to murder at any time? The mother is Lady Macbeth? The stepfather senator is an idiot? Within the same political party there is an ultraconservative right-winger and an ultraliberal left-winger?
Yet as a symbolic fable and lampoon, it all works. Frankenheimer and company actually have us believing that Shaw is not only ready to murder on command, but as the movie moves forward that he is able to do so in brutally efficient fashion. Yes, there are events that are perhaps a tad too easy to see coming. Yes, there is perhaps too much given away at the beginning that might have served to build the suspense a bit more if saved for later. And, yes, there is a subplot concerning Major Marco's meeting and falling in love with a beautiful young woman (Janet Leigh) that seems almost wholly extraneous. But, overall, the film has as much impact today as it had when it was made. Probably more impact today, since much of the film's hyperbole has turned out to be at least in part intriguingly possible. Let us not forget Lee Harvey Oswald and company.
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