The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Review
10/10
A patrol is captured in Korea and returned home. Every man in it recites the same sentence about the sergeant who saved them, in the same flat words, and none of them can remember anything else. Two of them are having the same dream about a ladies’ garden club in New Jersey.
The 10 is for a film that does four incompatible things at once and never drops any of them. It’s a paranoid thriller with a real conspiracy, a satire of American politics that’s broader than anything on television, a real horror film, and a family tragedy about a son and his mother.
There’s nothing in it I’d change. Even the elements that look like flaws, the abrupt tonal shifts and the odd karate fight, are doing work, and the film has been ahead of its audience for sixty years.
This is as close to perfect as American movies get for me. Just when I think I’ve pinned down what kind of film it is, it turns into another kind, and it never fumbles the handoff.
Plenty of thrillers from 1962 feel like museum pieces now. This one still makes the back of my neck prickle.
The Garden Club Dream
The film’s most famous sequence arrives early and establishes everything. A group of soldiers sit on a stage while a woman lectures a ladies’ horticultural society about hydrangeas. The camera pans and the room is a lecture hall of Soviet and Chinese officials. It pans back and it’s the garden club again.
The technique is a rotating set and a continuous camera move, which in 1962 was a real engineering problem. What it produces is the sensation of a dream correcting itself, where the dreamer’s mind supplies a plausible cover for a fact he can’t look at directly.
Then the demonstration happens. Raymond Shaw is instructed to strangle one of his own men, and the film cuts between the two versions of the room while he does it, with the garden club ladies commenting politely. That single sequence tells you the film’s method. It delivers the horror through the banal and the politics through the domestic, and it never announces anything as significant before it happens. The garden club sequence strikes me as the single best idea anybody had in a Cold War movie. The ladies chatting politely while a man is strangled in front of them is the most chilling joke I know, and it puts me on guard for the rest of the picture.
Lionel Lindon shot the film in black and white in 1962, when color was available and standard for a picture at this budget. The choice pays off in the dream material, where the two versions of the room have to cut against each other without a change in palette giving the game away, and in the television sequences, which read as news footage instead of as drama.
A dream sequence should reveal a mechanism, never a mood. This one explains the entire conspiracy, shows the conditioning, kills a character and sets the plot going, and it does all of it inside what looks like a hallucination. The switching device makes it work. Two versions of one room, alternating without transition, puts the reader inside a mind that’s refusing to see what it’s seeing.
Establish your rules in the strangest scene you have. An audience accepts anything during a dream and will carry the rules forward into the waking material without noticing they agreed to them.
Angela Lansbury Is the Antagonist
She was thirty-six. Laurence Harvey, playing her son, was thirty-three. That casting is either a production accident or the most disturbing decision in the film, and the result is the same either way.
Eleanor Iselin runs her husband’s political career, and the husband is a drunk buffoon who can’t remember which number of Communists he’s meant to be denouncing. The film’s satire of McCarthyism is that the demagogue is an idiot and somebody competent is working him.
Then the film reveals what she is, and the reveal is worse than a foreign conspiracy. She’s working with the enemy, she’s using her own son as the weapon, and she’s doing it because she intends to hold power herself. Her monologue near the end, delivered to a son who can’t respond, is the finest writing in the film. She explains that she asked for a different assassin, that they gave her Raymond, and that she’ll make them all pay for it. She’s furious on his behalf while continuing to use him.
Lansbury plays the whole part with enormous warmth. That’s what makes it unbearable. Eleanor is charming, competent and attentive, she uses endearments constantly, and none of it is a mask she drops. She loves her son and she’s destroying him, and the film insists that both are true at the same moment.
Lansbury frightens me more than any monster in any horror film. It’s the endearments that do it. A mother who fusses over her son while she aims him at a party convention is worse than any foreign agent the script could have invented, and she plays it without a single wink to the audience.
Sinatra Was Never Better
Bennett Marco is a man coming apart. He sweats, he shakes, he can’t sleep, he drops things, and Sinatra plays it without a trace of the persona he was famous for. The train scene with Janet Leigh is the strangest exchange in a film full of them. Two people meet, and she speaks in a run of non-sequiturs about Maryland and her name, and he’s barely able to answer. Readings of the scene vary, including that she’s a handler activating him, and the film never resolves it.
Sinatra’s willingness to look bad makes it work. He does most of a fight scene in one take, and reportedly injured his hand doing it, and the fight itself is clumsy and desperate in a way stage combat rarely is. That fight thrills me. It’s ugly and graceless and exhausted, and after decades of polished studio punches it looks like two men trying to hurt each other. I’d put it up against any fight scene of its era.
He also used his own standing to get the film made and released. The material was risky, United Artists were nervous, and Sinatra’s involvement is a large part of why anybody financed a story about a brainwashed assassin at a party convention.
Give an ambiguous scene no resolution and it stays alive for sixty years. The train conversation works because two readings are equally supported and the film declines to arbitrate. That only holds if both readings are complete. Vagueness produces confusion. Two fully worked interpretations sitting on the same dialogue produce discussion.
Casting against a persona is a resource you can spend once per performer. Sinatra playing an exhausted, frightened, physically unwell man lands because of two decades of the opposite.
It Predicted Things It Should Not Have
It opened in October 1962, thirteen months before Kennedy was killed in Dallas by a man with a rifle in a tall building.
The film was withdrawn from circulation for a long period afterward, and the reasons have been argued over ever since. Sinatra’s rights position, distribution economics and simple discomfort have all been offered, and the story that it was suppressed out of respect is the tidy version instead of the documented one.
What matters is the effect. A film that had been available disappeared for the better part of two decades and returned in 1988 to an audience that had heard about it. That’s a good way to acquire a reputation. The prediction itself is worth being careful about. The film described an anxiety that was already present, and the assassination made that anxiety concrete. I find that more unsettling than prophecy would be, because it means the country had already imagined the thing before it happened.
Why It Still Works
Two point two million dollars, three point three million in rentals on the original release, and a lasting reputation built almost entirely after the fact.
The film survives because its subject was never the Cold War. Strip out the Communists and what remains is a story about a political system in which the visible candidate is a fool, the person operating him is invisible, and people whose motives are entirely private are managing the electorate.
That hasn’t dated at all. The 2004 remake understood this and swapped the foreign conspiracy for a corporation, which is a legitimate updating and a much less frightening one, because a corporation wants money and Eleanor Iselin wants to be obeyed.
George Axelrod’s screenplay, adapting Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, is the other reason. The dialogue is faster and funnier than a thriller has any business being, and the comedy makes the horror land, because the audience is laughing about ninety seconds before something appalling happens.
That rhythm is my favorite trick in the whole script. I’m laughing at Senator Iselin fumbling his count of Communists, and a minute and a half later my stomach drops, and I can’t think of another thriller that pulls the switch this often without wearing it out.
Frankenheimer had come out of live television, where a director had to stage a whole scene for several cameras running at once, and the training is visible in every deep-focus composition here. Television sets sit in the foreground playing their own action while people argue behind them, and the film is doing two things in one frame throughout.
Comedy and dread work on the same muscle. An audience that’s just laughed is relaxed and unguarded. That’s the ideal condition in which to frighten them.
The requirement is that the jokes come from character instead of from the author. Senator Iselin is funny because he’s stupid and we’re watching him be worked, and that same fact is the horror.
Build your political material on a mechanism instead of a party. Foreign agents date. A fool in front and a competent person behind him is permanent. That’s why this film reads as current and its own remake doesn’t.
Should you watch The Manchurian Candidate?
Yes, and watch the garden club sequence twice. It’s a 10 because I can’t find a wasted scene, and the things that look like flaws, the tonal lurches and that strange karate fight, turn out to be doing work once you see what Frankenheimer is up to. A rotating set, a continuous camera move and a lecture about hydrangeas produce the clearest depiction of conditioning anybody has filmed, and the whole picture is built on those four minutes.
