The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Review

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 is a paranoid thriller with a real conspiracy, a satire of American politics that is broader than anything on television, a genuine horror film, and a family tragedy about a son and his mother.

There is nothing in it I would 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.

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 is the garden club again.

The technique is a rotating set and a continuous camera move, which in 1962 was a genuine 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 cannot 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. The horror is delivered through the banal, the politics are delivered through the domestic, and nothing is ever announced as significant before it happens.

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.

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 cannot remember which number of Communists he is meant to be denouncing. The film’s satire of McCarthyism is not that a demagogue is dangerous. It is that the demagogue is an idiot being operated by somebody competent.

Then the film reveals what she is, and the reveal is worse than a foreign conspiracy. She is working with the enemy, she is using her own son as the weapon, and she is doing it because she intends to hold power herself.

Her monologue near the end, delivered to a son who cannot 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 will make them all pay for it. She is furious on his behalf while continuing to use him.

Lansbury plays the whole part with enormous warmth, which is 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 is destroying him, and the film insists that both are true at the same moment.

Sinatra Was Never Better

Bennett Marco is a man coming apart. He sweats, he shakes, he cannot 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 is barely able to answer. Readings of the scene vary, including that she is a handler activating him, and the film never resolves it.

Sinatra’s willingness to look bad is what 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.

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.

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, which is a good way to acquire a reputation.

The prediction itself is worth being careful about. The film did not foresee an event. It described an anxiety that was already present, and the assassination made the anxiety concrete, which is a different and more interesting thing.

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 the electorate is being managed by people whose motives are entirely private.

That has not 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 is what makes the horror land, because the audience is laughing about ninety seconds before something appalling happens.

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.

Should you watch The Manchurian Candidate?

Yes, and watch the garden club sequence twice. A rotating set, a continuous camera move and a lecture about hydrangeas produce the clearest depiction of conditioning anybody has filmed, and everything that follows in the picture was established in those four minutes.

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