Old Yorker

John Frankenheimer (1962)

The first test screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove was scheduled for 22^nd November 1963.  The screening was postponed in light of John F Kennedy’s assassination early that afternoon and Columbia Pictures delayed the film’s release by several weeks, until late January 1964.  In the meantime, Major T J ‘King’ Kong’s remark that ‘a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff’ was dubbed to change ‘Dallas’ to ‘Vegas’.  There are differing accounts of why and when a custard-pie fight in the War Room was entirely cut but it’s not in dispute that Terry Southern’s script had included the line (when President Muffley takes a pie in the face), ‘Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!’  In a political coincidence a year or so earlier, the decade’s other classic screen testament to Cold War alarms and excursions had similarly arrived right on cue.  John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate opened in American cinemas on 24th October 1962, in the middle of the Cuban missiles crisis.

Other JFK connections and myths cling to The Manchurian Candidate, in both its genesis and its afterlife.  The Richard Condon book on which it’s based was published in 1959.  By 1961, plans to adapt it for the screen – as a United Artists picture, with a script by George Axelrod and Frank Sinatra heading the cast – were in hand but UA head Arthur Krim was nervous that the material was political dynamite.  Sinatra was a personal friend of the Kennedys.  After a weekend stay at Hyannis Port, he was able to assure UA that the President, who had read Condon’s novel, was more than happy for the movie to be made.  That was good enough for Krim, who also happened to be national finance chairman for the Democratic Party.  The Manchurian Candidate climaxes in a political assassination; for some years, legend had it that, after JFK’s death, Sinatra moved to halt the distribution of the film.  Back in 1954, he had starred in another, smaller UA picture, Suddenly, playing a would-be (eventually thwarted) presidential assassin.  When rumours began circulating that Lee Harvey Oswald had seen Suddenly shortly before the assassination in Dallas, Sinatra pressured UA into withdrawing it from circulation.  The story of his doing the same vis-à-vis Frankenheimer’s film seems to have been a false conflation of Sinatra’s important role in getting the picture made with the fate of Suddenly – putting two and two together, and making five[1].  This overlay of Hollywood lore on The Manchurian Candidate can be a vexing distraction, getting in the way of seeing it in its own right.  Yet the confusion of behind-the-scenes political fact and fiction is also peculiarly appropriate, even part of the film’s meaning.  This faithful adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel is a satire of Cold War anxiety-cum-paranoia.  In order to tell its tale, it must also be a reflection of that mindset.

During the Korean War, a US army unit is ambushed, captured and brainwashed by Soviet and Chinese military and scientists, led by Dr Yen Lo (Khigh Diegh) ‘of the Pavlov Institute’.  Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is the brainwash-ee who, on his return home, will be the Sino-Soviet conspiracy’s sleeper agent and, by eventually assassinating a sure-to-be-elected presidential candidate, enable a communist takeover of the American government.  Raymond’s stepfather is the Joseph McCarthy-esque demagogue, Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory).  His wife Eleanor (Angela Lansbury), Raymond’s mother and apparently even more rabidly anti-red than the Senator, pulls her puppet husband’s strings and is her son’s American handler on behalf of the communists.  The Manchurian Candidate is premised on a black-comedy conceit – what if the Red Scare-mongers of the time were themselves part of an international communist takeover bid?  The mind-control plot driver is a rather different matter.  After the Korean War, the US Army commissioned a report, published in 1956 with the title Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination and Exploitation of Prisoners of War.  The report deemed brainwashing a ‘popular misconception’ and concluded that ‘exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of “brainwashing” of an American prisoner of war in Korea’[2].  However, and unlike the ever-changing number of card-carrying communists in the US Defense Department alleged by Iselin (thanks to a bottle of Heinz ketchup on their breakfast table, he and his wife eventually settle on fifty-seven), the brainwashing of Raymond Shaw, his superior officer Bennett (Ben) Marco (Sinatra) and other members of their unit isn’t a figment of right-wing imagination in Condon’s book or Frankenheimer’s film.

The Manchurian Candidate is doubly thrilling:  it’s a first-rate political thriller and a piece of film-making whose invention and daring thrill.  Frankenheimer conveys the importance of the story without his storytelling becoming self-important.  The narrative is vitally entertaining – exhilarating – yet there’s an end-of-days atmosphere, to which David Amram’s martial, elegiac score, though sparingly used, contributes significantly.  It was the right decision to make the picture in black and white, which was how, in 1962, nearly all viewers saw their TV news:  Lionel Lindon’s black-and-white cinematography reinforces one’s sense of The Manchurian Candidate having its finger on the contemporary cultural pulse.  Richard Sylbert’s settings – whether the action is taking place in a bar, an office, an apartment or the mind-games venue in Manchuria as experienced by a washed brain – have a quality that’s hard to explain.  These locations are so well chosen and designed that they don’t merely look right; they make you feel they’re the only possible places that could look right.

Ben Marco, working in army intelligence after his return from Korea, suffers a recurring nightmare.  He relives the climax to the unit’s three days in Manchuria, when Raymond Shaw, calmly obeying the instructions of Yen Lo, killed two fellow soldiers to demonstrate his successful ‘re-education’.  Verging on a nervous breakdown, Marco struggles to work out what happened in Korea, and to understand how he not only came to recommend Shaw for the Medal of Honor for saving his soldiers’ lives in combat but also calls him ‘the most wonderful human being I’ve ever known’, an estimation that the reality of Raymond startlingly contradicts.  It’s the compulsion to describe Raymond in these terms that first leads Marco – when the two men meet again post-Korea, with Raymond now working as a journalist – to suspect that conditioning has taken place:  after all, ‘It isn’t as if Raymond’s hard to like – he’s impossible to like!’

Laurence Harvey, remarkably, succeeds in making Raymond thoroughly alienating but affecting when he needs to be.  Frank Sinatra’s charismatic naturalness is the perfect complement to Harvey’s aloofness.  Janet Leigh shared star billing with them.  Although she has a much smaller part in terms of screen time, Leigh is deft and appealing as the young woman whom Marco, at the end of his tether, meets by chance on a train and who saves his sanity.  The archly witty verbal sparring of their first encounter is both amusing and unnerving – a good example of the can-you-trust-anyone thread that runs through the story.  There’s a similar moment, in an exchange of looks between Marco and a senior military officer (Douglas Henderson), just before the climactic scenes at the political convention in Madison Square Garden.  Unlike Janet Leigh, several players in smaller supporting parts are probably best remembered as the characters they played in The Manchurian Candidate:  James Gregory as Iselin; John McGiver as his political opponent Senator Thomas Jordan; Leslie Parrish as Jordan’s likewise ill-fated daughter Jocie, who briefly proves, to Raymond’s astonishment and the viewer’s, that he is capable of loving and of being loved.

The film’s most celebrated contribution, though, comes from its other big-name player.  According to John Frankenheimer (according to Wikipedia), Sinatra reported back after that Hyannis Port weekend that Kennedy had told him, ‘I love The Manchurian Candidate.  Who’s going to play the mother?’  Sinatra had in mind Lucille Ball; Frankenheimer insisted on Angela Lansbury, with whom he had just worked on All Fall Down.  After watching that film, Sinatra was happy to agree to what proved a bold and brilliant piece of casting.  Agents repeatedly send Raymond into brainwashed fugue by suggesting he play solitaire; the appearance of the queen of diamonds card in the pack is what then triggers the action required of him; the red queen ‘is reminiscent in many ways of Raymond’s dearly loved and dearly hated mother’.  At thirty-six, Angela Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey.  The age difference, thanks to Lansbury’s hairdo and clothes, looks more but not much more.  The nearly coeval mother and son provide a persistent reminder of the story’s Freudian undercurrents – which are no longer undercurrents by the end of the famous library scenes.  These begin with Jocie’s re-entry into Raymond’s life, as a guest at the Iselins’ costume ball, where she comes dressed as a playing card – the playing card.  During the last moments in the library, after Jocie’s exit and Eleanor has explained to Raymond what he must do at the coming convention, his mother vows revenge on her communist masters for choosing, as the programmed assassin she requested, her only son.  The vow is sealed with a kiss – a protracted one, on Raymond’s mouth.  Angela Lansbury modifies her characteristic extrovert style of acting to extraordinary effect in this role, making Eleanor socially formidable while building an alarming sense – and pressure – of what’s inside this well-groomed political wife.  Lansbury delivers the library speech in hushed, rapt tones that put the seal on a triumphantly disciplined and expressive performance.

Between these two viewings of The Manchurian Candidate, I read Richard Condon’s book for the first time and can now admire George Axelrod’s screenplay all the more.  The novel is exciting and excoriating:   Condon has, and gives the reader, a lot of fun with his descriptions of the emotional cataclysm of Raymond’s childhood; the startling sexual history and political adventurism of Eleanor, still in thrall to the memory of the father who abused her as a young teenager; the outrageous career progress of John Yerkes Iselin.  These backstories occupy a fair number of pages, though:  Axelrod did a fine job of distilling what Frankenheimer needed to make the streamlined (just over) two-hour film that resulted.  Condon is specific about dates of events throughout the novel’s nine-year timeframe and that the political convention of the finale is taking place in 1960.  Except for the opening Korean War episode, Axelrod and Frankenheimer jettison these details, without any loss of clarity and with a gain in urgency.  Whereas in the book the politicians, Senator Jordan included, are clearly Republicans, the film gives a looser but still satisfying impression of the contemporary American political scene.  In Jonathan Demme’s puzzlingly pointless 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, the political protagonists are definitely Democrats; in Axelrod’s script, the word ‘Republican’ occurs once, the word ‘Democrat’ not at all.  The watchword, of course, is ‘communist’.

John Frankenheimer worked in television through most of the 1950s, making his first cinema feature, The Young Stranger (1957), while still under contract to CBS.  The juvenile delinquency theme of both this and his second feature, The Young Savages (1961), anticipated the troubled coming-of-age story All Fall Down, Frankenheimer’s next film to be released, in 1962.  He was astonishingly productive during that year.  All Fall Down opened in April, Birdman of Alcatraz in July, and The Manchurian Candidate three months later.  Frankenheimer continued to make good pictures in the years ahead, especially Seven Days in May (1964), which confirmed his aptitude for the political thriller.  (That film saw its release delayed because of the presidential assassination, too.)  The Train (also 1964) and Seconds (1966) followed.  Frankenheimer kept working, in cinema and TV, all the way through to his death in 2002, at the age of seventy-two, but it’s hardly surprising he never repeated the annus mirabilis of 1962 that culminated in The Manchurian Candidate.  This is one of my favourite films.

21 October/28 November 2021

[1] I’m not sure how Sinatra came to wield power enough to influence the distribution of either film but let that pass …

[2] As quoted in the Wikipedia article on ‘Brainwashing’.