#Who captured her to get publicity for his family hotel not that Rose or Harvey know about it yet.

[dekujinsart]

-leaves more MerMaya for Mermay and hides back under rock-

[wittypenguin]

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

I’ll unashamedly say right off the bat I love this movie. It’s a shame that there’s a whole heap of baggage around this film, because it’s an excellent Science Fiction thriller of a sort we don’t see anymore. Let’s get all the ridiculous rumour and here-say out of the way first, though.

According to urban legend, Frank Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963. Ballocks. While it certainly seems in poor taste at that point to be screening a film dealing with the assassination of a candidate for President of the United States, John Frankenheimer, the director of the film, states in the book John Frankenheimer: A Conversation with Charles Champlin that the film was pulled because of a legal battle between the film’s producer, Mr Sinatra, and the studio over Mr Sinatra's share of the gross sales. In the end, it was re-released to great acclaim in 1988.

Michael Schlesinger — who was responsible for that 1988 reissue — also denies the rumour. According to him, the film wasn’t removed from distribution per se, there was merely a lack of public interest in it by 1963. The idea that any film a year after its release would have the same level of interest in the marketplace — even with two Academy Away nominations (one for Angela Lansbury for Best Supporting Actress, and one for Best Editing) — is not just simply ‘glass half full,’ but downright wishful thinking. The distribution rights were held by the studio for ten years, and in 1972 those rights merely reverted to the film’s production company. Mr Sinatra’s lawyers held on to those rights so that no one would profit from a revenue stream which his lawyers had badly negotiated originally, and sitting on the film prevented it film being released for VHS home rental or ownership. Thus the falsity, “it was pulled from distribution.”

Left to right: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Khigh Dhiegh, James Edwards, Richard LePore, and Tom Lowell in The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

For fairly obvious reasons, this film has become a part of JFK/RFK Assassination Conspiracy lore: there’s a Presidential candidate being shot with a high-powered rifle, wielded by a former soldier located somewhere fairly high-up in what can be described as a public place. The book came out in 1958, and cannot possibly have been a blueprint for the assassination of President Kennedy, given he didn’t announce his candidacy until January 2nd of 1960. Even if one was to say ‘oh, but, see, that’s how they worked out how to do it: they read the book!’ beggars belief. First, in order for someone to use it as a template to kill President Kennedy, the entire Secret Service, the FBI, and the CIA had to collectively ignore — for four years — the possibility that someone might use the idea of the novel to kill the President, whose life is the single most important thing they are assigned to protect. Then, someone has to put everything into place in about two years, including bringing in people working with Project MKUltra (which, admittedly, had been sanctioned in 1953, so there is opportunity for that bit… kinda…) to provide a suitable subject to perform the act, re-target them from whatever they were originally programmed for to the President instead, then cover over everything involved with what is the most treasonous plot in the history of the country, keep everyone involved silent for over six decades; all while the files from the FBI Field Office in Media, Pennsylvania were leaked, exposing the COINTELPRO programme; then the publishing of ‘the Pentagon Papers,’ exposing the history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967; then the ‘Watergate scandal’ and the associated charges of corruption and influence peddling by Vice President Agnew were navigated; then the revelation of…

C’mon…!

Another aspect of the film which caused the conspiracy nutcases to go insane was the fact that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the man who fired the gun at Senator Robert F. Kennedy, appears to have either unwittingly or accidentally hypnotized himself prior to the incident using a series of LPs produced by the Rosicrucians, and then became obsessed with Senator Kennedy’s “sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 [fighter jet] bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians,” as he told David Frost in 1988. The parallel with this film’s plot becomes worse, as Mr Frankenheimer had became a close friend of Senator Kennedy during the making of The Manchurian Candidate so that, in 1968, the Senator asked Mr Frankenheimer to make some commercials for his campaign for the Democratic nomination. On the night Senator Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, it was Mr Frankenheimer who drove him from the Los Angeles Airport to the Ambassador Hotel for the acceptance speech.

There are merely coincidences — profoundly unfortunate ones — and they wouldn’t be seen as anything more than that, save for the involvement of a Kennedy family member in public office. That same reason is why anyone gives a damn about the ‘Chappaquiddick incident,’ other than the fact that one of the ‘great and the good’ was kept from serving any time in jail for their involvement in a death of an innocent person.

I do think that something happened that day in Dallas in addition to what we have thus far been told, but what it was and whom it was done at the behest of, we will never know. It certainly wasn’t something involving this film.

Angela Lansbury [left] and James Gregory [centre and on TV screen] in The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Okay… now let’s get to the movie.

It starts as what seems like a standard war movie, set during the Korean War, with a group of men captured, thanks to a double-crossing Korean guide and interpreter, by Russians with helicopters bearing a simple five-pointed star (which indicates China, but could also indicate the Soviet Union…? North Korea…? Texas…?). Then the same voice which at the start of Spartacus, told us that Christianity brought about the fall of Rome, informs us here that Raymond Shaw has a Medal of Honour and has come home to glory; a glory his mother (played by Angela Lansbury) and step-father wish to bask in the reflected warmth of, thus aiding the Senate career of the opportunistic, bombastic McCarthy stand-in (played by James Gregory).

Shaw has a mid-Atlantic accent which works well with Ms Lansbury’s. He’s the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being anyone’s ever known in their entire life.

Some of the side character’s’ performances are super wooden. “Zilkov” especially seems to have no experience beyond Christmas play in grade 4.

During a scene in New York City, the Manchurian scientist is doing origami, a Japanese art of paper-folding. So… Hollywood really doesn’t know the Orient at all.

Mr Frankenheimer had film and two more he directed released the same year: Birdman of Alcatraz (starring Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, and Telly Savalas) and All Fall Down (starring Eva Marie Saint and Warren Beatty). I think it’s safe to say that Mr Frankenheimer didn’t sleep for much of 1962.

Speaking of that year in film, I was surprised at the competition Ms Lansbury had for Best Supporting Actress Oscar. In this film, Ms Lansbury is fantastic: energetic, focused, she’s got great timing, and is entirely believable in every scene. Every single level of her performance is perfect, as she is laser-sharp in knowing what she needs from everyone at every moment.

Originally, I was looking to see who won instead of her, and then who her votes were split with, as typically a performance this good is split with someone equally deserving, meaning someone comes out of left field to win [cf Marisa Tomei]. So, why didn’t Ms Lansbury win?

Because 1962 was an insanely fantastic year for film, no matter the category you sample.

In a year where Marilyn Monroe was found dead (August 5th) and the ‘James Bond’ franchise starts (October 5th – Dr. No); you have dramas like Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, Mutiny on the Bounty, To Kill a Mockingbird, Billy Budd, Days of Wine and Roses, How the West Was Won, The Day of the Triffids, La Jetée (which was the inspiration of 12 Monkeys), Jules and Jim, Lolita, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Miracle Worker, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Sweet Bird of Youth; the musicals Gypsy and State Fair; plus The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, and All Fall Down from Mr Frankenheimer. It very much was a transition period from one generation of film making to the next, and the best of everything was on display. I don’t think you could consider 1962 ‘another 1939’ for film, but it was pretty damned close! Needless to say the Oscar Awards the next spring were pretty full; mostly full of Lawrence of Arabia and The Miracle Worker, but many other people as well.

I’d forgotten how much violence there is in this film. Much of it is corralled in opposite ends of the film, but there really is a bunch, and it is very shocking when it arrives. It’s still effective now, too, which makes things so very exciting.

On this disc, there’s a wonderful twenty minute documentary about the sociological factors involved in the creation of the hysteria surrounding “brain washing” and mind control in general from the early-1950s onwards. It really sews together so many disparate and interconnected threads: McCarthyism, fear of both the Soviet and Chinese varieties of Communism, imminent nuclear annihilation (an all-too real threat when this film was released, literally in the middle of the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’), the phobia of ‘too controlling mothers,’ distrust of anyone from another country, the differences between psychoanalysis and actual programming of thoughts, the focus on advertising through the pop culture book The Hidden Persuaders, and the idea that TV was a new insidious way to make ‘soft’ men instead of the ‘tough’ men the USA needed in the nuclear-powered time of the 1960s!

Anyway; all in all, it’s grand, and the times when shots are a bit out of focus, you don’t care, the story is so strong and the acting is grand, and… oh, I wish more films were like this; big, messy, multi-influenced tales of humanity. Thankfully people like Terry Gilliam and Duncan Jones are doing that sort of thing.

★★★★★