The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Date Seen: 8/10/17

Score: 5/5

DIRECTOR: John Frankenheimer 

PRODUCERS: George Axelrod & John Frankenheimer

STUDIO: United Artists

SCREENPLAY: George Axelrod

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lionel Lindon

Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra

Laurence Harvey

Ladies Garden Meeting...

...or Communist hypnotizing session?

Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey

Khigh Dhiegh

James Gregory and Angela Lansbury

Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh

Frank Sinatra, bizarrely, introducing the first karate scene into American cinema

Angela Lansbury and John McGiver

Leslie Parrish and Laurence Harvey

John McGiver and James Gregory

I think I can say with full certainty that The Manchurian Candidate is a film that should be seen more than once in order to fully process its level of cinematic and psychological thoroughness. Here is a movie with depth, appropriately wallowing in its own complexity while retaining an air of wry humor necessary to the formation of an excellent political satire. Although it does place on the 1998 AFI 100 Films list, The Manchurian Candidate was not exactly warmly received the year of its release, which was unfortunately the same year as such blockbuster masterpieces as Lawrence of Arabia, and it quickly fell into obscurity, for reasons that range from Frank Sinatra's tight control over its rights to its possible inspiration to Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet today, decades after the end of the Cold War, in a new era of political strife including a looming threat of apocalyptic forces ending life in America as we know it, The Manchurian Candidate is as ready for consumption as ever.

Clearly I have many positive things to say about this film, mostly because I greatly admire the collaboration of John Frankenheimer, George Axelrod, and cinematographer Lionel Lindon. The trio creates a distorted, dystopian American reality through its careful combination of surrealist-inspired visual style, intriguing, teasing dialogue, and fascinating psychological exploration. Yet, it's true that the film loses itself at times within the paradox of its own message: for a film that's anti-anticommunist, it's pretty anticommunist. That is to say, for a film that spends so much time establishing the McCarthy parody Senator Iselin as a demagogue buffoon who endangers the Democratic way by threatening the State Department with proof of communist interference, The Manchurian Candidate sure does make sure to trash communism. 

The entire film makes a point of differentiating a Kennedy-esque dream of American ideals from the serious, inhumane threat of communism, which is, by this film's definition, a conglomerate of baby-killer ethics with an unflinching goal to destroy the American way at any cost. Yet although the film is supposedly a political thriller, it bases its drama much more specifically on the personal threat of communism, demonstrating the ways in which it has the ability to dismantle the American traditions  that form the bedrock of western society. The film achieves this depiction through its specific target, the deconstruction of the American family unit.

Using Freudian psychology (very appropriately and aptly) to explore, among other things, the ways in which the family unit could be manipulated and radicalized by outside sources, the film demonstrates the serious threat posed by anti-American ideals by making Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin an exact opposite of the American ideal of femininity. Lansbury stands in stark contrast to the other women in the film, notably Janet Leigh's Rosie and Leslie Parrish's Jocelyn Jordon. As Ivan Coates writes in his take on the film, 

The true American women, Eugenie Rose and Jocelyn Jordan, reflect the postwar feminine ideal. They are domestically oriented and do not seek power outside of that domain. They embody ideal female qualities such as compassion, nurture, tenderness, warmth, and loving devotion. They are entirely male-oriented, desiring little more than to love, to serve, and to tend to one particular man, only becoming whole when coupled with another.... By contrast, communist women, represented primarily by Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury), become involved in the 'male' domains of politics and power. As a filmic construction the female communist represents a mockery of the domestic ideal and the sanctity of home. These values were regarded as central to the American way of life...

I find the inversion of traditional gender roles equated to evil chaos as being a rather banal trope of postwar American films, but I understand its sociopolitical implications. The filmmakers, in the act of demonstrating what will happen to women and thus the American family, demonstrate their own devotion to upholding the traditional spheres of western society, and thus complicate matters by making a film that thinks of itself as radically liberal in reality quite conservative. It plays into the hand, so to speak, of the Cold War era it was created in, whether aware or simply carrying out the propaganda mission unconscious of its actions like its own hypnotized protagonists. 

The Manchurian Candidate is a fascinating movie because of these many complexities and contradictions. How can a film that so virulently attacks McCarthyism also function as a reiteration of Communism's dangers? The film flirts with progressivism, from having an impressive number of African Americans represented in the cast while also employing several white men in yellowface, to its richly complicated relationship with Cold War era politics. Released 10 days after the Cuban Missile Crisis began in 1962 and re-released during the Reagan era's looming nuclear threat, The Manchurian Candidate is the perfect film to watch now, in 2017, as threats from North Korea commingle with the absurdities of the Trump Administration's political reality. 

Sources:

"A Second Look: The Manchurian Candidate" by Thomas Doherty, published in Cinéaste, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1988)

"George Axelrod and The Manchurian Candidate" by John Hanhardt, published in Film Comment, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter, 1970-1971)

"Review: The Manchurian Candidate" by R.M. Hodgens, published in Film Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring, 1963)

"Enforcing the Cold War Consensus: McCarthyism, Liberalism and The Manchurian Candidate" by Ivan Coates, published in the Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (July, 1993)

"Cold War Redux: From Kennedy to Reagan's America and Beyond" from What Have They Built You To Do?: The Manchurian candidate and Cold War America by Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González, University of Minnesota Press (2006)

"Review: What Have They Built You To Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America by Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González" by Susan Carruthers, published in The Journal of American History, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Sep., 2007)

All photos and GIFS from Google Images.