That the trauma is deliberately induced is the film’s great insight, even if the primary scheming is attributed to the most malevolent character imaginable - the bad mom. The army’s consulting psychiatrist (Joe Adams, who, Frankenheimer notes, represents one of the first instances when a black actor was cast in a part that didn’t call for a black actor: “We weren’t trying to win any great causes, we just decided we wanted to do that”) is skeptical of Marco’s story, as are the military officers who decide Marco is suffering from some proto-form of PTSD. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), of the Pavlov Institute.īoth are also trained to respond to any mention of Raymond’s name with the same phrase: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful person I’ve ever known in my life” (a line that Frankenheimer chuckles over on the commentary track, saying he’s used it repeatedly in life, as it’s so all-purpose). The speakers are white and snooty for Marco, black and pious for Melvin, to denote the ingenuity of the scheme, that is, the memories are buried under images that might pass for familiar, except that in each case, the dreamer recalls Raymond murdering two their fellows, at the behest of the presiding garden lady, who is, as the superbly edited three-way scene (that is, three sets of memories) reveals, Dr. Combined, the dreams of Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra) and Corporal Alvin Melvin (James Edwards) reveal the nefarious plan that’s in play: the conditioning sessions are buried in dreams of a garden club where the subject du jour is hydrangeas. The “meanwhile” part of the plot has Raymond’s men suffering nightmares. Now a “soulless,” mechanized assassin, Raymond is just waiting to be cued by his “operators.” The initial trigger is a suggestion (usually made by a phone call): “How about a game of solitaire to pass the time?” This leads Raymond to play the game until he sees the queen of diamonds, at which point, he’s receptive to whatever command he might hear.Ī couple of years pass, as the political circumstances for his mission are established. They capture Raymond and his unit in North Korea, condition them for three days, then send them back to the States, where he’s awarded the Medal of Honor for rescuing his troops. army sergeant, the sanctimonious and unbearably uptight Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), by a group of definitively evil Chinese and Russian operatives. The plot concerns the brainwashing of a U.S.
The manchurian candidate 1962 summary movie#
“The thing that I really care about, about this movie is that it was the first movie to really take on Senator McCarthy,” says the late, great Frankenheimer in his commentary (borrowed from the first, retroactively un-special edition DVD, released in 2001).
The movie that almost didn’t get made, based on Richard Condon’s Cold War novel, is at once anti-communist and anti-anti-communist. It’s a good story, as is the one about Sinatra pulling the film from distribution following John Kennedy’s assassination, though the latter has been mostly debunked. At the start of the commentary track for MGM’s new “Special Edition” DVD (timed to promote Alex Proyas’ remake, starring Denzel Washington), he recalls the familiar story, that Frank Sinatra’s commitment to the project got the thing done.
“This movie was turned down by every studio in Hollywood,” says producer/director John Frankenheimer of The Manchurian Candidate. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), The Manchurian Candidate Soon, you’ll be lending money out at interest. The virus of capitalism is highly infectious. You believe in the way she exercises power, but you also believe in her femininity and her reality as a woman, and as a kind of master politician of the ’60s. I’ve always had a problem playing just downright rotten women.