The Manchurian Candidate – based on the novel by Richard Condon – is one of film’s great political satires. What appears to be a creepy exploration of the world of post-hypnotic suggestion, in reality is a dead-on target criticism of… well I don’t want to spoil it for you.
The movie opens with some shocking scenes: a troop of American soldiers is Shanghaied, hypnotized and one in their midst, Raymond Shaw (the ever-fragile Laurence Harvey) is told to carry out some unspeakable acts. And he does them. These scenes have an hallucinatory quality that recur as this Manchurian Candidate is ordered, through post-hypnotic suggestion, to do some nasty things.
The film’s hero is Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), who was one of those kidnapped and hypnotized with Shaw and who is now suffering some nightmarish flashbacks. In another of the films more acid-like moments, Marco meets a beautiful woman (Janet Leigh) on a train who says she is engaged, but within minutes has formed an undeniably powerful bond with Marco, dumps her fiancé and joins him on this quest to get to the root of these visions.
The movie’s satirical edge emerges out of Shaw’s relationship with his mother and step father (Lansbury and Gregory), who happen to be very ambitious, if not powerful, figures in the Republican Party. Freud would be proud of the filmmakers’ casting of Lansbury, who is only a couple of years older than Harvey, and their relationship is, in the grand tradition of Hamlet and Gertrude, disturbingly incestuous in tone. The things this mother does to her son…
That psychological experts have dismissed The Manchurian Candidate as impossible is irrelevant. Condon, director John Frankenheimer and screenwriter George Axelrod’s point is that we are ALL suffering through some form of hypnosis. How else can you explain our choice of leaders? We must all be, to some extent, Manchurian Candidates.
The Manchurian Candidate is a brilliantly realized, acidic satire of American political life. Frankenheimer and Axelrod takes us into a strange, hallucinatory world that is hard to shake, long after the movie is over.
A brilliantly realized, acidic satire of American political life. It takes us into a strange, hallucinatory world that is hard to shake, long after the movie is over.- Dan Jardine
