Laurence Harvey, who plays the brainwashed Raymond Shaw, was born Octo(in Lithuania). It took Frank going directly to Jack Kennedy." 2. Condon later told a Sinatra biographer, "That's the only way the film ever got made. Frank visited JFK, who'd been a fan of the novel, and the president made a personal appeal to UA head Arthur Krim, who was especially apt to listen because he was also the Democratic Party's finance chairman. Lucky for Sinatra, he had friends in high places, including President John F. But the execs at UA thought the subject matter was too politically controversial and wanted nothing to do with it.
KENNEDY HELPED IT GET MADE.įrank Sinatra had a deal with United Artists and wanted the studio to make an adaptation of Richard Condon's 1959 novel.
Stare intently at the Queen of Hearts and let these behind-the-scenes details wash over you.
But the movie is significant for other reasons, too, besides its contribution to the English lexicon. Since then, whenever a new political figure has emerged from seemingly out of nowhere, a small subsection of paranoiacs has theorized that he or she was a "Manchurian candidate," secretly bent on destroying America. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.People who love movies and people who love conspiracy theories have common ground in The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 Cold War satiric thriller about an American soldier brainwashed by Communists into becoming an assassin. Several critics have taken the producers of the film to task for irresponsibility in distorting reality merely to obtain "wild effects." Certainly, there is a total disregard of credibility in it, but a motion picture so perfect in execution and so thoroughly entertaining as The Manchurian Candidate has not been around for months. Senator by James Gregory that calls to mind the antics of the late Joseph McCarthy, and Angela Lansbury is repellantly vicious as his scheming wife. There is a broadly comic portrayal of a boobish U.S. Frank Sinatra happily avoids overplaying a major in that patrol who begins to wonder what actually happened on it. Laurence Harvey is properly icy as the strange Korean War veteran who won a Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a patrol to nearly incredible successes. It is one simply of those rare movies that the viewer hopes will never end. John Frankenheimer's direction (up to some of the best efforts of Hitchcock or Orson Welles) and uniformly excellent performances create an hypnotic suspense that allows no time to appraise the plausibility of what is going on.
Yet every detail of the film is so expertly done that one has doubts about it only after he leaves the theater. The Manchurian Candidate is so absurd that a synopsis of it reads like bad science fiction. The sweet ladies of the garden club applaud his performance enthusiastically.Īctually, the first five minutes of the picture are slight preparation for this exquisitely shocking scene, and the bits sand pieces of the plot merge only gradually into an elaborate conspiracy to place the entire government of the United States in the hands of the Communists. "Yes ma'am," he replies politely, and obviously anxious to please his hostesses, he strangles one (with a scarf thoughtfully provided by a woman in the audience) and shoots the other in the forehead. She is asking the head of the American patrol to murder two of his men. Suddenly, however, the charming garden club women turn inexplicably into Chinese and Russian scientists at a secret meeting in Manchuria, and when the hydrangea-lovers reappear moments later, the chairwoman is no longer speaking on flowers. "If you come in five minutes after this picture begins," run the advertisements for The Manchurian Candidate, "you won't know what it's all about." And, in fact, a latecomer would enter in the middle of a very puzzling scene indeed: a New Jersey ladies' horticultural society meeting on the history and cultivation of hydrangeas is entertaining nine bored American solders in battle dress as guests of honor.