Watching "The Manchurian Candidate"

Oct. 30th, 1988

A long awaited, highly treasured thriller is at last out on tape, and it is of such nightmarish impact that I find it hard to get it out of my mind.

The release of director John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate," a film of such disturbing relationships and political satire that it can be classified as both weird and powerful.  Frankenheimer, master of deep focus and a director of unforgettable scenes and uneven wholes, was at the top of his young form in 1962, casting Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, and Angela Lansbury in a filming of Richard Condon's book of the same name.

The tale is about an unapproachable, ill-liked sergeant, Raymond Shaw, who is captured, along with his platoon, during the Korean war.  He and his men are brainwashed for three days by Chinese experts under Soviet instruction and released near their own lines.

On his return to the U.S., Shaw is put under the control of foreign agents, who plan to place their own man, Shaw's stepfather, senator John Issland, into the White House.

In Condon's book, the story seems wildly improbable, but the film smokes you along through the strength of it's strange images and through the incredible acting of Angela Lansbury, who plays the most monsterous mother I've ever seen on the screen.  The plan to take over the U.S. moves forward to its devastating conclusion, only to be foiled by the human psyche's need for expression, in this case through nightmares.

The nightmares caused by the brainwashing are odd, indeed.  The men in the platoon believe they are at a flower show, listening to a lecture by a cracked-voiced dowager.  (An imaginative touch is that the sole black soldier's dreams the ladies are black too.)  One shot shows the dowager-lecturer speaking to male communist officials in a banner decorated lecture hall.  Another shows the actual Chinese brainwashing expert addressing the ladies of the garden club.  The constant shifting of perspective, between reality and dreamlike fantasy, is so involving that I sat stunned.

The other set-piece to watch for is the presidential convention.  The noise, the confusion, the energy and enthusiasm are all there, and the echoing sounds of Madison Square Garden, when heard through a Hi-Fi VCR, put your right in the center of things.

But it is the character of Raymond's mother, brilliantly played by Lansbury, that is the emotional center of the movie.  In action, she makes Cinderella's stepmother seem like Saint Joan, yet she is also devastatingly human.  In a grotesque expression of mother-love, she takes her hypnotized son's face in her hands, tells him that she will make her mentors pay for his sacrifice, and then kisses him full on the lips.  Even today this 26-year-old scene is a shocker.

A subplot featuring a silly romance between Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh was lifted entirely from the book, where it didn't work, either.  This distraction is the only fault this superb thriller has.

"The Manchurian Candidate," the film, has a strange history itself.  Though it was critically acclaimed on its release, it was pulled from theatres after Kennedy was assassinated.  Frank Sinatra, one of the key players (he discovers the plot through his own nightmares), acquired rights to the movie and released if for video tape only a few months ago.  To publicize the tape, a new print of the movie was made and shown in a Los Angeles theater where it was so popular that "The Manchurian Candidate" was subsequently released inmost major cities, and even in Willimstown's Images Theater, where I saw jaded college students cringe with horror at each killing and gasp at the revelation of who Shaw's American controller was.

This grand film can be rented in Bennington at Cross Town Video, Picaflic, Record Rack and The Video Stop.

Mac Rush Works in the Banner composing room.

Just a few notes from me.  There's one spot where the word "Your" should be the word "You."  I don't know if this is an editing error on my dad's part or if it happened somewhere before it actually went to print.  There's no way to know for sure where the error happened but I can say, my dad was fanatical in his editing.

Also, my dad spells theater, both as "theater" and "theatre" in this column.  I copied everything as it was written.  Were he alive, I'd certainly ask why the different spellings were used.