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And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
"I cannot think of any film that was so ahead of this time like this "new film noir" feature.The movie went from failure to classic without passing through success. George Axelrod, screenwriter"
The film is based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon, who must have been astonished that it became a film with big stars like Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey -- and still more astonished that Frankenheimer and Axelrod did not soften its wicked satire.
It was made in what’s considered to be the last year of American innocence; it’s no coincidence that American Graffiti is also set in 1962 Within a year of the film’s release, the country would begin to explode with assassinations, race riots, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. “The Manchurian Candidate” was sort of a preview of what was just around the corner.
The film begins with a title: "Korea 1952" during the Korean War. Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey with an English accent!) and Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) are part of an American infantry platoon that is serving overseas in Korea.
The film trusts its viewers to follow its twisting, surrealistic plot, especially in the way fragmented memories of the Korean brainwashing leak into the nightmares of the survivors of that patrol. A flashback shows us what happened: After being hypnotized by their Chinese captors, they think they're attending a meeting of a garden club in a New Jersey hotel, while we see their communist hypnotist lecturing a room of other party officials. To show how strong the programming is, he orders Staff Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Harvey) to strangle one of the Americans and shoot another; the film's point of view cuts freely between the different versions of reality.
Back in the United States, Raymond is given the Medal of Honor and greeted by his smothering mother (Lansbury) and her second husband, the weak, alcoholic Sen. Iselin (James Gregory). It's a running gag in the film that Raymond is constantly referred to as the senator's son, and keeps repeating, "I am not his son." Mrs. Iselin has incestuous feelings for Raymond, which in the novel lead them to bed, but in the movie are revealed through a famous full-lip kiss. Raymond hates her, hates himself and has a bitter speech about how he is not lovable.
Seen today, "The Manchurian Candidate" feels astonishingly contemporary; its astringent political satire still bites, and its story has uncanny contemporary echoes. The villains plan to exploit a terrorist act, "rallying a nation of viewers to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy." The plot cheerfully divides blame between right and left; it provides a right-wing demagogue named Sen. John Iselin, who is clearly modeled on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and makes him the puppet of his draconian wife, who is in league with foreign communists. The plan: Use anti-communist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover.
"The Manchurian Candidate" is inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a "classic" but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released. "It may be," Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "the most sophisticated satire ever made in Hollywood." Yes, because it satirizes no particular target -- left, right, foreign, domestic -- but the very notion that politics can be taken at face value.
Historical Significance and "The Sinatra Legend"
The film’s release on October 24, 1962, coincided exactly with the Cuban Missile Crisis, heightening the public's sense of nuclear and political dread.
The JFK Connection
A persistent urban legend suggests that Frank Sinatra, a close friend of John F. Kennedy, withdrew the film from circulation after the JFK assassination in 1963 because he felt the movie's plot (a lone sniper at a political rally) was too painful or had potentially "inspired" the event.
The Reality: While the film was indeed difficult to find for many years, modern historians and Sinatra’s estate have clarified that the "withdrawal" was largely due to a legal and financial dispute between Sinatra and United Artists over distribution rights, not personal remorse regarding the assassination. It was re-released to massive acclaim in 1988.
Deep-Dive Themes and Symbolism
The Oedipal Nightmare
One of the film's most transgressive elements is the implied incestuous relationship between Eleanor and Raymond. In a pivotal scene late in the film, Eleanor kisses Raymond on the lips in a way that goes far beyond maternal affection. This "monstrous mother" trope reflects the 1950s/60s psychological anxiety regarding "Momism"—the theory that overbearing mothers were responsible for the psychological "weakness" or "feminization" of American men.
The "Rosie" Mystery
The first meeting between Marco and Rosie on a train features some of the strangest dialogue in cinema history (e.g., "I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch"). Some critics, including Roger Ebert, have speculated that Rosie might actually be a second sleeper agent or a government "handler" sent to mind Marco, though the film never explicitly confirms this.
The Garden Club Sequence
This sequence is a masterpiece of technical editing. Frankenheimer used a 360-degree pan to transition between the soldiers' hallucinations (a group of elderly ladies discussing hydrangeas) and the grim reality (communist officials observing the brainwashed soldiers). It remains one of the most effective depictions of a fractured psyche ever filmed.
Legacy and Influence
The term "Manchurian Candidate" has entered the global political lexicon to describe any politician perceived as a "puppet" controlled by an outside force.
Cinematic Impact
The Paranoia Trilogy: Along with Seven Days in May (1964) and Seconds (1966), this film forms the first part of Frankenheimer’s unofficial "Paranoia Trilogy."
Genre Foundation: It paved the way for the "New Hollywood" conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, such as The Parallax View and All the President's Men.
Remake: Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake updated the "Communist" threat to a "Corporate" one (Manchurian Global), reflecting the shift in American anxieties from the Cold War to the Military-Industrial Complex.
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