he time is 1952, the place Korea. An American platoon commanded by Capt. Bennett Marco (Sinatra), operating with native guide Chunjin (Silva), is captured by the enemy and flown to an
unknown destination. The platoon is missing in action for three days before its survivors return to camp, claiming that they owe their survival to the heroism of Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Harvey).
Some time later, Raymond returns to America a war hero, where is awarded the Medal of Honor. He is not happy to be greeted at the airport by a crowd of reporters arranged by his domineering mother (Lansbury) and her second husband, Sen. John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), both of whom seem intent on exploiting Shaw's reputed heroism for the senator's political gain. Raymond despises his mother, who he sees as a cold and domineering, and the senator, who is a glad-handing mediocrity who owes his success in politics to his much smarter wife constantly telling him what to do. Shaw hates them so much he abandons them before the flight home, to begin his job as research assistant for a newspaper columnist his mother derides as "communist."
In the years that follow, Marco, now a colonel, finds himself tormented by nightmares about the three missing days. They begin with the members of the platoon, operating under the delusion that they're in New Jersey, seeking shelter from a torrential rainstorm at a meeting of a ladies' gardening club. They slump in their folding chairs, smoking cigarettes and wearing expressions of nigh-infinite boredom as they listen to the high-pitched matron at the podium
drone on and on about hydrangeas. But the illusion falters at the edges, revealing the ladies to be officers of the Chinese and Soviet armies, listening to a master brainwasher whose mind-control techniques have transformed the soldiers into automatons, ripe for carrying out any instructions their new masters see fit to provide. They're unaware of their surroundings, and their cigarettes are "yak dung." To demonstrate, the brainwasher directs Raymond to strangle another soldier to death, while directing the victim to just let it happen. Marco, dreaming all
this, screams himself awake and determines to find out what really happened.
As the red-baiting Sen. Iselin uses his allegations of communist infiltration in the State
Department to build his reputation, Raymond rebuilds a past relationship with Jocelyn Jordan (Leslie Parrish), daughter of Iselin's political enemy, the principled Sen. Thomas Jordan (John McGiver). But Mother has other plans. And Marco finds himself involved with Eugenie Rose Cheney, known as "Rosie" (Leigh), whose dialogue and actions make suspiciously little sense. ...
The Cold War turns hot
The Manchurian Candidate is not normally considered science fiction, but the wildly fanciful brainwashing at its center (which is capable of turning trained soldiers into blank-eyed assassins in less than three days), firmly places it in the speculative camp. Its over-the-top screenplay, which includes a psychological detective story, a plot to take over the United States, a doomed romance, genuine horror, one of Hollywood's earliest martial-arts
sequences and (in the form of the idiotic puppet senator played by James Gregory) uproarious political satire, is so complex that it can be seen again and again, each time revealing more and more layers of possible manipulation—and so open to interpretation that it's almost impossible to say which side wins at the fadeout.
A key part in the enigma is the role played by Janet Leigh's Rosie. When first seen, she's intently watching Sinatra's Marco fidget and sweat on a train to New York. Marco is such a wreck he fumbles several attempts to light his cigarette, and rushes from the club car in a state of physical panic. Rosie follows, lights his cigarette and engages him in what must be one of the strangest conversations in movie history. "Maryland's a beautiful state," she says. He mutters
that this is Delaware. She answers him. "I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter." He won't look at her. Speaking in controlled, hypnotic tones, she goes on, asking him at one point if he's Arabic, and repeatedly reciting her phone number and address for him to memorize. Before long, he's hooked up with her in New York, and seems to be doing much better. Many audiences never question her role as the story's quirky love interest, especially since she's never explicitly linked to the main assassination storyline, but it's hard not to suspect that there's more to her than meets the eye—and never more so in the last scene, where the threat has apparently been vanquished and she sits silently listening to Marco's anguished post-mortems. The clear implication is that she's also working for the enemy, as Marco's own
handler, and that, with the assassination plot dispensed with, the true target of the conspiracy has yet to be revealed.
In a film that puts that much thought into a seemingly throwaway character, the central players are even more memorable. Sinatra, whose acting fluctuated wildly in quality depending on how much he cared for a particular role, was known to sleepwalk through some pictures. But he believed in Candidate, and he gave the performance of his career as a traumatized,
impassioned patriot driven by the need to know what has been done to him. (And also by humanity: Marco despises Raymond, but before long comes to feel a deep compassion for his plight.) As Raymond, who is controlled by playing cards, Laurence Harvey is twitchy, unlikable and so tormented that the film noticeably brightens when his renewed relationship with Jocelyn seems about to offer him a chance of lasting happiness. James Gregory plays the dim Sen. Iselin with the perfect mixture of posturing arrogance and deep confusion. And John McGiver, who is
rarely singled out in essays about the film, is fine indeed as a principled, likable senator who sees the Iselins for what they are and vows to defy them to his dying breath: a brave mission statement that he would have been better off not making to Mrs. Iselin's face.
And then, of course, there's Mrs. Iselin herself, who plays a particularly twisted part of the tapestry. President John F. Kennedy, who was with what soon turned out to be tragic irony an admirer of Condon's original novel, was delighted to hear that the movie was being made and said that he couldn't wait to find out who played her. One trusts he was pleased by the performance of a perfectly cast Angela Lansbury. Though famously only one year older than the actor playing her son, she was able to pass as a well-preserved older woman, whose loveless,
incestuous, downright murderous handling of her brainwashed son renders her one of the darkest
villains in movie history. Kissing him on the lips in an unsettling display of incestuous lust, she vows to betray her backers: "They will be pulled down and ground into the dirt for what they did to you. And," she adds, establishing what she finds more offensive, "what they did in so contemptuously underestimating me."
Finally, there's the white Henry Silva, in ineffective Asian makeup, as the Korean Chunjin. He works hard at his role. He can't be blamed, just because modern-day audiences find the failed disguise so distracting. But he's not around much.
As for the film's Cold War politics, they don't date the film at all. Seen today, there's a disquietingly topical real-world resonance to Mrs. Iselin's lines about exploiting a horrific act of terrorism to sweep her husband into office "with powers that make martial law look like anarchy." Because the true plot at the center of The Manchurian Candidate is only accidently about assassination. It's about public relations.
