Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN RERELEASED & REASSESSED 'THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE' The Manchurian Candidate has made a remarkable reappearance. A critical success but box office failure in 1962, the film has been...
...Through the twists of Richard Condon's novel and George Axelrod's screenplay, this point is validated...
...What kind of time capsule is it...
...It is comforting to believe the "guilt" theory, less for Sinatra's sake than for the example it provides of someone in Hollywood considering the possibility that films aren't innocent...
...This November marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Kennedy's death...
...According to others, Sinatra has felt uneasy about the film's treatment of political assassination after our politics began to suffer so heavily from it...
...Some plot lines are completely forced and some dialogue is a hoot, with Laurence Harvey popping off with one classic (now hilarious) male-chauvinist comment...
...So why has Sinatra objected to the film's rerelease...
...It is now also available on video...
...It was John F. Kennedy who had pressured United Artists president Arthur Krim into backing what was then seen as an oddball "it-couldn't-happen-here" film...
...However fictional the specifics about actual assassinations, the film anticipates a mood of mistrust that has contaminated our national life since 1963...
...The Manchurian Candidate is a rather risky film, one that gives an even more sleazy picture of American mores and politics than Advise and Consent" he wrote, referring to Otto Preminger's film of the Allen Drury novel...
...It satirizes anti-Communist hysteria, but also ironically supports it...
...That brings to mind the line in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) when a priest visiting the Hepburn-Tracy manse tells Sidney Poitier, a professor seeking their daughter's hand, "I have just read your article in Commonweal...
...some good movie-making and an outstanding cast succeed in giving the fantastic events a realistic tone...
...Whatever Sinatra's motives, his permission to rerelease the film has meant that this classic of American political Gothic has been filling art houses throughout the summer in several major cities...
...No one (the film was initially released around the time our first advisers went to Vietnam) had heard of their falling out...
...The final line of its last two segments is especially sinister...
...Angela Lansbury, in her best movie role, plays the scheming wife of a would-be presidential candidate (James Gregory) who flings about McCarthyite accusations of Communist associations and practices a crude, cartoonish Americanism...
...Joined with this is a haute Cold War caricature of Russian and Chinese agents working in cruel tandem...
...Sadly, the passage of time makes The Manchurian Candidate look less risky than prophetic...
...In 1962, Commonweal's Philip Hartung reviewed the film, noting its combination of excellent acting and an unbelievable plot line...
...With sharp direction by John Frankenheimer (who has since outdone Candidate only with The Train), the film sadly recalls attitudes which cost us all so much...
...There was a time, this screenplay declares, when writers weren't afraid to sound as if they or their audience had read a few books...
...More interesting than the overt politics is the Gothicism...
...A critical success but box office failure in 1962, the film has been withheld from television, video, and theatrical rerelease because one star (and the film's co-producer), Frank Sinatra, objected...
...Here, nothing is as meets the eye...
...Nevertheless, despite Candidate's improbable plot, Hartung wrote...
...Much of the film is so intelligent that one despairs over the decline and fall of what we can expect from Hollywood...
...Audiences today can also respond nostalgically to the style of the film, which is both wacky and literary...
...According to some insiders, Sinatra has been motivated by nothing more than squabbles over profits with United Artists...
...Sinatra also withdrew Suddenly, a powerful film about assassination which Lee Harvey Oswald watched in Dallas in mid-November, 1963...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...The politics of the film are richly confused...
...soldiers surviving Korea, including Sinatra and Laurence Harvey (as Lansbury's Oedi-pally inclined son), puzzle out strange nightmares from combat experiences that provide the clues to a giant hidden conspiracy...
...Sinatra even gets to mention Orestes and Clytemnestra...
...You leave feeling queasily defiled, and reminded of how often things have not been what they seemed...
...Krim, like Sinatra, had been a Kennedy supporter in 1960...
...The plot pits this vicious pair against the earnest Senator (John McGiver), who says, "If you and your husband were paid agents of the Soviet Union, you couldn't be doing more to hurt America...
...There are Communist traitors in our midst, the film declares, just not where you'd expect them...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 16
