When Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) returns to America from active service in the Korean War in 1952 he is flown directly to Washington and personally decorated with the Medal of Honor by the President (presumably Harry S. Truman, though this is not stated) as crowds of cheering onlookers wave flags and celebrate.
His commanding officer, Major Bennett 'Ben' Marco (Frank Sinatra), describes Shaw as "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being" he's ever known and all of Shaw's men seem to concur, a little too closely, with this appraisal. But not all is well in Shaw's life and that becomes apparent very quickly in 1962's The Manchurian Candidate (the John Frankenheimer cold war thriller, based on a book by Richard Condon, was shown recently on BBC2 and I caught up on the iPlayer).
There is clear tension between Shaw and his mother Eleanor (Angela Lansbury) and outright contempt towards her partner, his stepfather, Senator John Iserlin (James Gregory plays the morally bankrupt senator with a self-serving sneer worthy of Richard Nixon and that surely can't be an accident).
Iserlin is eager to use Shaw's popularity to boost his chances in an upcoming election but Shaw considers Iserlin to be a "vile, slandering, son of a numbskull" and soon departs for New York where he takes a job as a journalist under the wing of eccentric newspaper baron (he wears a bed jerkin for night time chess games) Holborn Gaines (Lloyd Corrigan).
Gaines, also, is no fan of Iserlin and the hatred is mutual. Eleanor considers Gaines to be a Communist and in her world, and in much of America of the 1950s, there is no worse thing to be. Senator Iserlin is dead set on exposing the Commies who have infiltrated American institutions even if he's not got any idea of who they are. Perhaps that explains Ben Marco's recurring nightmare.
Marco is plagued nightly by dreams that he has been brainwashed by Chinese and Soviet Communists into believing he's attending a meeting of lady gardeners in New Jersey when in fact he is being paraded in front of rows of high ranking reds in front of large posters of Mao and Stalin. In the dream, Shaw is made to strangle one colleague to death and shoot another in the forehead.
One of Shaw's men, Corporal Allen Melvin (James Edwards), keeps having the same dream too. Which suggests something more is going on, and when Shaw is knocked down by a hit and run driver and wakes up in what appears to be some kind of Soviet controlled institution and starts speaking, and acting, even more robotically than before it seems that Shaw has, indeed, been brainwashed.
When Dr Yen Lo (Khigh Dheigh) arrives at the scene of Shaw's convalescence he explains to his Soviet counterpart Zilkov (Albert Paulsen), who is looking after the patient, that Shaw has had all of his guilt and fear removed by brainwashing and is now, himself, a useful and lethal Communist agent. But is this the truth? And if it is what will those in charge of Shaw make him do? What do they want from him and what other Americans are working against, rather than with, the US alongside Shaw?
It falls to Marco to find out but will he find out more than he bargained for? Sinatra is brilliant as Marco. He smokes, he drinks, he sweats, he falls in love (ridiculously easily) with the beautiful Rosie (Janet Leigh) on a train and he has a huge passion for both culture and knowledge. I think I like Frank Sinatra as an actor more than I do a singer.
Lansbury's excellent too. At ninety-six years old she's still with us and here she plays the role of Shaw's manipulative and domineering mother to perfection in a film that goes in heavier on intellect than it does raw emotion but still packs quite a punch as it explores issues of paranoia, homeland security, impeachment, patriotism, exploitation of patriotism, mind control, and solitaire.
The Manchurian Candidate also, very pertinently, shows how extremist beliefs on both sides of the political debate so often come together to crush those in the centre and to defeat the vast, and kind, majority of mankind that choose to live out their lives not demarcated by red lines and absolute moral truths.
Where the film falls down, perhaps understandably considering the era in which it was made, is in its handling of racial subtleties. Most of the actors playing the Koreans and the Chinese are clearly anything but (Khigh Deigh is an Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese actor born in New Jersey and Henry Silva who plays Chunjin, Shaw's valet, is a Brooklyn born actor of Spanish and Sicilian descent).
That aside, the film holds up pretty well and, in some ways, has possibly improved over time. The constant reference to Iserlin as an 'idiot' doesn't look so strange in an era where Trump was able to become President and when Eleanor suggests the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is part of a Communist conspiracy to take over the USA she's not too far from espousing an early version of QAnon's hate fuelled bullshit.
There are some beautiful shots of New York's Central Park in winter time, an unobtrusive but impressive score by Philadelphia jazz man David Amram, and great cameos from John MacGiver as Senator Thomas Jordan (Iserlin's nemesis) and Leslie Parrish as his daughter Jocelyn whom Shaw falls in love with when she nurses him after he's bitten by a snake.
The necessary, and very much of its time, voice over exposition is never too clunky nor is it intrusive and as the story speeds towards its final set piece you have a good idea, but are never quite certain, where it is going. That's the nature of these paranoia inducing cold war thrillers. After seeing The Manchurian Candidate there's a chance you'll never look at the Queen of Diamonds in the same way ever again.
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