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For the novel by Richard Condon, see The Manchurian Candidate. For the 2004 film, see The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film)

The Manchurian Candidate
Directed by	John Frankenheimer
Produced by	George Axelrod John Frankenheimer
Written by	Novel: Richard Condon Screenplay: George Axelrod
Starring	Frank Sinatra Laurence Harvey Janet Leigh Angela Lansbury Henry Silva James Gregory Douglas Henderson (actor) Leslie Parrish John McGiver Khigh Dhiegh
Release date(s)	October 24, 1962
Running time	126 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is a Cold War political thriller film adapted from the 1959 thriller novel, by Richard Condon, directed by John Frankenheimer, and features Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, and Janet Leigh. The central concept of the film is that the son of a prominent, right-wing political family has been brainwashed as an unwitting assassin for the International Communist Conspiracy. The Manchurian Candidate was nationally released on Wednesday, October 24, 1962, at the zenith of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Critical response 3 Production 4 Legacy 5 2004 film version 6 The Kennedy Assassination 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

During the Korean War the Soviets kidnap an American infantry patrol and take them to Manchuria, in Communist China, to be brainwashed and then covertly returned to their lines. There, the Communists (Russian, Chinese, Korean) implant false memories in the soldiers' minds to cover the kidnap, and to provide a subconscious trigger in the mind of one soldier, Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw. After reintegration to American society, the soldiers are unaware of their capture, kidnap, and brainwashing.

As part of the brainwashing, Captain (then Major) Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and the rest of the platoon believe Shaw saved their lives in combat, for which he is awarded the Medal of Honor. Also, when asked to describe Raymond Shaw, each man automatically says: Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life. Privately, however, they know that Shaw is a cold, sad, unsociable loner. As Marco puts it: It isn't as if Raymond's hard to like. He's impossible to like!

After the war, Marco suffers a recurring nightmare: an entranced Sgt. Shaw kills two of his platoon before the assembled Soviet, Chinese, and Korean brass watching a practical demonstration of the Russian brainwashing technique. He tries investigating the mystery, but receives no support from Army Intelligence, for whom he currently works, because he has no proof. This changes when he learns that another soldier from the platoon also has been suffering the same nightmare, identifying the same assembled Communists. Marco seeks to uncover the mystery with Army Intelligence support.

Back in the U.S., Raymond Shaw is a Communist sleeper agent whose actions as such are controlled with a Queen of Diamonds playing card, the subconscious trigger that compels his obeying his Communist operator's orders, kill any witness, and then forget his actions. As the brainwasher, Doctor Yen, in Marco's Manchurian nightmare, explains that Shaw's hasn't been 'washed', it has been dry cleaned. To test the assassin's conditioning, Dr Yen order's Shaw to kill his newspaper publisher employer.

Raymond's mother, Eleanor Iselin is the driving force behind her husband (and Raymond's step-father), Senator John Yerkes Iselin, a bombastic demagogue in the style of McCarthy and Nixon who is mostly dismissed as a fool. Raymond hates them both, especially his domineering mother. Sen. Iselin is established when (per his wife's orders) he interrupts a televised Congressional briefing of the Secretary of Defense and accuses him of knowing that some 207 Defense Department employees are Communist agents, which provokes a chaotic reaction among journalists and a enraged reaction from the Secretary.

Unknown to Raymond, the Iselins are Communist agents with a plan leading to the White House. Mrs Iselin, herself, is the American operative for whom Raymond is the instrument with which to effect the operation's final step.

For a while Raymond does find happiness with Jocelyn Jordan, the daughter of one his step-father's political archrival, Senator Thomas Jordan. What begins as a Romeo and Juliet joke becomes genuine romance and they marry. Although pleased with the match, Sen. Jordan makes clear to Raymond's mother that he will stop her husband's bid for the U.S. Vice-Presidency. In reply, she has Raymond assassinate Jordan and, in the process, also kills Jocelyn.

Mrs. Iselin then primes Raymond to assassinate their party's presidential candidate at the nomination convention. Afterwards, Sen. Iselin, the vice-presidential candidate, will, by default, become the presidential candidate and will give an inflammatory Communist-written speech. The assassination will cause mass hysteria in the U.S. and propel the demagogue Iselin, the Manchurian Candidate, to the White House and justify his presidential emergency powers "that would make martial law seem like anarchy". Thereby, U.S. President Iselin would be a Communist puppet.

In a cynically moving scene, Raymond's mother admits to the activated Raymond that she is a Communist agent, and regrets his having been the killer assigned to her, that she will avenge that once in power. The International Communist Conspiracy chose Sergeant Raymond Shaw as the assassin, because it solidified their hold and control upon her.

Marco, however, figures how to block Raymond's subconscious triggers, presenting him with a trick deck composed entirely of Queen of Diamond cards. Although Marco's attempts first fail, Raymond keeps control over himself at the Republican party convention and takes his revenge by first killing his mother and step father, then himself, while wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor, now truly earned.

Angela Lansbury was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, and Ferris Webster was nominated for Best Film Editing. In addition, Lansbury was named Best Supporting Actress by the National Board of Review and won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

The film is No. 67 on the AFI's "100 Years...100 Movies", and No. 17 on its "100 Years...100 Thrills" lists. In 1994, The Manchurian Candidate was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The film is consistently in the top 100 on the IMDb's list of top 250 films (No. 87 as of November 2007). It has received a rare 100 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes [1]. Prominent American film critic Roger Ebert ranks The Manchurian Candidate as an exemplary "Great Film", declaring that it "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."[2]

In April 2007, Angela Lansbury's character was selected by Newsweek as one of the ten greatest villains in cinema history.

For Raymond's mother, Sinatra had wanted Lucille Ball, but Frankenheimer had worked with Lansbury in a mother role in a previous film, All Fall Down, and insisted on having her for the part ^[1].

Although Lansbury plays Raymond Shaw's mother, she was in fact only three years older than Harvey.

Janet Leigh plays Marco's love interest. A bizarre conversation on a train between her character and Marco has been interpreted by some — notably, film critic Roger Ebert — as implying that Leigh's character, Eugenie Rose Chaney, is working for the Communists to activate Marco's programming, much as the queen of diamonds activates Shaw's. It is a rather strange conversation between people who have only just met, and almost appears to be an exchange of passwords. Frankenheimer himself admits that he had no idea whether or not "Rosie" was supposed to be an agent of any sort; he merely lifted the train conversation straight from the Condon novel, in which there is no such implication ^[1].

On the DVD audio commentary of the film, the director stated his belief that it contained the first-ever Karate fight in an American motion picture. This is however untrue, as the 1955 MGM film Bad Day at Black Rock has a short Karate fight scene between Spencer Tracy and Ernest Borgnine.

The famous interrogation sequence where Raymond and Marco confront each other in the hotel room opposite the convention are the rough cuts. When first filmed Sinatra was out of focus and when they tried to re-shoot the scene he was simply not as effective as he had been in the first take. Frustrated, Frankenheimer decided in the end to simply use the original out-of-focus takes. Critics praised him for showing Marco from Raymond's distorted point-of-view ^[1].

For the scene in the convention hall prior to the assassination, Frankenheimer was at a loss as to how Marco would pinpoint Raymond's sniper's nest. Eventually he decided on a method similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. Frankenheimer notes that what would be plagiarism in the 1960s would now be looked upon as an homage ^[1].

The Karate fight in Candidate takes place in Raymond's apartment between Marco and Raymond's Korean manservant (Henry Silva). It is similar to the later battles between Inspector Clouseau and his Oriental manservant Cato in The Pink Panther movies.

Nu metal band Slipknot make reference to the film in their song Wait and Bleed. These lyrics were then adopted by the band Manchurian Candidate [3]. References to the film were also mentioned in the self-titled song Manchurian Candidate.

Angela Petrelli on the show Heroes was inspired by Mrs. John Iselin.

Main article: The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film)

Director Jonathan Demme adapted The Manchurian Candidate to film in 2004, featuring Denzel Washington (Maj. Marco), Liev Schreiber (Raymond Shaw), and Meryl Streep (Senator Eleanor Shaw). This contemporary adaptation substantially changed and updated the Cold War story to an anti-corporation story of private and business control of the U.S. government by beginning the story in Kuwait at the tail end of the first Persian Gulf War.

Raymond is the brainwashed Manchurian candidate and Marco the brainwashed assassin. The novel explicitly depicts incest between Raymond and his mother. In social conventions of American cinema in 1962 limited Frankenheimer's depiction to a salacious adult kiss between mother and son. Demme's depiction of mother-son incest is explicit.

The Manchurian Candidate, by Jonathan Demme, was critically and commercially successful in its updated representation of the social, political, and economic evils that the novel depicted.

Hollywood rumor holds that Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the John F. Kennedy assassination, though the evidence for this is conflicting. Certainly the film was rarely shown in the decades after 1963, but it did appear as part of the Thursday Night Movies series on CBS on September 16, 1965 and again later that season. It was also shown twice on NBC, once in the spring of 1974 and again in the summer of 1975. Sinatra did not acquire distribution rights to The Manchurian Candidate until the late 1970s. He was involved in a theatrical re-release of the film in 1988. The film has aired on a fairly regular basis on the Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics cable networks.

Similar rumors and treatment surround the film Suddenly! in which Sinatra himself starred as a Presidential assassin.

• Assassinations in fiction
• Conspiracy thriller
• Project MKULTRA, CIA mind-control research program
• The Bourne Identity
• Seven Days in May
• The Simultaneous Man
• Telefon
• "The Deadly Assassin"
• The Boys from Brazil
• Spy film