It’s a mannered, pompous performance right out of summer stock. Only John McGiver, as a liberal senator who, presumably, should be appealing, since he’s portrayed as being on the side of right, strikes a false note. Henry Silva is suitably sinister as a Red agent and pretty Leslie Parrish is lively and believable as Harvey’s illfated romance. Supporting work, with perhaps one exception, is fine. One of the brilliant achievements of the film is the way Axelrod and Frankenheimer have been able to blend the diverse moods, including the tender and explosively funny as well as the satiric and brutally shocking. One especially, on a Washington-to-New York train in which she picks up a semi-hysterical Sinatra, registers as one of the great love scenes since Bogart and Bacall first tossed non-sequiturs at one another in “To Have and Have Not.” (“Are you Arabic?” asks Miss Leigh, “Or, to put it another way, are you married?”). The actress only has two or three scenes, but they count. A pleasant surprise is Janet Leigh as a sweet, swinging N.Y.
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Less showy, but no less effective, is Sinatra who, after several pix in which he appeared to be sleep-walking, is again a wide-awake pro creating a straight, quietly humorous character of some sensitivity.
Equally good is Harvey, who succeeds in making appealing a character correctly described as “completely unlovable”–by far his best role since “Room at the Top.” Also ripe for kudos are Frankenheimer, as director, and Axelrod, for best script from another medium. Most likely to succeed is Angela Lansbury, whose performance as Harvey’s scheming, caustic mother (“Raymond, why do you always have to look as if your head were about to come to a point?”) is one of the most poignant and diamond-hard of the ear. “Candidate” must inevitably come up for a bundle of Oscar nominations next spring. This film could not have been made anywhere but in the U.S. “The Manchurian Candidate” thus restores a topical excitement to American films which has been almost totally lacking since Hollywoodites starting taking up residence abroad. Joseph McCarthy, played with farsical but devastating gusto by James Gregory.
A major character in the proceedings is a thinly disguised takeoff on the late Sen. In character and incidental comment, it displays irreverence towards hallowed cliches, be they (all-consuming) mother love, the commercialization of Christmas (“‘The 12 Days of Christmas’?–one day is quite loathsome enough”), Iron Curtain spies (here the Russ agent is an apprehensive boor and the Chinese a whimsical, literate mind from outer Manchuria, if not space), to say nothing of homegrown political frauds who hide behind portraits of Abe Lincoln. Like all the best films, there probably has never been anything quite like “The Manchurian Candidate” before, though in sheer bravado of narrative and photographic styles it shares the tradition of Hitchcock, Capra, Welles and Hawks. The captain’s subsequent pursuit of the truth comprises the bizarre plot which ranges from the halls of Congress, New York publishing circles and an extremely unlikely Communist hideout in mid-Manhattan, to a literally stunning climax at a Madison Square Garden political convention. Harvey himself admits to being the least likely of heroes, and Sinatra, though he testifies that the sergeant is ‘the bravest, most honorable, most loyal’ man he knows, realizes this is completely untrue. Shortly thereafter, the sergeant of the group, Laurence Harvey, is seen being welcomed home in Washington as a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, having been recommended for that award by his captain, Frank Sinatra, who led the illfated patrol. Koch, “Manchurian Candidate” gets off to an early start (before the credits) as a dilemma wrapped in an enigma: a small American patrol in Korea is captured by the Chinese Communists. But the fascinating thing is that, from uncertain premise to shattering conclusion, one does not question plausibility: the events being rooted in their own cinematic reality.Īs scripted by Axelrod and directed by Frankenheimer, who also double as coproducers under exec producer Howard W. government, is, on the surface, one of the wildest fabrications any author has ever tried to palm off on a gullible public. Its story of the tracking down of a brainwashed Korean war “hero,” being used as the key figure in an elaborate Communist plot to take over the U.S. The exact nature of “Manchurian Candidate” may be hard to define, but perhaps “suspense melodrama” is the best term.