The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Directed by John Frankenheimer
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Why Don’t You Pass the Time by Playing a Little Solitaire? By Fearless Young Orphan The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Directed by John Frankenheimer I saw it: August 19, 2010 Why haven’t I seen it yet? For the longest time, I didn’t even know what it was supposed to be about, or that it was supposed to be any good. It seemed like one of those movies that is famous for its confusing title. I even saw the 2004 remake first, and then this little beauty turned up on my list of classics. Candidate A platoon of American soldiers stationed in Korea comes under attack. Most of the platoon is rescued by Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who displays such valiant behavior that he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor upon his return. This is good news for his mother, the Mrs. Iselin who is married to Senator Iselin (who, Raymond assures everyone adamantly, is only Raymond’s stepfather). Mrs. Iselin would like her husband to become the Vice President of the United States, and it certainly doesn’t hurt matters to have a hero in the family. Angela Lansbury, icy and quite beautiful, eats this role alive; she may be one of the most evil and frightening characters I’ve ever seen in a film. What is amusing about her is that we know from the moment we hear her speak that she is a villain, long before we know exactly what the hell she’s up to. Her son hates and fears her; he can’t get away from her fast enough. The rest of the platoon also returns to the States but more than one of them is troubled by nightmares. We follow Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) as he tries to get on with his life but he’s on the brink of a nervous breakdown thanks to what he sees in his sleep. He dreams of his platoon sitting in placidly on a gardening lecture amidst many elegantly dressed elderly women, but the women keep changing faces and becoming Korean, Chinese and Russian officials. The gardening lecture switches from talk of magnolias to talk of brainwashing. And then the nice lady giving the lecture orders Raymond Shaw to do some very nasty things. Raymond does them. This is when Marco always wakes up screaming. The dream sequence, which is told from two different viewpoints in the film, is a creepy, ominous scene, and is one of the best-constructed movie- nightmares I’ve seen done. It captures exactly the elusive, slippery nature of dreams and the strange horrors of nightmares, which don’t always have monsters leaping at you but are often about horrible, uncontrollable events unspooling. It’s a landmark film scene, and it alone recommends the entire movie. But lucky for us, there’s also quite a Not only are they brainwashed, sleep-deprived POWs, but they bit more good movie to watch. So also have to listen to a lecture about gardening. it’s not all about one extremely good scene, hooray! Marco is fairly convinced that his platoon was taken prisoner and brainwashed, and he suspects Raymond Shaw is at the heart of the matter. Marco’s stress over this is such that he is put on a “leave of absence” from the active duty, as the Army doesn’t like its soldiers getting too obviously shaky. On his involuntary vacation, Marco goes to find Shaw, to get to the bottom of this mess. Rather than treating the badly brainwashed pawn Shaw as a remorseless villain, the movie instead follows Marco and Shaw as the men become reacquainted. Having heard the story of Shaw’s life, which has been so utterly ruled by his mother’s influence, Marco comes to sympathize with this man. He wants not only to stop whatever Shaw has been programmed to do, but to help Shaw himself. That’s a nice touch, because while poor Raymond Shaw insists that he, Shaw, is “not lovable,” I wanted to help and protect this man. He’s such a helpless victim. What he wanted from life, and what he has been dealt, are at such odds that one cannot help but sympathize. Through his investigation, Marco discovers that Raymond has a series of trigger mechanisms imbedded in his subconscious. If Raymond hears the words, “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” then Raymond automatically reaches for a deck of cards. He plays mindlessly until he sees the queen of diamonds, at which point he goes into a trance and is completely at his brainwasher’s command: he will follow any order given to him without question or remorse. This method of brainwashing is most likely a complete load of crap, but as a movie device it’s really fun to think a basically decent man can be turned into a mindless killing machine. Marco does what he can to deprogram poor Shaw, but by the time Marco has it all figured out, it may be too late, because evil Mrs. Iselin’s plan is coming into play. Oh yeah, this particular queen of diamonds was in on the entire thing; she is a Communist agent whose plan is to invade the United States in the most devastating way possible: through its heart and mind, and in such a way that nobody ever realizes that we’ve been invaded until it’s far too late. Spoilers may be a moot point now because it’s an old movie and there’s been a remake, but I’m not going to spoil anyway because really, the last half hour or so is unbearably tense, even if you sort of know what’s coming. I wouldn’t want to ruin that for anybody. This is a smart thriller that grabs the viewer’s interest from the beginning and doesn’t let go, pausing only here and there to let us get to know our characters. The interesting thing is that, perhaps, we don’t ever really get to know anybody. On the train to meet with Raymond Shaw, Marco encounters an attractive woman named Rosie (Janet Leigh) who drums up a romance with him but says the damned strangest things you’ve ever heard. What is she up to? Who is she really? Can Marco or Shaw trust anybody at all? These guys can’t even trust their own memories. Though it may not sit well with us, we never find out for certain what Rosie is doing, so we just have to coast along on our paranoid speculations. Now I have a single complaint about an element that consistently brought me out of the story. I was able to suspend my disbelief about the extreme brainwashing of Raymond Shaw: fine, he’s a pliable puppet of a Communist regime. But I simply could not accept the priming mechanism used to trigger his obedience. First of all, as a long-time office employee, you know I’ve played about a thousand hours of solitaire. There is no guarantee in any solitaire game that the queen of diamonds will ever show its face. That sucker could be buried at the bottom of your biggest stack. So already, there is a problem. What if Raymond’s solitaire game is stuck and he never sees the trigger? Okay, and also they have picked a somewhat common thing. It’s like having Raymond trigger off a picture of Sophia Loren or something. Obviously any symbol of the queen of diamonds does the trick, because his true-love Jocelyn shows up at a costume part dressed as the queen of diamonds (and yes, it’s supposed to be a complete coincidence, which is like, the stupidest thing ever in a movie that is otherwise so smart). So what happens if Raymond goes to a casino, or gets into a poker game with some buddies, or watches Alice in Wonderland? Does he just flip in and out of a trance state until his brain blows up? As if that isn’t bad enough, at one point a bartender just accidently happens to say exactly the right words in Raymond’s presence “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” because, of course, that phrase just comes up in conversations all the damn time, and Raymond trances himself right into the lake at Central Park. So the whole solitaire thing was a problem for me, and I had to work around it. If Raymond’s trigger had been more believable, I would have simply loved this movie. Seeing The Manchurian Candidate was like being in a relationship. I loved most of it, but was forced to ignore some flaws, and then realized that I could never fully trust what was going on. Companion Film: The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Directed by Jonathan Demme You know, this is a rather good film. Manchurian’s remake wisely took the story idea of a sleeper agent and transplanted it in modern America, made our platoon veterans of the Gulf War rather than Korea, and made the villains to be a corporation rather than the Communists, and did a bit of tinkering with the roles of our characters. There are great actors at work, who do not try to mimic their predecessors but instead create interesting new spins on the older ideas. Denzel Washington is Marco in this one, and he takes the role of a traumatized soldier to a nice new level where they didn’t quite dare take Sinatra—meaning he’s not only on the verge of a nervous breakdown but is behaving so strangely and saying such bizarre things (“I have a chip implanted in my shoulder!”) that most of us would quickly assume he was a schizophrenic and needed to be hospitalized and medicated.