He was asleep until a phone call? Was Ismail Ax the trigger to set him to terminator mode?
The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film)
The Manchurian Candidate is a film adapted from the 1959 thriller novel written by Richard Condon. A Cold War thriller, it was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury and Janet Leigh. The central concept of the book and the subsequent 1962 film is that the son of a prominent political family has been brainwashed into becoming an unwilling assassin for the Communist Party.
Plot
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
During the Korean War and the Second Red Scare, the Soviets have developed a technique based on "brainwashing" and akin to hypnosis, whereby a person can be snapped into and out of a trance, ordered to do things with full compliance, and have no memory of such actions afterwards. The Soviets kidnap a patrol of U.S. soldiers fighting in Korea, take them to Manchuria in the People's Republic of China to be brainwashed and then covertly release them back to the American forces. To cover their tracks, the Communists implant false memories in the American soldiers' minds and provide a subconscious trigger whereby one soldier, Raymond Shaw, could be snapped into and out of hypnosis. Even after full reintegration with American society, the soldiers have no conscious knowledge of their experience.
Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and the rest of their platoon believe Shaw saved their lives in combat, for which he receives the Medal of Honor when they return to the US. They also describe him, almost robot-like, as the "kindest, bravest, warmest most wonderful human being" they have ever known in their lives. Deep down, however, they know that he 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 is over, Marco begins to have a recurring nightmare in which Raymond, under a trance during a bizarre demonstration before the Soviet and Chinese brass, kills two of his comrades. He tries to investigate the mystery but receives no support from Army Intelligence for whom he now works because there is no proof to support his position. This changes when he learns that another platoon member has been having the same nightmare and identifies the same Communist personnel. Marco then sets out to uncover the mystery with Army Intelligence support.
The Communists intend to use Raymond as a sleeper agent. They use the queen of diamonds in a deck of playing cards as a subconscious trigger to compel him to follow their orders, which he doesn't remember afterwards.
Raymond's mother (Angela Lansbury) is the driving force behind her husband and Raymond's step-father, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory), a bombastic McCarthy-like demagogue, whom most people dismiss as a fool. Raymond hates them both, especially Iselin, but also his mother who has such a domineering personality.
In fact, unknown to even Raymond, the Iselins are Communist agents whose plan is to go all the way to the White House. Mrs. Iselin herself is the American operative who is to use Raymond in the final step of the operation.
For a while Raymond does find happiness with Jocelyn Jordan (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of one of his step-father's political rivals. What starts as a joke along the line of Romeo and Juliet turns into genuine romance and the young couple marry. Although he is pleased with the match, Jocelyn's father (John McGiver) makes it clear to Raymond's mother that he will still block her husband's bid for the US Vice-Presidency. She in turn uses Raymond to assassinate Jordan and, in the process, Raymond also kills his own wife (he was programmed to kill any witness to crimes he committed while under the direction of his operative).
Mrs. Iselin then primes Raymond to assassinate their party's presidential candidate at the nomination convention. In the aftermath, Senator Iselin, having been the vice-presidential candidate, will become the presidential nominee by default and will make a fiery speech (prepared ahead of time). The assassination will cause mass hysteria, paving Iselin's way to the White House and justifying the new president's emergency powers "that would make martial law seem like anarchy." Senator Iselin would thereby be controlled by the Communists, a candidate made in Manchuria.
In a moving scene, Mrs. Iselin admits, to an apparently still hypnotised Raymond, that she has been a Communist agent for years. She required an assassin for the final step of taking over the US, but had no idea that it would be her own son. After all, the world has plenty of killers who hardly require brainwashing to carry out their assignments. Raymond was chosen because it meant the Russians and Chinese increasing their hold on Mrs. Iselin and, once the deed is done, she intends to take her revenge on them all.
Marco, however, figures out a way to block Raymond's subconscious triggers. Although Marco's attempts seem to fail at first, Raymond in fact keeps control over himself at the party convention and takes his revenge by killing his mother and Iselin. He then commits suicide wearing the Medal of Honor which he now truly merits.
Janet Leigh plays Marco's love interest. A bizarre conversation on a train between her character and Marco has been interpreted by some as implying that Leigh's character, Eugenie, 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 appears almost to be an exchange of passwords. Frankenheimer, however, in the DVD commentary, points out 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.
Critical response
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 consistently in the top 100 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films (#72 as of February 2007). It was #67 on the American Film Institute's "100 Years, 100 Movies," and #17 on its "100 Years, 100 Thrills" lists.
The film received a rare 100% 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]
The Kennedy Assassination
Hollywood rumor holds that Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 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 rumours and treatment surround the film Suddenly! in which Sinatra himself starred as a Presidential assassin.
Trotsky parallels
Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940, by Ramón Mercader. Mercader, who was raised by his mother to be a Soviet agent and assassin, was visiting Trotsky's home as a sleeper agent when he killed him with an ice axe in the skull.
Trivia
The film has the first-ever Karate fight in an American motion picture (at least according to Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary).
The fight takes place in Raymond's apartment between Marco and Raymond's Korean manservant (Henry Silva) who is a Communist agent. It is similar to the later battles between Inspector Clouseau and his Oriental manservant Cato in The Pink Panther movies. During that fight sequence, Frank Sinatra broke his little finger when he smashed his hand through a wooden desk.
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. 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. (Source: Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary.)
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. (Source: Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary.)
Although Angela Lansbury plays Raymond Shaw's mother, in reality she was only three years older than Laurence Harvey.
See also
Conspiracy thriller
Project MKULTRA, CIA mind-control research program
The Bourne Identity
Seven Days in May
The Simultaneous Man
Telefon
"The Deadly Assassin"
Sleeper agent
The Boys from Brazil
Spy film
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Originally Posted by rottweiler
Chosen - the name for Korea as a Japanese province (1910-1945)
Choson, Korea, Korean Peninsula - an Asian peninsula (off Manchuria) separating the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan; the Korean name is Choson.
Get it? Manchurian Candidate.
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