Review of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by Rameshwar I — 21 Apr 2016

If one can digest the silliness of its brainwashing concept and the trigger mechanism, it can easily turn out to be an excellent viewing experience. I did not quite get it in the first few seconds of the demonstration sequence, not because I could not follow a complex editing or screenplay but I just did not see it coming in a movie of that era. This is one of the most elaborate and beautifully written scripts I have ever come across.

Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and his team were termed heroes and showered with medals and awards when they fight their way back home through a deep enemy territory during the Korean war. Shaw's mother Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury) is a manipulative power broker now married to Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory) with a full intent to put him on the pedestal. Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) a member of Shaw's team and few others starts to have nightmares that contradict their daring escape story all pointing to something skeptical about Shaw. When Marco begins to lose his mind over this, he starts an unofficial inquiry until he finds something solid.

The writing, editing, screenplay and performances were top notch for its time with a lot of emphasis on character development. But the narrative style did put me off sometimes especially Sinatra's piece. The girlfriend/wife character is out of the blue and does not serve any purpose than for him to go on narrating instead of having a conversation. Though it was brilliant for the writing to show the handlers do a lot of mock tests on their brainwash project before a real approach, the whole thing somehow looks messy and too fictional. The movie could've been easily been 20 minutes lesser in its runtime and action sequences were too dated. I can only speculate what a chilling resonance it could have had after JFK's assassination only a year later.

Not without its glitches but a brilliant writing with a complexity that is not seen in its era.