Review of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by Kyle M — 18 Jul 2014

I'd say that my experience watching this film may be reflected on the tagline seen on the original poster.

"If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won't know what it's all about!" - that's very true - "When you've seen it all, you'll swear there's never been anything like it!" That tagline is surprisingly true. At first, it was hard knowing what was going on. So I went back to the first five minutes, and it got only a little clearer. But until I got to the second half, I'd started to understand the meaning of its way completely (almost actually). So it's true on what the second part of the tagline meant: I'd never seen anything like it.

Staff Sergeant Richard Shaw (Laurence Harvey) returns from the Korean War to the U.S. lines, and was given a Medal of Honor by his commander Mayor Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra). But he's not actually free from his freedom, there's still his nasty, sinister, controlling mother Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury) and his McCarthy-like stepfather Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), and he's not completely himself like when he left to go to war. Shaw was brainwashed when his U.S. platoon was captured and taken to Manchuria in Communist China. Whenever he hears the words to play solitaire, he goes into a blank and do an order after seeing the Queen of Diamonds card. He do an order of killing with no memory of his horrific action.

Marco kept having a recurring nightmare of Shaw killing his two "missing" comrades. So he went to investigate, and save his "kid" (a nickname he gave to Shaw) from doing any more killings, if his nightmare turns out to be right. A technique he'd figured before the climax is the smartest handling for that kind of situation.

It's like what Alfred Hitchcock would do when directing a political thriller. There are some tactics and tiny homages to his ways of creating suspense. The suspense begin to stir when Shaw was offered solitaire and will eventually do an order.

So it's a nice satire in a small way when making fun of the way how that time was like between a part of the government and the communists. It's also.

It's definitely something I've never seen before. With a deck of cards initiating the brainwash and the suspense, and Lansbury's nasty character when I've only seen her as sweet characters (i.e. "Beauty and the Beast" and "Anastasia"). A nice film on the Cold War with some melodrama power in the last two orders that Shaw was brainwashed to take. (Probably need a better way to end this review, but it'll do like that for now.) (B+).