Iselin can't decide how many communists he thinks are in the State Department, and settles on 57 after studying a ketchup bottle.įrankenheimer (1930-2002) was a tall man, movie-star handsome, who told hilarious stories about his adventures as a boy wonder in the days of live network television. Frankenheimer says on the commentary track that he is proudest that the film hammered McCarthyism there's a scene where the hard-drinking Sen.
#THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE FULL MOVIE 1962 MOVIE#
The movie is based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon, who must have been astonished that it became a film with big stars like Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey - and still more astonished that Frankenheimer and Axelrod did not soften its wicked satire. The plan: Use anti-communist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover. Joseph McCarthy, and makes him the puppet of his draconian wife, who is in league with foreign communists. John Iselin, who is clearly modeled on Sen. The villains plan to exploit a terrorist act, "rallying a nation of viewers to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy." The plot cheerfully divides blame between right and left it provides a right-wing demagogue named Sen.
Seen today, "The Manchurian Candidate" feels astonishingly contemporary its astringent political satire still bites, and its story has uncanny contemporary echoes. Sinatra says it was the high point of his acting career nobody mentions why it was unseen for 24 years. The DVD includes a conversation by Sinatra, Frankenheimer and writer George Axelrod, taped when the movie was finally re-released. In fact, the director John Frankenheimer told me, Sinatra had a dispute with United Artists about the profits, and decided it would earn no money for the studio or anyone else. Frank Sinatra, the film's star, purchased the rights and kept it out of release from 1964 until 1988, and the story goes that he was inspired by remorse after Kennedy's death. This is politics, and filmmaking, the way they’re meant to be: breathless.The film has become so linked with the Kennedy assassination that a legend has grown up around it. But beyond the heart-racing plot and the tremendous acting (Frank Sinatra is especially good as Harvey’s old Army buddy), The Manchurian Candidate retains it status as a one-of-a-kind classic in large part because of Frankenheimer’s inventive, highly stylized direction and the film’s confident, propulsive pacing. Taken to Manchuria in northeast Red China, he is brainwashed, then released, unaware that he’s been primed to assassinate a Presidential candidate when activated back in the States by his communist “operator” - in fact, his stepmother, played with reptilian glee by Angela Lansbury.
The story, from a 1959 Richard Condon novel, is mind-bending enough: the scion of an American political dynasty (Laurence Harvey) is captured during the Korean War. A half-century old this year, John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece was the first great conspiracy film - and the movie by which all other conspiracy flicks have been, and always will be, measured. There are conspiracy movies, there are political thrillers, there are films that spark entirely new cinematic genres - and then there’s The Manchurian Candidate. Cast: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh Get This Movie