The Manchurian Candidate’s Villains Still Have the Run of the Place

In writing about The Manchurian Candidate, I want to open with a facetious joke about how unimaginable for young people the politics of October 1962 must have been, but I am so very tired. I’ll just say that like most things from the Cold War, John Frankenheimer’s eerily dark film—steeped in the paranoia of spy thrillers of the time, and released in theaters as Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear annihilation—is recognizable in the most exhausting way.

As the film turns 60—as the height of the Cold War turns 60, as six decades separate us from McCarthyism—I guess we’ve gotta talk about its world: The one where Russian strongmen and snarling American demagogues rage at each other in the limelight while dancing with one another in the shadows. The lines on the map they fight over are incidental. Behind them, deep in the territory of their enemies, they’re perfectly capable of finding people vengeful enough, ambitious enough, morally bankrupt enough to be their allies.

In some corner of the Korean War, a group of American GIs lead by Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), a commanding officer with the kind of Mid-Atlantic accent nobody has anymore, are led into a trap. Somehow, they make it out and back stateside. It’s an inspiring story: Raymond, the stepson of an ambitious senator and his overbearing socialite mother, is now a war hero credited with saving his entire unit during a near-disastrous operation. But Raymond’s recollections of the event are fractured, and more than one of his Army colleagues are plagued by horrific nightmares that tell a very different tale of what happened during the op.

One of them, Marco (Frank Sinatra himself) can’t shake himself away from the night terrors: In them, his entire brainwashed unit sits in a garden party for some gathering of proper Southern ladies. When we zoom out, though, we discover that they’re being exhibited as the successful products of psychological reprogramming to a roomful of Communist intelligence officers (some played by actual Asian actors, unlike other Asian characters in the movie…).

The premise is on display for the audience immediately: Raymond is so brainwashed that, on command, he murders two of his own squadmates as they passively allow it. It’s a profoundly dark and inventive set piece, and one of the reasons people haven’t forgotten the movie in 60 years. At one point, we see the illusory garden party from the perspective of a different member of Raymond’s unit, Corporal Melvin (James Edwards). Melvin, who is Black, sees the “garden party” as populated entirely by Black women. It shows both the lengths and the limits of the programming, while beating the audience over the head with the sheer dissonance of a Black woman dressed in her Sunday best as she affects the intensity of a Soviet spymaster questioning Raymond’s handlers about how effective this perfect spy and assassin really is.

The spectacle plays this close to dark comedy when you see it in the context of Raymond’s stepfather, the blustering Senator Iselin (James Gregory), who surely must tuck Black women and Russian KGB into the same folder in his mind’s one tiny, dusty cabinet. While returning as a hero, the prickly Raymond is greeted by stifling fanfare courtesy of Iselin and, of course, Raymond’s mother Eleanor (the late, great Angela Lansbury). Senator Iselin’s claim to fame is yelling about how many Communists have infiltrated the U.S. government (he plaintively suggests to Eleanor that she at least try to keep the numbers consistent when those pesky reporters push back on his accusations). Raymond wants nothing to do with either of them, and who could blame him?

Meanwhile, certain that his nightmares and fractured memories of Raymond’s supposed heroism are more than just PTSD, Marco begins to investigate the war hero, and the weird things Raymond gets up to when he happens to stumble across the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards. Whoever holds that trump card has the power to tell Raymond to do anything, no matter how awful or against his nature.

I served them, I fought for them, I’m on the point of winning for them the greatest foothold they will ever have in this country, and they paid me back by taking your soul away from you. … Because they thought it would bind me closer to them. But now we have come almost to the end. One last step. And then, when I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously underestimating me.