.jpg)
The 1960s was a turbulent time, for America and the world. The Cold War was entering a dangerous new phase, with nuclear brinksmanship in the Caribbean, the Vietnam War beginning to heat up, widespread civil unrest, and a dizzying series of assassinations and coups. Consequently, it was the start of the golden age of the political thriller, ripe fodder for explorations of paranoia and the intricacies of geopolitics. And it arguably started with The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer's landmark psychological thriller released in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.The year is 1954. A U.S. Army platoon returns as heroes after being captured in Korea. Their sergeant, Raymond Shaw, receives the Medal of Honor for saving his platoon's lives in combat. But he and all the other men keep having the same recurring nightmare. Bennett Marco, also plagued by the dream, does some digging and discovers that Shaw, who was never actually liked by the men for his strictness and stiff demeanor, is (unbeknownst to anyone including himself) a sleeper agent for a joint Sino-Soviet brainwashing project as a means of installing a Communist plant in the White House.
The Manchurian Candidate is the quintessential Cold War thriller. It's got an all-star cast, including Frank Sinatra (in what's probably his best role), Janet Leigh (whose star was ascendant following Psycho), and Angela Lansbury in a role that will absolutely make you never be able to look at the kindly old lady of Murder, She Wrote the same way again. Its influence is widespread, with its eerily prescient commentary on brainwashing (a term popularized by this very film and originating from pre-Communist China) and providing ripe fodder for later science fiction thrillers, including hit video games BioShock and Call of Duty: Black Ops.
While on its surface Frankenheimer's film seems explicitly anti-Communist, with its portrayal of Soviet and especially Chinese agents treating Shaw as little more than a carefully-constructed experimental machine, it threads the needle a little bit more deftly than your average spy movie from the era. The 1950s were the height of the McCarthyist period, and Senator Joe Iselin is an unflinching parody of McCarthy himself, in one early scene making repeated claims of multiple communist infiltrators in the U.S. government but never giving the same number every time, at one point giving three different numbers in just a few seconds. (When he presses his scheming wife, Shaw's mother, for an exact number, she spots the bottle of ketchup he's dumping on his overcooked steak, and the next day, he announces a list of exactly 57 card-carrying communists.) The film ultimately seems to be making the argument that authoritarianism plays out the same no matter who's in charge. And given what we now know about MKULTRA and similar projects by America and the west, that argument almost seems like a salient point.
Whatever your feelings about the film's political message, at least to the extent that it can be said to be a genuine political thriller at all, The Manchurian Candidate is nonetheless an eerie herald of the coming violence of the decade. A year later, President John F. Kennedy was dead, shot by an emotionally unstable man with a murky history in the Communist Bloc.* Frankenheimer would follow it up with two more films to round out what would retroactively be titled his "Paranoia trilogy," the explicitly political thriller Seven Days in May (about an attempted coup by the military to topple a president seen as soft on communism) and Seconds (a shadowy group of the ultra-wealthy kidnap a depressed middle-aged banker, fake his death, and subject him to radical plastic surgery to give him a fresh start on life, whether he wants it or not.) These films are a reflection of the decade they were produced in: paranoid, cynical, and suffused with the feeling that powerful interests are manipulating us from behind the scenes and we have no say in the matter.
Huh. That feels familiar.
-june❤
*A persistent rumor floated around for years that the film was pulled from circulation following the assassination on the orders of Frank Sinatra (who played Marco.) None of this is true, though the film didn't see as much play as other films of the era until the 1988 home video release.
No comments:
Post a Comment