Manchurian Candidate, The (DVD)

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Mystery drama. Cold-War political farce. Spine-tingling thriller. Read it how you will, 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate" takes us for a wild, Wonderland ride through the mother of all conspiracy theories.

Based on the best-selling novel by Richard Condon, who viewed his work as satire, the movie was written by George Axelrod ("The Seven-Year Itch," "Bus Stop," "Breakfast at Tiffany's"), and directed by John Frankenheimer ("Birdman of Alcatraz," "Seven Days in May," "Black Sunday"), who have it both ways--serious and satiric. Frankly, I think Frankenheimer topped himself with "Seven Days in May," for me still the greatest conspiracy-theory movie ever made; but with "The Manchurian Candidate" he fashioned what many folks think is the quintessential paranoid mystery classic, as apparently so did the American Film Institute, voting it number sixty-seven on their list of 100 all-time best movies.

Yet "The Manchurian Candidate" probably wouldn't have gotten made at all if it weren't for its star, Frank Sinatra. Studios were reluctant to touch the politically sensitive book, dealing as it does with the Soviet brainwashing of an American citizen into becoming an instant assassin, studios fearing it might interfere with the U.S. Government's relations with Russia at a crucial period in history. But Sinatra was a friend of then-President John F. Kennedy, and when he asked the President what he thought about the idea of making the movie, Kennedy said to go for it. Ironically, when Kennedy was shot a year or so later, the studio and Sinatra insisted the movie be removed from circulation, and for over a quarter of a century it remained withdrawn, not appearing again until its rerelease in 1988.

In the film, Sinatra plays Major Ben Marco, the leader of an American patrol captured in Korea in 1952. During this time the squad is turned over to the Russians, who transport them to Manchuria and brainwash them into thinking that they wiped out an entire squad of North Koreans and fled to safety. They are conditioned to believe that one of them, Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), saved all their lives and delivered them back to safety single-handedly. Because of the squad's account of his bravery, Shaw is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

What is not known to anyone but the Russians (and the audience) is that Shaw was programmed during his capture to be a killer, an assassin who will follow any command given him whenever he's triggered to do so by seeing the queen of hearts in a deck of cards. In three test situations leading up to his final assignment, Shaw is ordered to murder people around him and does so unquestioningly. What the Russians ultimately have in store for him is one of the film's many surprises.

Ah, but when the squad return to the States and several years pass by, some of the men start having nightmares, weird dreams about Shaw killing one or more of their number. Sinatra's character is among the men tormented by strange dreams, and because he is promoted to the army's Intelligence Division, he eventually has access to pursue what these dreams could signify.

In the meantime, we get to know Shaw a little better. By coincidence or no, his mother (Angela Lansbury) is married to an ultraconservative, right-wing nutcase U.S. Senator (James Gregory), patterned after the real-life, red-baiting Joe McCarthy; the stepfather is a quack who goes around accusing anyone who disagrees with of him of being a Communist. But he's a fool and a drunk, and it's really Shaw's mother who manipulates him, just as she manipulates her son. When Shaw falls in love with the daughter (Leslie Parrish) of a liberal, left-wing senator (John McGiver), the mother has a conniption and insists her son break it off. He cannot seem to resist her bidding any more than he can resist the dictates of his Communist masters.

Sinatra is perfectly cast as the heroic but tortured Major Marco, a man who first thinks he might be going mad and then slowly catches on that something outside himself is amiss. It's one of Sinatra's two or three best film roles. Laurence Harvey is equally good as the seemingly indomitable Shaw, a hardnose with few or no friends, who seems tough and self composed on the outside yet is easily twisted around his mother's clinging finger as well as the Communists'. Harvey portrays a character of strength and weakness simultaneously, a neat accomplishment.

But the real standout in the show is Angela Lansbury, who was nominated for, but did not win, a Best-Supporting Actress Oscar. (She did win a Golden Globe, but who remembers?) Lansbury is brilliant as the nasty, evil, sinister, conniving mother who has her own personal plans for her son as well as for her lamebrain senator husband. Her son constantly resents her, yet he ceaselessly complies with her will. It's only toward the end of the film, when we see the mother plant a big wet one on the son's lips, that we begin to understand the full import of the situation.

Yet another part of the film's fine madness is that Ms. Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey when she played his mother, and nobody seems to notice! Still, Hitchcock beat Frankenheimer on that front a few years earlier by casting Jessie Royce Landis as Cary Grant's mother in "North By Northwest." Landis and Grant were the same age.