From the Archives: Frankenheimer’s ‘Candidate’ a Big Winner

John Frankenheimer, the director, was well into “The Manchurian Candidate,” which he was filming from George Axelrod’s script, when I asked him what it’s about. Frankenheimer took a deep breath, stammered a few words and then gave up. “You’ll have to see it and figure that out for yourself,” he said.

I understand readers of Richard Condon’s novel had something of the same difficulty in trying to describe it to friends.

Anyhow, whatever it was that threw readers of the book into incoherencies has been carried over into the picture.

I have now looked at the pesky thing twice. I went the second time to see if I would see what I thought I saw the first time.

“The Manchurian Candidate” is not only fascinating because it is so unpredictable as storytelling but also because it reverts to the kind of movie-making that made cinema — sheer “film” — a joy, and an end in itself.

Study of Welles

Its sight-sound technique suggests a profitable study of Orson Welles, its melodrama a ditto of Elia Kazan and its surprises a ditto of Alfred Hitchcock — not a bad parlay! Frankenheimer has operated on the principle that the eye is quicker than the hand: If, on sober second thought, he has a lot to “alibi” for, most of the pieces in his jigsaw puzzle still astonish by the ease with which they seem eventually to drop into place.

But what IS it about? A Manchurian? A candidate? A candidate for what?

Among other things, this is the most frightening picture about brainwashing ever made — and there are moments, particularly in the earlier sequences, during which the viewer may begin to believe he is undergoing a session or two himself. I don’t know how far this fiendish “science” has progressed or that it could do to any human organism what it does here to Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey. Some will dismiss the concept as sheerest fantasy, or see in Raymond Shaw just a nuclear-age version of that older, less complicated Frankenstein’s monster

Shocked Laughs

Raymond Shaw kills six people horrifyingly. At the preview there were some titters in the wrong places, but I am inclined to attribute them less to mockery than to shock or nervous disbelief. There were also gasps.

Frankenheimer cheats at the finish little. But it is one of those fine moot points: By fooling us for a few breathtaking seconds, he is able to build up to the biggest gasp of all. This occurs at a presidential campaign rally in Madison Square Garden ... the culmination of a bizarre chain of events dating back to the Korean front in 1952.

The brainwashers are Red China Communists, the brainwashed several members of an American Army patrol, led by Harvey and Frank Sinatra, who are betrayed by their interpreter, Henry Silva, ambushed and whisked aboard a helicopter to a brainwashing “class” in Manchuria. Here their “instructor” is a squat, fearsome psychiatrist named Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh) and what happens to them is like some monstrous nightmare, as diabolically funny as it is hair-raising.

The Gls are spirited back to their lines and they gradually resume normal lives. All except Harvey: He is the Reds’ guinea pig, and he is “sick in a kind of special way”: he has been trained to kill and to have no memory of the killing and thus no sense of guilt or fear. He is their triggerman, their obedient assassin in America, and the big job he is being saved for is to come at the order of his “American operator.”

Who that operator is provides not the least of the surprises.

Sinatra, now a peacetime major in Army intelligence, is the man who begins to sense a continuity in all these events and sets out to piece them together. It is like a detective story to which the key is as strange as the “Rosebud” in Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

Harvey is hardly the typical GI, but then Raymond Shaw is not like other men. This is one or his strongest performances, as is in turn that given by Sinatra as the major. But the most chilling portrayal is reserved for Angela Lansbury as Raymond’s politically ambitious mother; it will live, as the saying goes, in infamy.

Still others scoring in a remarkably offbeat cast are James Gregory his McCarthy-like senator-father; Leslie Parrish, his girlfriend; John McGiver her father, also a senator; Janet Leigh, in love with Sinatra; James Edwards, Barry Kelley, Douglas Henderson, Albert Paulsen, Madame Spivy and, of course. Silva and Dhiegh.

Communists are the villains also — but less ingenious ones — in “Escape From East Berlin,” a timely “exploitation” film made for MGM by Walter Wood and Don Murray, who has the male lead, in West Berlin. It is a reenactment of the “tunnel 28” incident that took place behind, under and outside “the wall” in August of last year.

Ingenuity Gains

The picture has old-fashioned but ultimately gripping direction by Robert Siodmak, a veteran of hard-hitting early Hollywood talkies. The characters are mostly the usual German types, except for beauteous Christine Kaufmann, who is certainly unusual, and Hollywood’s adopted Werner Klemperer. They tend to be self-conscious in acting but a stilted script (despite three writers), which appears to have been arbitrarily cut and contains false leads, like that suspicious neighbor with the hoe.

Once the tunnel is underway, however, the suspense quickens and the last couple of reels prove worth the wait.

The picture does manage to suggest something of the tragedy of this divided city and the heartbreak and desperation of loved ones separated, as they are here, by only 100 yards. One can hardly restrain a cheer when they finally make it to the other side, all 28 of them.