CORROSIVE COMMENTARY ON BOTH ANTI-COMMUNIST AMERICA AND the Korean War are perversely united in a plot that gives new meaning to “layered,” in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a crazy theorem with a “given” and a “to prove.” The given is a prologue in the form of a pre-credits sequence and an opening title: “Korea 1952.” A patrol led by the unpopular Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is betrayed by an interpreter (Henry Silva), later revealed to be in the service of the North Koreans. The patrol is ambushed, rendered unconscious, and carried off on stretchers, destination unspecified. That much makes sense. We assume we will see the men, or at least some of them, later. But there is something puzzling about the interpreter, who looks more Mediterranean than Korean, which is understandable since Silva was half Sicilian and half Spanish. A Red, or a red herring? A step in proving the theorem? A matter to be clarified later? Or a sign that we are in a world where reason no longer prevails, and the irrational holds sway?
After the credits roll, Shaw is being welcomed with great fanfare for having saved the lives of his men, routing the enemy, and, after three days during which the patrol had been reported missing, leading them back to safety—acts of heroism that merit the Congressional Medal of Honor. This account of Shaw’s bravery is the first of many such mind-teasing incidents. When did Shaw perform these heroic acts, if he did? After he and the patrol had been carried off on stretchers—and to where?
At the ceremony, Shaw is upstaged by his mother, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury), who uses the occasion to campaign for his stepfather, Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory), a vice presidential candidate. Shaw loathes them both, but he is especially contemptuous of his stepfather, who is in the thrall of his manipulative wife. (The backstory, which is not in the film, can be found in Richard Condon’s novel of the same name. Iselin had been the law partner of Raymond’s father and the lover of the power-obsessed Eleanor, who divorced her husband when he resisted her machinations and married the malleable Iselin.) Eleanor and her puppet spouse pose as rabid anti-communists, even though Iselin cannot keep straight the number of communists he claims are in the State Department. In that respect, he is not unlike Senator Joseph McCarthy, except that Iselin is more stupid than sleazy.
Another member of the patrol, Captain (later Major) Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), is plagued by a recurrent nightmare in which the members of the patrol are at a New Jersey garden party where a woman is extolling the virtues of hydrangeas. An extraordinary circular shot tracks left to right, from the lethargic looking men to the garden club ladies, then reverses direction, as if to close the circle. Eventually, we realize that during the three days the men were reported missing, they had been flown to Manchuria, where they were brainwashed—or “dry-cleaned,” as a communist doctor gleefully remarks. Marco is reliving a demonstration that took place before an audience of communist functionaries, in which Shaw was singled out as an example of successful brainwashing. Another indication that something is amiss occurs when Shaw is asked to identify the person he dislikes least. When he names Captain Marco, the hydrangea expert insists he pick another: “That won’t do, Raymond. We need the captain to get you your medal.” But Shaw is unworthy of the medal. He did not save his patrol; in fact, he kills two of its members. To illustrate the effectiveness of the experiment, Shaw is ordered to strangle one of the men, then shoot another, tasks he performs with the dispassion of a somnambulist.
Shaw has become a programmed assassin. The procedure setting him in motion never varies. He receives a call telling him to play solitaire, which he does unquestioningly. When the queen of diamonds—the red queen, the symbol of his controlling mother—keeps turning up, he is ready for his next assignment. At present, that task is murdering the liberal editor of the newspaper for which he works. Shaw kills unfeelingly, unable to remember what he has done and experiencing no guilt.
Gradually, we realize Shaw’s mother has something to do with her son’s programming, but exactly what? Initially, she was opposed to his relationship with Jocie, the daughter of a senator who does not conceal his contempt for Iselin, whom she denounced as a “communist tart.” But when Mother Shaw realizes that a marriage between her son and Jocie could bring the senator into her orbit, she stages an elaborate costume ball, at which Iselin dons a fake beard in order to look like an Amish farmer, accompanied by Mother Shaw costumed as a cross between a shepherdess and a matronly Little Bo Peep. Raymond is dressed as a gaucho, Jocie, as the queen of diamonds—which may mean either that she is part of the conspiracy or that her choice of costume was accidental. Tragically, it was the latter. When Mother Shaw realizes that the senator is committed to blocking her husband’s nomination, it is elimination time. The situation becomes more complicated when Shaw and Jocie elope. It is then time for a game of solitaire, with the senator as victim. Unfortunately, Jocie appears at the crime scene and is murdered as well. (In the novel, both murders are ugly. Raymond shoots the senator in the forehead, and Jocie gets one bullet in each eye.) Raymond Shaw has killed his father-in-law and his wife. He has two more to go.
The Manchurian Candidate has the dazzling unreality of a work like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which is so grippingly preposterous (“Who is John Galt?”) one keeps turning the pages in disbelief, hoping that eventually it will all make sense. The Manchurian Candidate (both the novel and the film) is also hypnotically improbable. To use E. M. Forster’s phrase, it is an “and then” type of story, in which motivation gives way to chronology. Instead of cause and effect, there is a series of “and this happened,” followed by “and then that happened,” with “this” alternating with “that” until the last link in the narrative chain has been forged, with “The End” in place of a resolution.
As The Manchurian Candidate approaches what would normally pass for closure, the truth is disgorged from the clotted mass of story lines awaiting some kind of unification. Mother Shaw divulges the truth, which she articulates so chillingly, each syllable ice-coated, that we hang on every word she utters. She coldly informs her Pavlovian killer-son that he is to dress as a priest to gain access to Madison Square Garden, where a political convention is taking place. He must then shoot the presidential nominee through the head, making it possible for Iselin to steal the spotlight and deliver a speech that is a model of rhetoric—a speech that, she rhapsodizes, has been “worked on” in the United States and the Soviet Union, implying that there are communist cells in America in league with Moscow. The speech will sweep her and her mannequin husband into the White House, where they will replace the republic with a totalitarian state. She then kisses Raymond as she would a lover. The incestuous implications would not have shocked readers of the novel, in which the adolescent Eleanor has sex with her father in the attic of their home. Her incestuous relationship with her father, which naturally is not mentioned in the film, comes close to explaining why Mother Shaw, having broken the incest taboo with her father, could easily break it again with her son. However, neither mother nor son will live long enough for the unspeakable to occur.
At this point in the film, logic begins to buckle—but not snap apart. Mother Shaw has been anti-communist from the start, yet she has worked with the Soviets and North Koreans to produce a robotic assassin, not realizing that it would be her son. Once she and her spouse are safely ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she intends to make the brainwashers pay for what they have done, vowing, “[T]hey will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you and what they have contemptuously done to me.” Apparently, what they have done to her takes precedence over what they have done to him. Clearly, she understands that her son is the human equivalent of a computer program. One wonders if she would have had Raymond deprogrammed after the assassination, or, more likely, kept him as he is so she could have a personal hit man. Perhaps she never intended to be her own son’s controller, but that is exactly what happened. One wonders if this wasn’t a perverse joke the Soviets and North Koreans played on her. They must have known Raymond Shaw was her son. The Manchurian Candidate invites all sorts of speculation, little of it conclusive.
Mother Shaw’s dream of turning America into a fascist state is not farfetched. Only her chosen means are. She adopts the Soviet model and then discards it, along with those she colluded with—but she retains her original model’s totalitarian features. In the early years of the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed to be a failed philosophy, fascism or some sort of dictatorship appeared to be an alternative. And after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Fritz Kuhn, head of the pro-Hitler German-American Bund, embarked on a campaign to emulate the Nazis’ demonization of Jews by characterizing them as an alien race and enemies of the United States. Although Kuhn denied that he wanted a Nazified America, this was his goal. Mother Shaw’s would have been an American police state that owed more to Stalin’s Russia than Hitler’s Germany.
Marco deprograms Raymond by showing him that he was playing solitaire with a force deck, one that contains fifty-two replicas of the same card, the Queen of Diamonds. Raymond now knows who must be killed, and it is not the nominee. He dispatches his mother and stepfather before turning the rifle on himself. He has thus committed matricide, uxoricide, suicide, and—if stepfathers and fathers-in-law qualify—patricide. Marco’s final thoughts in the film differ from those in the novel, in which he mutters, “No electric chair for a Medal of Honor man.” Unless Marco divulges the truth, Shaw will be remembered as a deranged killer, not the son of a mother who dreamed of turning America into a dictatorship. The film ends with Marco’s personal commendation for Shaw’s Congressional Medal of Honor, which, if it ever saw print, would have validated Shaw as the hero he had originally been made out to be—but in a different way: “He had been made to commit acts too unspeakable to be cited here by an enemy who had captured his mind and his soul. He freed himself at last, and, in the end, heroically and unhesitatingly, gave his life to save his country.” Then Marco, played brilliantly by Sinatra in his best screen performance, says despairingly, “Hell, hell.” Thoughtful moviegoers would have nodded assent. “The End” then appears on the screen, leaving the audience speechless or pensive, depending on their reaction to a film about tragic waste.
The movie version of The Manchurian Candidate is far more critical of America than the novel. If one assumes that brainwashing can produce assassins like Shaw and leave men with their minds and souls in disrepair, the fault lay not with the lunatic fringe—of which Mother Shaw is the paradigm—but with a nation so obsessed with communism that it would wage a war in Asia to keep the red tide from traveling westward. The Korean War resulted in fifty-four thousand American casualties. Raymond Shaw might have been one if them if he had not been chosen for a different role. Either way, he died.
The Manchurian Candidate belongs to the tradition of cautionary tales, which includes The President Vanishes (1934) and Gabriel over the White House (1933). In the former, an isolationist president, refusing to involve America in a European war, incurs the anger of the public, which equates neutrality with cowardice. To drive home his rationale, the president allows himself to be kidnapped and held captive by the right wing Grey Shirts (a composite of Hitler’s Brown Shirts and William Pelley’s Silver Shirts). An FBI agent kills the Grey Shirts leader with the transparent name of Lincoln Lee, freeing the president to preach non-intervention and implying that it took his kidnapping to bring the country to its senses. In Gabriel over the White House, a seemingly incompetent president undergoes political regeneration after an auto accident and embarks on a campaign to purge the country of undesirables, even if doing so means executing criminals (which it does). In short, he strives to convert the republic into a dictatorship so powerful that—dispensing with the Constitution and individual liberties—he will be able to accomplish his goal of world disarmament. All three are troubling films. Although what they depict never came to pass, their nightmarish plots unfolded so naturally that one could easily imagine these scenarios coming to pass.
The Manchurian Candidate opened in New York on the eve of the tense weekend of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In his New York Times review (25 October), Bosley Crowther could not take the film seriously, but he admitted that it could “scare some viewers half to death.” He hoped they would not be foolish enough to believe it. But this was a time when one could believe anything, even global war precipitated by a missile buildup on an island some ninety miles from the Florida mainland. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated a year later, Sinatra, out of respect for the late president, purchased the rights to the film and had it withdrawn from circulation—even though Sinatra himself played “a would-be presidential assassin” in Suddenly (1954). Sinatra overreacted. A president is not assassinated in The Manchurian Candidate, only a power-crazed woman and the buffoon she intended to install in the White House. Another explanation given for the film’s withdrawal was Sinatra’s dissatisfaction with the way the profits were allocated by United Artists—not that this mattered much, since the movie failed at the box office. Whatever the case, The Manchurian Candidate did not resurface for a quarter of a century.
The ideal 1962 double bill would have been The Manchurian Candidate and the half-hour short, Red Nightmare (1962), produced by Warner Bros. “under the personal supervision of Jack L. Warner,” and in cooperation with the Department of Defense, whose seal appears at the end. If Mother Shaw could achieve her dream, the United States would be the police state depicted in Red Nightmare, in which the main character, a Joe Smith American type, experiences the dream to end all dreams: He goes to sleep in a democracy and wakes up in a dictatorship.
Narrated by a grim-voiced Jack Webb, Red Nightmare opens with what looks like a small-town street, except that there is an armed guard patrolling an area cordoned off by barbed wire. The setting, Webb informs us, is a mock-up in Soviet Russia, complete with a college where students learn the American way of life, which they will abandon once they become the future commissars of a Stalinist United States. The message, with its “it can happen here” warning, is far from subtle. To prove his point, Webb subjects a typical American father of three to a nightmare in which he awakens to a world where his church has become a “people’s museum”; his wife has turned into a party diehard; his teenage daughter is off to a collective farm; and his younger children have chosen to attend a state school. Worse, he is put on trial for the triple crime of subversion, deviation, and treason. Just before he is about to be executed, he is jolted into waking, having learned that freedom is not a gift, but a right that must be earned. It was a kind of Father Knows Best meets Invasion U.S.A. movie, at thirty minutes mercifully short, which was about all the homily could sustain without going into overdrive. Red Nightmare, seen in conjunction with The Manchurian Candidate, would have provided a gloss on the latter. Mother Shaw learned enough about communism to be able to convert the republic into a dictatorship, American style, without the Soviet trappings and the abhorred “c” word. When Angela Lansbury describes her vision of the new America to her son, one does not need to experience the red nightmare. Mother Shaw, harshly lit, as if in a horror film, was the nightmare.
Seven Days in May (1964), filmed with President Kennedy’s support and released a year after his assassination, is a more reliable guide to Cold War tensions. The film dramatizes the seemingly impossible, when a president successfully negotiates a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, calling for the dismantling of nuclear missiles. In 1964, such a treaty would have been devoutly to be wished for—at least by Americans tired of living under the ever-increasing threat of nuclear war. But the film, adapted by Rod Serling from the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, was set in 1970 after another war—this time with Iran—which, like the Korean War, ended with an armistice. The public’s mood is hardly joyous, recalling the response to disarmament in The President Vanishes, in which any form of détente was considered a sign of weakness. Certainly the joint chiefs of staff think so, going so far as to plan a coup “in the interests of the nation’s safety,” the assumption being that disarmament does not ensure safety. Actually, the conflict goes deeper. Jordan Lyman, the president (Fredric March), is a Democrat and a dove, unlike his would-be nemesis General Scott (a chillingly self-righteous Burt Lancaster), who is primed for a takeover. Unbeknownst to the president, a training base, code name ECOMCON (Emergency Communications Control), has been set up in the Texas desert, where an elite paramilitary force is ready to spring into action.
By setting the action in 1970, Serling was altering the time frame of the novel, published in 1962, but set in 1974. In both cases, the time change moved the action into the future, a feature of science fiction. But the time-shifting was also a way of reassuring us that what is being depicted is not happening now and that just before the point of no return, the crisis will be resolved without the country going into red alert. Cold comfort, perhaps, but better that than a radioactive shower.
Unlike The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May was doubly time-specific: 1964 audiences were watching a movie set in 1970. The Manchurian Candidate, released in 1962, was set after the Korean War, which ended a decade earlier and had little to do with either the time of the film’s release or the time of its action, remaining at the level of horror fantasy. Certainly anyone who saw Seven Days in May in 1964 would never have associated the film’s president, Jordan Lyman, with Lyndon Johnson, a hawk who called opponents of the Vietnam War “nervous Nellies.” Johnson mired the country in an unwinnable war that encountered such resistance that he was forced to announce on nationwide television that he would not seek reelection—as if that were possible.
While anything was possible in the days after the Kennedy assassination, a year later the nation’s problems were mostly domestic, except for the looming specter of Vietnam. By the time Seven Days in May opened in February 1964, President Kennedy and civil tights leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated; protests against the Vietnam War were mounting, often accompanied by the burning of draft cards; three civil rights activists had been murdered in Mississippi; race riots had broken out in Harlem, despite passage of the Civil Rights Act, which supposedly had ended segregation; and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, even though peace seemed remote.
Like The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May blurred the distinction between politically charged melodrama and science fiction. Each operated from the “what if?” premise. What if a Korean vet could be programmed into becoming an assassin? What if the nation—which preferred the continuation of the Cold War to disarmament—had become so polarized by a peace-seeking president and a war-happy military that it would ignore a government take-over if the United States could maintain its superiority in the arms race?
Once the president learns what has been planned in his absence, he announces that he will be going fishing for a few days. But instead, he stages a counter-coup and gives a press conference in which he anticipates Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “We will remain strong and proud and we will see a day when on this earth all men will walk out of the long tunnels of tyranny into the bright light of freedom.” Dr. King was more eloquent, but the point was the same. Significantly, the president does not condemn Scott for his refusal to compromise. Neither Scott nor the Soviet Union represents the enemy: “The enemy is the nuclear age and out of this comes a sickness.” It is a simple explanation of what occurred on 6 August 1945, for which the world has paid hundreds of times over. The age claimed its victims, dead and alive. Among the latter is General James Scott. Forced to resign his command, Scott can remain in the military, his sickness untreated and perhaps untreatable.