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The Manchurian Candidate (view source)

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Upon his return from Korea, Shaw is horrified and disgusted to see that his mother and stepfather have organized a welcoming committee that behaves like a "disgusting three-ring circus." In fact, his stepfather, whom Shaw has always detested, is up for re-election and has used the Medal of Honor ceremony as political theater.

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Captain Marco, freshly promoted to the rank of Major, is assigned to Army G-2 (i.e., Intelligence). But soon he is plagued by a chilling recurring dream: that not only was his story of Sgt. Shaw's heroism a lie, but in fact the patrol had been subject to [[~~brainwash~~]]~~ing~~, and that at a demonstration before several senior Soviet and Chinese officers, Shaw strangled one member of the patrol and shot another—which is to say, he personally murdered the very two men whom Marco would later list as killed in action.

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Captain Marco, freshly promoted to the rank of Major, is assigned to Army G-2 (i.e., Intelligence). But soon he is plagued by a chilling recurring dream: that not only was his story of Sgt. Shaw's heroism a lie, but in fact the patrol had been subject to [[brainwashing]], and that at a demonstration before several senior Soviet and Chinese officers, Shaw strangled one member of the patrol and shot another—which is to say, he personally murdered the very two men whom Marco would later list as killed in action.

The Army G-2 discounts his story and assigns him to the Public Relations Corps. This appointment proves disastrous, as Marco's assignment, the Secretary of Defense, loses his temper in a confrontation with Senator Iselin (who is a thinly-disguised parody of Senator [[Joseph McCarthy]], or rather the now-traditional [[liberal]] caricature of that real-life politician). Marco is reassigned to the G-2, who orders him to go away on leave. In his travels, he meets his eventual wife Rosie, who reaches out to him even though at first he tries to run away.

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Marco is not the only member of the patrol to be plagued by a strange dream. Corporal Alan Melvin also dreams of sitting in a room full of Soviet and Chinese senior officers and other officials, and watching as Shaw strangles one of his buddies and shoots another at point-blank range. Melvin's wife encourages him to write to Shaw, which he does. Independently of one another, each man, when asked how he feels about Shaw, says in a monotone that Shaw is a wonderful person. The truth, however, is vastly different: Raymond Shaw, far from being attractive, is personally repulsive.

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Marco traces Shaw to [[New York City]], where Shaw at first was the confidential assistant to a well-known newspaper columnist (probably suggested by [[Walter Lippmann]]), and now writes the column himself after ~~the columnist~~ has been found murdered in his bed. When Marco finally comes to Shaw's apartment, he is horrified to confront Chunjin, the former interpreter to the patrol who was also present in the interrogation session that Marco recalls in his recurring dream. He lashes out at Chunjin and repeatedly roars questions at him about Raymond's obsessive behavior with his hands before he committed the murders, and why Chunjin himself was present, not as a captive, but as a capt''or''. He is arrested, but the G-2 vouches for him, and Rosie comes to take him home.

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Marco traces Shaw to [[New York City]], where Shaw at first was the confidential assistant to well-known newspaper columnist Holborn Gaines (probably suggested by [[Walter Lippmann]]), and now writes the column himself after Mr. Gaines has been found murdered in his bed. When Marco finally comes to Shaw's apartment, he is horrified to confront Chunjin, the former interpreter to the patrol who was also present in the interrogation session that Marco recalls in his recurring dream. He lashes out at Chunjin and repeatedly roars questions at him about Raymond's obsessive behavior with his hands before he committed the murders, and why Chunjin himself was present, not as a captive, but as a capt''or''. He is arrested, but the G-2 vouches for him, and Rosie comes to take him home.

Marco then calls on Shaw to apologize for his behavior and explain his tortured dream. Shaw shocks him by saying that he had had a letter from another member of the patrol who was having similar dreams. Because this is the first person other than Marco to be reporting strange dreams, Marco rushes to Washington at once. There the G-2 convenes a meeting of his staff and questions Marco more closely. Marco identifies two known Soviet and Chinese officials from his dream, and the G-2 announces that he believes Marco's story and has formed a joint [[CIA]]/[[DIA]]/[[FBI]] team to investigate Raymond Shaw. Marco is assigned to this team as military liaison.

=== The investigation ===

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Marco concentrates on Shaw and even encourages Shaw to tell him a sad story: he had once met a lovely and kind young woman, the daughter of Senator Jordan, and his mother had written an offensive letter in Shaw's name and forced Shaw to sign it. The next day, Marco meets Shaw in a bar and finds Shaw playing a game of [[solitaire]]. Marco barely hears the bartender tell another customer a story of how he had encouraged his brother-in-law to take a [[taxicab]] to [[Central Park]] and jump in the lake. And then Marco is stupefied when Shaw does exactly that. Marco follows Shaw and arrives in time to see Shaw jump in the lake, but Shaw has no memory of having done this. Nevertheless, Marco now remembers that Raymond had been playing with an imaginary—or perhaps not imaginary—deck of cards during the high-level Sino-Soviet briefing that Marco recalls in his dreams.

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Marco concentrates on Shaw and even encourages Shaw to tell him a sad story: he had once met a lovely and kind young woman, the daughter of Senator Jordan (the other Senator from New York State), and his mother had written an offensive letter in Shaw's name and forced Shaw to sign it. The next day, Marco meets Shaw in a bar and finds Shaw playing a game of [[solitaire]]. Marco barely hears the bartender tell another customer a story of how he had encouraged his brother-in-law to take a [[taxicab]] to [[Central Park]] and jump in the lake. And then Marco is stupefied when Shaw does exactly that. Marco follows Shaw and arrives in time to see Shaw jump in the lake, but Shaw has no memory of having done this. Nevertheless, Marco now remembers that Raymond had been playing with an imaginary—or perhaps not imaginary—deck of cards during the high-level Sino-Soviet briefing that Marco recalls in his dreams.

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Marco asks the other members of the special task force about this, and they conclude that Raymond Shaw is acting under an elaborate series of suggestions implanted in his mind through [[~~hypnosis~~]]. They also identify the likely trigger: the queen of diamonds, a symbol of his mother.

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Marco asks the other members of the special task force about this, and they conclude that Raymond Shaw is acting under an elaborate series of suggestions implanted in his mind through [[hypnotism]]. They also identify the likely trigger: the queen of diamonds, a symbol of his mother.

What neither Marco nor even Shaw himself realizes is that Shaw's own mother is his "American operator" who gives him his orders. His mother first arranges for him to meet Senator Jordan's daughter Jocelyn again and even to marry her. But when this fails to create any fellow-feeling between Senators Jordan and Iselin, Shaw's mother then gives Shaw an order to kill Senator Jordan, and to kill Jocelyn as well.

=== The unraveling ===

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Shaw retains no memory of any of his "assignments." Such is the nature of his programming that he will kill on order and then forget that he has done so, so that he will have no guilty conscience. But the sudden death of Jocelyn Jordan upsets him greatly, even though he does not yet realize that he was responsible for her death. He is so upset that he now is plagued with his own recurring dreams of the Manchurian interrogation session. In desperation he calls Marco, who meets Shaw at his hotel across the street from [[Madison Square Garden]], the ~~site of a Presidential nominating convention where~~ Senator Iselin has just won the Vice-Presidential nomination. Marco brings with him a "forced deck" containing fifty-two queens of diamonds. Marco uses these to induce Shaw to confess to the following:

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Shaw retains no memory of any of his "assignments." Such is the nature of his programming that he will kill on order and then forget that he has done so, so that he will have no guilty conscience. But the sudden death of Jocelyn Jordan upsets him greatly, even though he does not yet realize that he was responsible for her death. He is so upset that he now is plagued with his own recurring dreams of the Manchurian interrogation session. In desperation he calls Marco, who meets Shaw at his hotel across the street from [[Madison Square Garden]], where the Republican National Convention is taking place, and Senator Iselin has just won the Vice-Presidential nomination. Marco brings with him a "forced deck" containing fifty-two queens of diamonds. Marco uses these to induce Shaw to confess to the following:

# The night action for which Shaw received the Medal of Honor never took place as reported.

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== Goofs ==

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=== Contrivance or "Dramatic License" ===

Senator and Mrs. Iselin greet Sergeant Shaw with a banner reading "Johnny Iselin's Boy!" and spread it over his head for a [[Photo Opportunity|photo-op]]. That would likely never have been allowed to happen. In real life, no civilian, even the mother and stepfather of a Medal of Honor recipient, would have been allowed to get that close to an honoree, and certainly not to spread a venal-looking banner over his head and take an unauthorized photograph, not only of the honoree, but also of a [[general]] officer of the Army.

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== Themes and Receptions ==

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=== Brainwashing ===

The 1950s was a time of intense interest in accounts of mind control, and the term "brainwashing" was coined in 1950. At a time of high Cold War tension, the book ''I Was Stalin's Prisoner'' (1952), a first-person account of US executive Robert A. Vogeler's experiences with mind control as a political prisoner in Hungary, produced derivative fiction. ''Brain-Washing in Red China'' (1951) and other writings by Edward Hunter proclaimed the danger and potentially devastating possibilities of brainwashing. Inaccurate reports to the effect that numerous American POW's had defected to the Chinese in Korea caused alarm; in fact there were only a few. Richard Condon's novel ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (1959), the basis for this film tapped into public fascination and concern over mind-control techniques. Novels by William Burroughs, A. E. van Vogt, and Francis Pollini all incorporate brainwashing themes. By the time of Walter Wager's ''Telefon'' (1975), the subject of brainwashing techniques had become passé.<ref>David Seed, "Brainwashing And Cold War Demonology." ''Prospects'' 1997 22: 535-573.</ref>

Some scholars have concluded there was no such brainwashing but it was a real fear at the time. The film picks up and elaborates on this fear, and suggests that a "part light-induced, part drug-induced" technique would be effective. The 1954 film "Prisoner of War" also is based on brainwashing POW's in Korea.

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Yet perhaps these nay-sayers have ignored one salient fact: the 1950s were ''not'' the first time that an aggressive power, dominated by "true believers" in an ideology, had used subconscious conditioning to impel men to commit political murder. Centuries earlier, at the time of the [[Crusades]], the secret order known as the Assassins used a form of conditioning, part drug-induced (specifically, [[hashish]], hence the name ''assassins'' or ''hashshasheen'', literally "hashish addicts") and part sexual, to produce men dedicated to political murder in the name of [[Islam]]. That the USSR and/or the PRC would have used a much more sophisticated technique (described in the film as part light-induced and part drug-induced), if such a technique had been feasible, ought to have surprised no one. If today the consensus remains that no such mental conditioning (other than harsh interrogation under sleep deprivation) was possible, that is only because no Western psychiatrist or neurologist has ever duplicated the technique, nor do the archives of the Soviet [[KGB|Committee for State Security]] contain anything that one could reliably construe as a reference to any such technique.

At the time of its release in 1962, the film defied plot analysis or genre categorization, but the film's subject of US soldiers brainwashed by Chinese forces during the Korean War found particular resonance in US popular culture. Beginning in 1952, popular journalists frightened and titillated their readers with sometimes dubious tales of Communist mind-control techniques. Some critics who analyzed the film in 1962-63, however, saw the film as a [[leftist]] commentary on McCarthyism - the character of Senator John Ickes Iselin, the stepfather of Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw, bears striking resemblances to Joseph McCarthy, if only as parody and burlesque. The film's real target was "Mom-ism," since it was the supposedly invasive upbringing of Raymond Shaw by his mother that made him a good candidate for brainwashing according to some, and viewed by others as a subtle attempt to help break down the nuclear family by [[liberals]]. <ref>Susan L. Carruthers, "The Manchurian Candidate (1962) And The Cold War Brainwashing Scare." ''Historical Journal of Film, Radio And Television'' 1998 18(1): 75-94. 0143-9685</ref>

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:... a tall, bald [[Communist Chinese]]/Korean doctor-spylord Yen Lo ... introduces the captured, passive and impotent men, all drugged and hypnotized [for] a public demonstration of the powers of [[hypnotism]]. One reviewer called this premise "far-fetched".<ref name="filmsite"> "Although the film initially failed at the box-office and its plot was considered far-fetched, it anticipated the American obsession with conspiracy theories in the early to mid-60s." [http://www.filmsite.org/manc.html] </ref>

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(The notion that ''The Manchurian Candidate'' was a box-office failure is not completely accurate. ~~In fact~~, ~~Frank Sinatra had the film pulled from circulation~~ after the assassination of President [[John F. Kennedy]], in the fear that his film had provoked [[Lee Harvey Oswald]] to commit this act.<ref name=Osborne>Osborne, Robert. End-of-film commentary on ''The Manchurian Candidate''.</ref>)

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(The notion that ''The Manchurian Candidate'' was a box-office failure is not completely accurate. However, one year after the assassination of President [[John F. Kennedy]], the creative rights to the film reverted to Frank Sinatra. He, after failing to come to terms with the production company ([[United Artists]]), shelved the film rather than allow UA to benefit materially from a work that he now owned and for which they were unwilling to compensate him fairly. At the time, many suspected that Frank Sinatra had the film pulled from circulation after the Kennedy assassination, in the fear that his film had provoked [[Lee Harvey Oswald]] to commit this act.<ref name=Osborne>Osborne, Robert. End-of-film commentary on ''The Manchurian Candidate''.</ref> However, Ben Mankiewicz now says that that was "a Hollywood version of an urban myth."<ref name=Mankiewicz>Mankiewicz, Ben. Introduction to ''The Manchurian Candidate''.</ref>)

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=== Manipulation of fact ===

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Mrs. Senator Iselin engages in an interesting scheme of manipulation, and frankly avows that to her husband when he complains that she never tells him to give the same number twice of Communists in the Defense Department. By way of explanation, she says this:{{cquote|What are the newspapers of America writing about, and what are they saying? Are they saying, "Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?" Of course not! They're asking, "''How many'' Communists are there in the Defense Department"!}}

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In short, by keeping the news organs and their readers and viewers guessing, Mrs. Iselin invites people to accept ''a priori'' that the Defense Department has Communists in it, although an objective observer ought to have noticed that when a man cannot tell the same story twice in succession, he is usually lying.

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=== Manipulation of popular emotion ===

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The primary purpose of Mrs. Iselin's plan is to manipulate the emotions of the people into accepting dictatorship in the belief that the country is under a dire threat. Mrs. Iselin avows as much to her son when she gives him his final assignment, not realizing that Major Marco has already "unconditioned" him. In fact, she predicts that the assassination of the named Presidential candidate will cause the American electorate {{cquote|to sweep us into the White House with powers that will make martial law look like anarchy.}}

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The facts of the matter are far more complex. In the film, the Communist threat ''does'' exist. But the person behind the campaign to popularize that threat ''is herself an agent of that threat.'' Or so she pretends, at least in her dealings with Soviet and Chinese agents that actually induce them to recruit and train an assassin and place that assassin at her disposal. What she actually intends is to seize power in America and then launch a war of revenge against her very helpers. That Mrs. Iselin would conceive that such a plan could actually work, only shows the profound megalomania that afflicts this character.

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The recent decision by the estate of Frank Sinatra to license this film for broadcast on American [[television]] (chiefly by [[Turner Classic Movies]]), coming as it does a scant seven years after the [[Attacks of September 11, 2001]], might or might not be coincidental. Several commentators, of both [[liberal]] and [[libertarian]] persuasions, have concluded, either recently or shortly after those attacks occurred, that the attacks were in fact "false-flag operations" perpetrated by the United States government as a campaign of exactly the sort of popular emotional manipulation that Mrs. Iselin attempts in this film.

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The movie featured a riveting performance by [[Angela Lansbury]]<ref>[http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001450/ IMDB website]</ref> as the brilliant, controlling mother who manipulated both her husband and her son to realize her dream of a communist takeover of the [[United States]]. Her husband was a parody of Senator [[Joseph McCarthy~~]], who brandishes a list of 57 card carrying communists. (The only reason for citing 57 members of this list is that Senator Iselin reads that number on a bottle of Heinz [[Ketchup~~]].) Frank Sinatra had initially suggested to Director [[John Frankenheimer]] that he cast [[Lucille Ball]] as Mrs. Iselin. But Frankenheimer, who had previously cast and worked with Lansbury in another film, ''[[All Fall Down]]'', showed Sinatra a "rough cut" of a key scene in which Lansbury appeared, and Sinatra agreed that Angela Lansbury would be a better choice.<ref name=Osborne2>Osborne, Robert. Introduction to ''The Manchurian Candidate''.</ref>

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=== Other themes ===

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The movie featured a riveting performance by [[Angela Lansbury]]<ref>[http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001450/ IMDB website]</ref> as the brilliant, controlling mother who manipulated both her husband and her son to realize her dream of a communist takeover of the [[United States]]. Her husband was a parody of Senator [[Joseph McCarthy]]. Frank Sinatra had initially suggested to Director [[John Frankenheimer]] that he cast [[Lucille Ball]] as Mrs. Iselin. But Frankenheimer, who had previously cast and worked with Lansbury in another film, ''[[All Fall Down]]'', showed Sinatra a "rough cut" of a key scene in which Lansbury appeared, and Sinatra agreed that Angela Lansbury would be a better choice.<ref name=Osborne2>Osborne, Robert. Introduction to ''The Manchurian Candidate''.</ref>

== Recent Remake ==

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==Colloquial Usage==

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In modern day usage, to describe a political candidate as a "Manchurian Candidate" is to say that they are hiding their real beliefs in hope of being elected, and afterwords able to advance their hidden agenda. [[Barack Obama]] is frequently accused of being a Muslim Manchurian Candidate, by ~~the media, like~~ [http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=79411 WorldNetDaily] and other ~~authoritative and trusted~~ sources.

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In modern day usage, to describe a political candidate as a "Manchurian Candidate" is to say that they are hiding their real beliefs in hope of being elected, and afterwords able to advance their hidden agenda. [[Barack Obama]] is frequently accused of being a Muslim Manchurian Candidate, by [http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=79411 WorldNetDaily] and other sources.

==Further reading==

TerryH

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