The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, July 13-19
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Directed by John Frankenheimer
The near-genius of The Manchurian Candidate is that the film folds the political assassin and the victim into one man, and gives that man a friend played by Frank Sinatra; no American, whatever her beliefs and inclinations, is completely immune. The innocent assassin is Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey): stepson of the idiot Senator Iselin, rich and resentful mama’s boy, and, after an act of heroism during the Korean War, recipient of the Medal of Honor. But the Medal is a mistake. During the war, Shaw and his entire platoon, including the Sinatra character, Major Ben Marco, were kidnapped and hypnotized by the Communist forces of evil. The Chinese and the Russians then conditioned Shaw to kill on command, disregarding “those uniquely American symptoms, guilt and fear”—never mind that those are the bread and butter not of Melville but of Dostoyevsky. Frankenheimer is happy to barrel right along, and back in America, Major Marco, now working in intelligence, begins to suspect that something is amiss. The nightmares in which his hypnosis begins to “wear off” are the film’s strangest and most interesting scenes. The Commies tried to disguise themselves in the platoon’s memories as a group of old ladies discussing hydrangeas. A tactical error: old women have been frightening grown men for ages. For example, as anyone who’s seen the 2004 Jonathan Demme remake (or Zoolander) knows, Raymond turns out to be controlled in almost every way by his loathsome mother (Angela Lansbury), who intends to program her son to “[rally] a nation of television viewers into hysteria.” The movie—set in the early 1950s, adapted from a 1959 novel by Richard Condon—came out in 1962. Poor Mrs. Iselin was born too early. Imagine what she could have accomplished on the internet. Elina Mishuris (July 15, 4:15pm, 7pm, 9:45pm; July 16, 2pm, 7:30pm at BAM’s “Four More Years: An Election Special”)
