Calling somebody a “communist” in today’s world is kind of a dated insults, perhaps in the vein of calling somebody a “fishmonger.” The guy on the street corner assures me that communism is still around, and I believe him, but the stigma—real or imagined—in America is not what it was in the 1920s, 1980s or 1950s.
As a society, we still allow peoples and ideologies to get the more paranoid half of our imagination—Islam, Haliburton or diet communism (socialism) to name a few. But none of these are quite as wildly and widely terrifying as communism in the 1950s. This was a time when the Cincinnati Reds (an allusion to Native Americans) had to change their team name to avoid offending people with connotations of communism--before eventually changing their name back to the (less offensive) name: The Reds. This was a time when not only the USSR had successfully tested nukes, but had several of them, big ones, and eventually the biggest one. Everything may be big in Texas, but it’s biggest in Russia. The USSR was putting mini-moons in orbit and shot their most bloodthirsty canine into space. Never before had a country won a war--like how America won WWII--and become so immediately terrified.
And when America talks about anything for longer than twelve minutes, Hollywood will make a movie about it. What’s extraordinary then, is when a movie can transcend its own time and be more than a classic, be more than revolutionary, insightful, quaint, nostalgic, or precognitive. One such movie was, is and will be, John Frankenheimer’s, 1962 Cold War-thriller: “The Manchurian Candidate.”
In practice, political movies are box office death because their inherent ideologies alienate half of the country or are otherwise too spineless. It’s why Oliver Stone can make marginally profitable or culturally resonate films, though they are cut off from being classics (his casting/directing/writing might also be holding him back). Political dramas, even historical dramas, are too political if the characters’ real life manifestations still have real world power. Conversely, films that take potshots at both sides (“Man of the Year,” “Swing Vote,” etc.) rarely offer any new intellectual territory. In “The Manchurian Candidate,” left and right extremists come under fire in every way that is both new and relatively unused.
In the film, Senator John Iselin is a McCarthy-stand-in, though assuming the real life McCarthy is the only hot blooded politicians to attack groups of people for their thoughts is historically negligent. Iselin, running for Vice-President, makes wild accusations about communists infiltrating the state department. Iseline's high-roading rhetoric mixed with presidential ambitions is obviously more akin to former Vice-President Richard Nixon, but Iselin’s character is little more than a puppet. This is not a one-to-one historical allegory, as Nixon was far from anybody’s puppet. Iselin, though, is routinely built up and brushed off by his backroom-savvy wife, Eleanor. Eleanor, a coy name-connotation of FDR's lovely wife, has to be the icy, remorseless caricature more modern Republicans have since painted on Hilary Clinton.
This power-couple then sends the movie audience mixed messages about what to believe. The self-serving, communist-hater would hate puppies if it’d further his career. Furthermore, while his specific conspiracy accusations are entirely unfounded, the film is undoubtedly about...wait for it...a communist conspiracy. The film, via psychological mumbo--and occasional jumbo--demonstrates that the Chinese and Russians very much want to take over America and feasibly could. The audience is asked to fear communists, then fear fear-mongers, then fear women, rightist, communists (again!), war veterans and snakes. Either that or just stop being afraid of everything.
Politics aside, the film is extraordinarily crafted—most notably in a few early scenes wherein several American soldiers are hypnotized and then hallucinate the actual events while dreaming months later. Shades of “Inception,” indeed, but only in the best, normal-gravity, way. Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey) lumbers through the scenes as a partially hypnotized, partially shell-shocked war veteran, but he really shines two-thirds in, impressing himself at his first articulated joke in years. Revealing Shaw as a formally likeable guy comes at the exact wrong moment for our hero Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra)—making it the exact right moment for the film.
Also, let us not forget why Frank Sinatra was a movie star. Yeah, yeah, he’s was good for every scene—and really good for one strangely out-of-focus scene. But he was great as one-half of the first karate fight scene ever staged in an American film. Like the political drama, the fight was brutal, destructive, crisp, confusing and left both parties considerably worse off than mere minutes before. Sintra may have been difficult to work with, as rumored, but the fight scene broke his hand and he let the movie use his private airplane as a set. True, he earned a lot of money from the original “Ocean’s 11,” but he wasn’t always just some suave character besting the mortals lucky enough to breathe his air.
"This is the best hand in poker, I'm tellin' ya!"
America was terrified, yes. But so was the USSR, and such a detrimental irony is not lost on the movie when the Chinese and Russian conspirators question their own communist beliefs, briefly favoring the joy of success and secret knowledge. These men, the supposed villains, are not risking their lives so that school children will be forced to read Karl Marx a generation from now; they are risking everything so that they can be proven to be on the "right side" of the human condition. Philosophy is not enough reason to die for most; but winning, well, that's in our genetic make-up.
Such philosophical cynicism is actually an embrace of human commonality when the same pitfalls of a reversal ideology crash around the Americans. Saved by few bullets, America in the movie avoids throwing itself into the embrace of a dictator we so nearly, and would have gleefully, elected. In this aspect, a crazed gunman circumvented democracy to save us from our worst enemy, ourselves.
Ultimately, there is no message to “The Manchurian Candidate” besides what you learn. The movie has nothing to say, but rather asks the audience to filter, question, test and believe what they can. The film was made with communism on the mind, but it has since outlived the explicit paranoia. Murder, friendship, deception, sacrifice, politics, demagogues, love, conspiracies, and hypocrites all populate this historical, fictional world, creating an experience and making adaptable ideologies still relevant, entertaining and terrifying.
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