The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed and produced by John Frankenheimer. The screenplay is by George Axelrod, based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate. The film s leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, with co-stars Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, and James Gregory.

The plot centers on Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw, part of a prominent political family. Shaw is brainwashed by communists after his Army platoon is captured. He returns to civilian life in the United States, where he becomes an unwitting assassin in an international communist conspiracy. The group, which includes representatives of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, plans to assassinate the presidential nominee of an American political party leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The film was released in the United States on October 24, 1962, at the height of U.S.–Soviet hostility during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was widely acclaimed by Western critics and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actress (Lansbury) and Best Editing. It was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant .

Plot

Soviet and Chinese soldiers capture a U.S. Army platoon during the Korean War, and take the men to Manchuria in communist China. Three days later, Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Captain Bennett Marco return to UN lines. Upon Marco s recommendation, Shaw is awarded the Medal of Honor for saving his soldiers lives in combat, though two men were killed in action. Shaw returns to the U.S., where his heroism is exploited by his politically motivated mother, Eleanor Iselin, whose plans are to further the career of her husband, Senator John Iselin. When asked to describe Shaw, the other soldiers in his unit respond, Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I ve ever known in my life. In contrast to this description, Shaw is a cold, sad, unsympathetic loner.

After Marco is promoted to major and assigned to Army Intelligence, he has a recurring nightmare: a hypnotized Shaw blithely murders the two soldiers from his own platoon before an assembly of communist military leaders to demonstrate their revolutionary brainwashing technique. Marco learns that another soldier from the platoon, Allen Melvin, has the same nightmare. When Melvin and he separately identify photos of the same two men—leading figures in communist governments—from their dreams, Army Intelligence agrees to help Marco investigate.

During captivity, Shaw was programmed as a sleeper agent, who blindly obeys orders to kill without any memory of his crimes. His battle heroism was a false memory implanted during the brainwashing. Agents trigger Shaw by suggesting he play solitaire; the queen of diamonds activates him. Eleanor masterminds the ascent of John, a Joseph McCarthy-like demagogue who makes baseless claims that communists work at the Defense Department. Shaw repudiates his mother and stepfather by taking a job at a newspaper published by their critic, Holborn Gaines. Communist agents have Shaw murder Gaines to confirm that his brainwashing still works.

Chunjin, a Korean agent who posed as a guide for Shaw s platoon, comes to Shaw s apartment asking him for work. The unsuspecting Shaw hires him as a valet and cook. Marco recognizes Chunjin when he visits Shaw s apartment; he violently attacks him and demands to know what happened during the platoon s captivity. After Marco is arrested for assault, Eugenie Cheyney, a woman he met on a train, posts his bail and breaks her engagement to date him.

Shaw rekindles a romance with Jocelyn Jordan, the daughter of liberal Senator Thomas Jordan, the Iselins chief political foe. Eleanor arranges their reunion to garner Senator Jordan s support for John s vice-presidential bid. Unswayed, Jordan insists he will block Iselin s attempts to seek the party s nomination. After Jocelyn inadvertently triggers Shaw s programming by wearing a queen of diamonds costume at a party for her thrown by the Iselins, they elope. Furious at Senator Jordan s rebuff, Eleanor—who is Shaw s American handler—sends him to kill Jordan at his home. Shaw also kills Jocelyn when she stumbles upon the murder scene. Afterward, he has no memory of the killing and is grief-stricken upon learning they are dead.

After discovering the card s role in Shaw s conditioning, Marco uses a forced deck to deprogram him, hoping he will reveal his next assignment. Eleanor primes Shaw to assassinate their party s presidential nominee at the height of its convention so that Iselin, as the vice-presidential candidate, will become the nominee by default. In the uproar, he will seek emergency powers to establish a strict authoritarian regime. Eleanor tells Shaw that she requested a programmed assassin, never knowing it would be her own son. She vows that when she takes power, she will exact revenge upon her superiors for selecting him.

Shaw enters Madison Square Garden disguised as a priest, taking up a sniper s position in an empty spotlight booth high above. Marco and his supervisor, Colonel Milt, race to the convention to stop him. At the last moment, Shaw aims away from the presidential nominee and instead kills Senator Iselin and Eleanor. When Marco arrives inside the lighting booth, Shaw tells him that not even the Army could have stopped them, so he had to. Then Shaw, wearing the Medal of Honor around his neck, immediately commits suicide. Later that evening, Marco, speaking to Eugenie privately, mourns Shaw s death.

Cast

• Frank Sinatra as Maj. Bennett Marco
• Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw
• Janet Leigh as Eugenie Rose Rosie Cheyney
• Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Eleanor Iselin
• James Gregory as Sen. John Yerkes Iselin
• Henry Silva as Chunjin
• Leslie Parrish as Jocelyn Jordan
• John McGiver as Sen. Thomas Jordan
• Khigh Dhiegh as Dr. Yen Lo
• James Edwards as Cpl. Allen Melvin
• Douglas Henderson as Col. Milt
• Albert Paulsen as Zilkov
• Barry Kelley as Secretary of Defense
• Lloyd Corrigan as Holborn Gaines
• Madame Spivy as Female Berezovo
• Reggie Nalder as Dmitri
• Joe Adams as Psychiatrist
• Helen Kleeb as Ladies Garden Club Speaker (uncredited)
• Robert Riordan as Benjamin K. Arthur (uncredited)
• Whit Bissell as Medical Officer (uncredited)

Production

Sinatra suggested Lucille Ball for the role of Eleanor Iselin, but Frankenheimer, who had worked with Lansbury in All Fall Down, insisted that Sinatra watch her performance in that film before a final choice was made. Although Lansbury played Raymond Shaw s mother, she was, in fact, only three years older than Laurence Harvey, who played Shaw. An early scene in which Shaw, recently decorated with the Medal of Honor, argues with his parents was filmed in Sinatra s own private plane.

Janet Leigh plays Marco s love interest. In a short biography of Leigh broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, actress Jamie Lee Curtis reveals her mother had been served divorce papers on behalf of her father, actor Tony Curtis, the morning that the scene where Sinatra and she first meet on a train was filmed.

In the scene where Marco attempts to deprogramme Shaw in a hotel room opposite the convention, Sinatra is at times slightly out of focus. It was a first take, and Sinatra failed to be as effective in subsequent retakes, a common factor in his film performances. In the end, Frankenheimer elected to use the out-of-focus take. Critics subsequently praised him for showing Marco from Shaw s distorted point of view.

In the novel, Eleanor Iselin s father had sexually abused her as a child. Before the dramatic climax, she uses her son s brainwashing to have sex with him. Concerned with the reaction to even a reference to a taboo topic like incest in a mainstream film at that time, the filmmakers instead had Eleanor kiss Shaw on the lips to imply her incestuous attraction to him.

Nearly half the film s $2.2 million production budget went to Sinatra s salary for his performance. Another $200,000 went to Harvey.

Reception

Critical response

Film critic Roger Ebert listed The Manchurian Candidate on his Great Movies list, declaring that it is inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a classic , but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released .

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Manchurian Candidate holds an approval rating of 97% rating based on 60 reviews, with an average rating of 8.70/10. The website s critical consensus reads: A classic blend of satire and political thriller that was uncomfortably prescient in its own time, The Manchurian Candidate remains distressingly relevant today. On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film has a score of 94 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating universal acclaim .

Awards and honours

Award	Category	Nominee(s)	Result
Academy Awards	Best Supporting Actress	Angela Lansbury	Nominated
	Best Film Editing	Ferris Webster	Nominated
British Academy Film Awards	Best Film from any Source		Nominated
Directors Guild of America Awards	Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures	John Frankenheimer	Nominated
Golden Globe Awards	Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture	Angela Lansbury	Won
	Best Director – Motion Picture	John Frankenheimer	Nominated
Laurel Awards	Top Action Drama		Nominated
	Top Action Performance	Frank Sinatra	Nominated
	Top Female Supporting Performance	Angela Lansbury	Nominated
National Board of Review Awards	Best Supporting Actress	Angela Lansbury (Also for All Fall Down)	Won
National Film Preservation Board	National Film Registry		Inducted
Online Film and Television Association Awards	Hall of Fame – Motion Picture		Won
Producers Guild of America Awards	PGA Hall of Fame – Motion Pictures		Won

In 1994, The Manchurian Candidate was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant . The film ranked 67th on the AFI s 100 Years…100 Movies when that list was first compiled in 1998, but a 2007 revised version excluded it. It was 17th on AFI s AFI s 100 Years…100 Thrills lists. In April 2007, Lansbury s character was selected by Time as one of the 25 greatest villains in cinema history.

Releases

According to a false rumour, Sinatra removed the film from distribution after John F. Kennedy s assassination on November 22, 1963. Michael Schlesinger, who was responsible for the film s 1988 reissue by MGM/UA, has helped debunk the rumour. According to him, the film was not removed, but public interest in it was small immediately before the assassination. The autumn 1962 release had run its course. Box-office successes in the U.S. immediately before the shootings in Dallas were comedies, notably It s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and movie distributors avoided reviving a thriller with a bleak ending that millions of people had seen barely a year earlier. Newspaper display ads indicate that after the assassination, The Manchurian Candidate was not rereleased as frequently or as widely as other 1962 movies, but it was indeed revived and never banned. The movie played at a Brooklyn cinema two months after the assassination (January 1964), and that same month, in White Plains and Jersey City, New Jersey. It was televised nationwide on CBS Thursday Night at the Movies on September 16, 1965.

Sinatra s representatives acquired rights to the film in 1972 after the initial contract with United Artists expired. The film was rebroadcast on nationwide television in April 1974 on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. After a showing at the New York Film Festival in 1987 increased public interest in the film, the studio reacquired the rights and it became again available for theatre and video releases.

Year	1962
ReleaseDate	1962-10-24
RuntimeMins	126
RuntimeStr	2h 6min
Plot	An American POW in the Korean War is brainwashed as an unwitting assassin for an international Communist conspiracy.
Awards	Nominated for 2 Oscars, 5 wins & 8 nominations total
Directors	John Frankenheimer
Writers	Richard Condon, George Axelrod, John Frankenheimer
Stars	Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh
Produced by	George Axelrod,John Frankenheimer,Howard W. Koch
Music by	David Amram
Cinematography by	Lionel Lindon
Film Editing by	Ferris Webster
Production Design by	Richard Sylbert
Art Direction by	Philip M. Jefferies
Set Decoration by	George R. Nelson
Costume Design by	Moss Mabry
Makeup Department	Ron Berkeley,Jack Freeman,Bernard Ponedel,Gene Shacove,Mary Westmoreland,Dorothy Parkinson
Second Unit Director or Assistant Director	Joseph C. Behm,Read Killgore,David Salven
Art Department	Arden Cripe,Philip M. Jefferies,Richard Borland,Lucius O. Croxton,John M. Elliott,Seymour Klate,Richard M. Rubin,Gaylin P. Schultz,Joseph S. Toldy
Sound Department	Joe Edmondson,Del Harris,Buddy Myers,Bill Flannery,Paul Wolfe
Special Effects by	A. Paul Pollard
Stunts	Gordon Doversola,Beau Vanden Ecker,Joe Gray,Robert ‘Buzz’ Henry,John Indrisano
Camera and Electrical Department	John Mehl,Felix Barlow,Robert Campbell,Bill Craemer,Eugene Levitt,William Read Woodfield
Costume and Wardrobe Department	Wesley Jeffries,Angela Alexander,Morris Brown,Ron Talsky,Rose Viebeck
Editorial Department	Carl Mahakian
Music Department	David Amram,Richard Carruth,Vinton Vernon,David Amram,Vince De Rosa,Paul Horn,Manny Klein,Harold Land,Jack Nimitez
Script and Continuity Department	Amalia Wade,Grace Dubray,Mollie Kent
Additional Crew	Thom Conroy,Gene Martell
Genres	Drama, Thriller
Companies	M.C. Productions
Countries	USA
Languages	English, Spanish
ContentRating	PG-13
ImDbRating	7.9
ImDbRatingVotes	75639
MetacriticRating	94
Keywords	conspiracy,korean war,brainwashed assassin,communist conspiracy,recurring nightmare