Original ‘Manchurian’ shrouded in mystery

From the beginning, the late John Frankenheimer’s spellbinding version of Richard Condon’s novel, “The Manchurian Candidate,” was steeped in controversy, mystery and almost too much irony.

In retrospect, what else could anyone expect of a 1962 satirical thriller that dealt with assassination, extremist politics and brainwashing aimed at profound regime change? I remember seeing it first in high school, just days after the Cuban missile crisis, and finding it almost as unsettling as the nuclear brinkmanship on the network news.

“The country was just recovering from the McCarthy era and nothing had ever been filmed about it,” Frankenheimer once said. “It really dealt with the McCarthy era, the whole idea of fanaticism, the Far Right and the Far Left really being exactly the same thing, and the idiocy of it.”

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In his book, “The Films of the Sixties,” Douglas Brode argued that the movie “changed Hollywood’s notion of what audiences would accept both in the style and subject of a mass market film. In the final days of peace and tranquility, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ hinted at what was just around the corner.”

Audiences had never seen anything like it, and they weren’t prepared for the shock (it was less than a box-office smash). Neither, perhaps, are 21^st Century audiences who are faced with this summer’s provocatively updated Gulf War remake, which substitutes the original’s wickedly funny approach to anti-Communism with a cautionary tale about corporate power.

Prophetic tale?
Yet President John F. Kennedy personally approved the original production, phoning United Artists chief Arthur Krim to let him know that he liked the novel and hoped it would make a good movie. Thirteen months after the picture was released to theaters, President Kennedy was assassinated, and “The Manchurian Candidate” began to take on a morbidly prophetic tone.

That wasn’t the end of it. In the spring of 1968, Frankenheimer, a friend of the Kennedys, drove Senator Robert Kennedy to the California gathering at which he would be assassinated. In the years that followed, Frankenheimer often talked about his vague feelings of guilt.

Supposedly the movie’s star, Frank Sinatra, was so bothered by the picture’s assassination plot that he pulled it out of theatrical release in 1963 and suppressed it for decades. At least that’s the legend. Sinatra had little to say about it, though George Axelrod, the screenwriter of “The Manchurian Candidate,” claimed that’s what happened.

In the late 1980s, when a theatrical reissue was being prepared, Axelrod told The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson that the picture was withdrawn immediately after Kennedy’s death: “The climate of the times was such that having an assassination picture floating around seemed to be in grotesque bad taste. Particularly since Frank had been friends with the president.”

That may be what Axelrod’s memory told him, but Condon remembered otherwise. He told Hinson that Axelrod’s account was “ridiculous,” adding that “I don’t think it was ever actually ‘pulled’ from release...I know Sinatra has a very high regard for it.”

When the film was reissued in 1988, Roger Ebert also claimed it was pulled from release in 1963, though he thought this was because of a dispute between United Artists and Sinatra, “who held a controlling interest in the film and thought the studio was using funny bookkeeping to keep it out of the profit column. For more than 25 years, memories of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ have tantalized those who saw it at the time.”

Still, there would be little reason for yanking “The Manchurian Candidate” immediately after the President’s murder. It had been in release for more than a year, grossing a tepid $3.5 million and ranking 25^th on the list of 1962’s box-office attractions. It ended most of its theatrical runs in early 1963.

Rebirth of a classic film
The movie found its largest audience (to date) when it was shown on network television during the 1965-66 season. I was a college student at the time, and I vividly remember staying up late after the broadcast, arguing with my dorm-mates about whether Janet Leigh (who played Sinatra’s remarkably accommodating girlfriend) was meant to be sinister or eccentric (Leigh herself claimed she didn’t know) and wondering whether soldiers really could be hypnotized to commit murder.

It didn’t help that the networks routinely edited theatrical movies to fit two-hour slots, and the 126-minute “Candidate” was almost incoherent when commercials repeatedly interrupted its complex plot. The movie continued to turn up at festivals and college film series in the 1970s, but then it really did disappear for more than a decade.

Sinatra apparently made the decision. But if he was motivated by a business dispute with United Artists, why did he also yank “Suddenly,” a 1954 film in which he played a political assassin? By some accounts, Lee Harvey Oswald saw “Suddenly” in Dallas in November 1963.

Sinatra claimed to be delighted with the “Candidate” reissue, and he allowed “Suddenly” to be released on video and television in 1986. According to his daughter, Tina Sinatra, he was also receptive to a “Candidate” remake. In 1991, he told her it would have “greater audience appeal today.”

Although Frankenheimer’s film won its share of praise from critics, it was all but ignored at the Academy Awards. It earned only a supporting-actress nomination for Angela Lansbury, as a McCarthy-esque Lady Macbeth who turns out to be working for the Communists. (Meryl Streep plays a somewhat warmer version of the character in the remake.)

Despite the fact that it was difficult to see, it became widely accepted as Frankenheimer’s masterpiece. William Bayer’s “The Great Movies” names it as one of the 60 all-time greats and praises its prophetic power: “Its much-criticized perversity...unfortunately no longer seems farfetched.” The New York Times’ Paul Krugman recently attested to the plot’s enduring relevance by suggesting another remake, “The Arabian Candidate,” in which President Bush’s “war on terror” becomes the equivalent of the 1950s war on communism.

On the occasion of the original’s DVD release, Frankenheimer claimed that it was “one of those experiences where everything went right.” Adding that he was no better than his material, he modestly praised Condon’s novel and his collaborators: “George Axelrod wrote a marvelous screenplay, which I followed faithfully. The actors were wonderful...Everything that critics praise in the film is in this book.”

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