A Candidate That For Awhile Stopped Running
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Sees Into Frightful Future
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| Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey Take Lunch Break on Location |
posted by John McElwee at 9:00 AM
Thursday, January 30, 2014
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Sees Into Frightful Future
2 Comments:
I caught this when it was re-released in the early 90s, and again a few years later on PBS. For the life of me, I can't understand how anyone could view this as a satire. To me, it's pretty scary, whether or not it's believable, and poignant -- Laurence Harvey's character never had a chance. I really find it a very sad movie.
Having said that, what also struck me seeing in a theatre was that the sound seemed to come from the screen, like it used to in the pre-multichannel stereo days of my youth. Having gotten used to music and SFX coming from all around me with most movies, it was like a trip back in time.
Donald Benson considers international villainy as practiced through the years on screen heroes:
Don't mind me. Just babbling.
I mentally flashed on "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror", where a British nobleman is exposed as a German double -- switched in when the original was captured in the previous war decades earlier. Holmes had a line to the effect the calculating Germans anticipated a specific future need, which suggests a German spy biding his time as a respected government figure while waiting for the Nazi party to come into existence, take over Germany and eventually target England.
For a while after WWII it seemed the last-gasp Nazi plot was a standard fallback. The sleeper cell, the thickly-accented scientist with an undeployed superweapon, or simply some Nazi loot pursued by former intimates of Adolf. The gimmick lingered on to the German-accented agents of KAOS on "Get Smart."
Also remember there was an on-and-off queasiness about actually naming China or the USSR as the enemy, at least in lighter movies. Benny Hill did a Bond parody where his boss would delicately reference "a certain unnamed foreign power". Each time, Benny would turn to the camera and announce "Russia!", as if he'd cleverly solved a mystery. An Italian scifi potboiler featured some Asian spies who spent much of their screen time explaining they weren't Chinese (added in translation?). If you were going to actually name Russia or China, it usually had to be in the context of a darn serious film
In the real Bonds, the Russians and Chinese were rarely the direct villains. They might employ a Goldfinger to do some dirty work; more often they'd be manipulated themselves by SPECTRE, a non-ideological gang with corporate trappings. This remained the rule through the Roger Moore period, with the occasional independent megalomaniac stepping in. By the time Roger left, the Bonds were almost friendly towards Russia ("View to a Kill" has Russia being dependent on Silicon Valley for technological progress -- it's presented as a gag). By then we rarely heard about "Red China" at all.
Given a choice (and lacking a clearly-defined war), Hollywood historically preferred made-up villains. Mafias that aren't quite THE Mafia; Arab terrorists of imprecise origin or creed; military or intelligence types clearly stamped "rogue"; and of course the apolitical baddies grabbing something "to sell to the highest bidder".
The current series of Marvel Comics movies & shows have HYDRA, which more or less replaced the Nazis in the WWII-set "Captain America" and lingers on as the successor to SPECTRE.
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