The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
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The motion picture The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) was in many respects prophetic in terms of what it has to say about the American political system and how that system might develop over the next several years. The film can be seen as rather cynical work in that it regards American politics as a game in which the public can be and is manipulated by the unscrupulous. The reason this can be done is because the public responds more to image than to reality, something that was beginning to be more evident at the time this film was produced and that has been much discussed in the years since. The film was made in 1962, placing it after the media-driven campaign of John F. Kennedy in which the candidate who did best on television was also the best-received by the public, as will be explained below. The political campaign in this film is also driven by manipulation of the media, but also by a plan involving murder, false heroism, and finally treason on a grand scale. This film was produced at the height of the Cold War as hysteria was mounting about a potential Russian and Chinese threat, and in the film it is the Chinese threat that becomes the greatest threat, as the title indicates. The period was one of considerable tension, and the United States was at the time still awash in fear of possible nuclear attack, seen in the number of people building fall-out shelters in their basements or backyards. There was also a scientific race under way betwee
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ricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Iselin is constantly calling out the numbers of Communists he has found in different government departments, and his figures vary from news conference to news conference because he is making them up as he speaks. The filmmakers use McCarthy's ghost to create a character who is especially despicable because he rails against Communists on the one hand while being their tool on the other, and this would have been especially galling to the right-wing in American politics, the wing that had supported McCarthy and that continued to claim there were Communists in every walk of American life. The film was highly successful, though it wa evident that there were forces that would have been happier had it not been made at all:
It came out at a time when it was clearly dangerous to speak of politics in the outspoken, satiric anti-McCarthy vein that characterized this picture. Although Condon's book, which [George] Axelrod follows faithfully in his screenplay, had been published, it is not outspoken books that upset politicians, churches, pressure groups and the like, but outspoken movies. . . Swept along by good reviews, the popularity of Frank Sinatra, and the still strong tide of lib
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2776
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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