The Manchurian candidate is a 1962 political thriller, detailing the attempts of a medal of honor awardee as he tries to discover what happened in Kuwait, uncovering a political conspiracy along the way.. The plot contains many themes reflective of the times.
The film, had suspenseful presentation of itself, with it's tagline being, ''miss the first 5 minutes and you won't know whats going on'', (paraphrased), as shown by the way the soldiers are captured within the first 5 minutes, and the famous, ''ladies tea party scene'', in the first ten. If someone were to miss these scenes, they would miss crucial parts of the film.
The themes of the film are simple, showing the evil of communism, and how they wish to overthrow the american way. This is shown throughout the film, with many of the villains being Korean, soviet Russian, or just people from the East. This was partially due to the film being produced in the middle of the cold war, causing nation-wide fear of communism.
Also, the theme of the character Iselin, a politician ordered by his wife to accuse politicians of communism being in the department of defence, seems to be based of the U.S senator Joseph McCarthy, a 1950's politician who would frequently accuse political enemies of being communists.
The brainwashing, a major plot point of the film, stems from the fact that during the 1950's, Freud's and Pavlov's works were fairly well known, and the CIA even tried it's own form of mind control experimentation, using techniques such as electrotherapy and LSD. After the Korean war ended, a number of soldiers chose to remain, causing unrest about possible brainwashing, since it was inconceivable that anyone would choose not to come back to America. This was exaggerated in the film, with Shaw being forced to kill his Wife and father in law, who he treasured dearly, under the influence of Communism.
CAMERA WORK
The camera is used to great effect in this movie. To start with, the ''Garden party''. It starts out with camera on the old ladies, before performing a 360 degree shot, ending up back at the real image of the communist gathering. A particularly famous scene, the interrogation between Marco and Shaw, had Marco out of focus, showing audiences the blur between reality and hypnotism for Shaw. In actuality, this is because Sinatra's first performance was out of focus, and the re-shoot wasn't as good. They then left the first one in.
Trailer Video below.
The trailer would attract audiences, by showing seeming unrelated images, including action, and tension, all while warped music plays in the background, with the phrase, ''if you come in 5 minutes late, you won't know what's happening'', coming up twice, building a suspense for the film, with no dialogue being played.
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