Frank & The Reds.

In this week's film lab, we screened The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film dovetails last week's discussion of Sinatra's Democratic leanings and alleged Communist involvement with this week's focus on Sinatra's relationship to presidential politics. 


The Manchurian Candidate seems to be more focused on providing a commentary on the Red Scare and the paranoia surrounding Communist activity in the 1950s and 1960s than on Sinatra's personal leftist leanings. The Communists in the film brainwash Lawrence Harvey's Raymond Shaw as an assassin, shrewdly hypnotizing him so that he has no memory of his actions. This new state leaves Shaw free from "those uniquely American symptoms--guilt and fear." The Communist characters in the film give audiences insightful glimpses into two things: first, what American producers and directors guessed Communist leaders were thinking about Americans, and second, what the American producers and directors really thought about themselves. The scenes where the Communists speak about Shaw as a new kind of weapon are particularly telling--Americans were worried about the threat within.


As Major Bennett Marco, Sinatra portrays a radically different type of character than in his previous films. The difference between Marco and Sinatra's musical characters is perhaps most easily noticed, but the Marco character is also a departure from Sinatra's dramatic soldier roles. For one, Marco is an intellectual. His apartment is filled with stacks of books (my kind of guy), and he enjoys reading about everything from "principles of modern bankruptcy and diseases of horses" to "ethnic choices of the Arabs and history of piracy". In war films, Sinatra's drunken buffoonery often serves as comic relief from the stresses of combat (see Maggio in From Here to Eternity and Francis in None But The Brave). 


In his musical films, Sinatra plays the naive young military man, totally inept in the ways of romance (see Anchors Aweigh and It Happened in Brooklyn). He also tends to play the second-fiddle love interest to greats like Peter Lawford, Gene Kelly, and Marlon Brando (It Happened in Brooklyn, On The Town, and Guys and Dolls, respectively). In The Manchurian Candidate, we finally see a Sinatra who is comfortable with himself and his relationships. He doesn't go through the shenanigans of pursuing the "wrong" girl until the last minute, when he realizes that the "right" girl has been under his nose the whole time. Instead, Sinatra meets Janet Leigh's Eugenie Rose Chaney early in the film. A strong female character, Leigh asserts herself and gives Sinatra her address and number when they meet on a train. She goes home, breaks off her engagement to another man, and rushes to the police station to bail out Sinatra after he is picked up for getting in a fight. 


An interesting note--at one point during the film, a movie theater in the background of a scene displays an advertisement for Walt Disney's "Pinocchio" on the marquee. The film is set after the end of the Korean War (so sometime after 1953). "Pinocchio" was released in 1940.
Additionally, I found it odd that the actor who plays Chunjin, an "Oriental" interpreter who comes to ask Shaw for employment, is actually a Brooklyn-born Italian.