Up until Election Day on November 4th, we'll be taking a look at one movie every day that involves an election, which gives us seven great political movies to discuss. With 5 days to go, let's start with movie #3!
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
1962, right at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, this movie came out and proposed a completely paranoid Red Scare scenario. What if one of the Vice Presidential nominee is a communist? And forget the wealth spreading socialist kind of scare. This is the in-league-with-the-enemy, come-to-take-over-the-White-House-and-bring-down-America communists. A Senator, under the urging of his ambitious wife, starts accusing Defense Department employees as Communists—though, secretly, they’re both Communist agents wanting to create fear in Americans. Their son, meanwhile, is a Medal of Honor decorated war hero, brainwashed by the Commies to become an assassin. Frank Sinatra plays a Major who suspects something fishy about the merit of the Medal of Honor and starts an investigation that uncovers the Communist ploy.
It’s interesting how the right-wing witch-hunting Senator—who is very closely modeled on Joseph McCarthy—end up being the Communist. In one way, it’s vilifying the right, but on the other hand, it’s only cementing their fear tactic even more. Essentially, it’s saying that anyone could be a Commie, even the most anti-Commie guy out there. Then again, it’s also saying that paranoia is destructive to America, so much so that the Communists were using them against the US. So...
Resonance: In 2004, Jonathan Demme remade the movie with Denzel Washington in the Sinatra role and Liev Schreiber as the Machurian Candidate. The film switched the Communist threat with a corporate influence conspiracy (instead of Manchuria, China, we got a company called Manchurian Global—a pretty lame attempt at keeping the same title). While it’s as appropriate of an update as any, they pretty much dropped the ball in exploring the kind of primal paranoid fear that the Reds so kindly provided us back in the Cold War days. I’m talking about, of course, Islamic radicals and the distrust in the American people’s psyche upon faced with a Muslim being a person of authority. We can talk about progressiveness all we want, but as long as sentences as asinine as “Obama might be a secret Muslim” are still topics of conversation out there, then the paranoia displayed in The Manchurian Candidate still lives. Just because no one’s stepping up to be the next McCarthy doesn’t mean he didn’t father any (figurative) spawns.
Unforgettable Scene: The scene that makes the movie is obviously the climactic assassination scene, but it really works better after seeing the entire movie. What’s just as cool out of context is this indoor fight between Sinatra and Henry Silva (who’s playing a Korean… Oh, the good old days). This fight is often called the first karate fight ever shown in an American film. Sinatra broke his little finger doing a karate chop on the coffee table, and you can see that take included in the film.
Remember: after you're done watching movies, don't forget to vote!
