Implausible as the movie may seem, the behavior of Trump as candidate and now as president is even more improbable. In assessing how this old movie speaks to the current moment, let’s begin with the surrealism. They had been captured, brainwashed by a Chinese-Russian cabal and then released so that Raymond, who is now both a war hero and a programmed assassin, can assist the Russians in getting their man into the American presidency without anyone the wiser.
It turns out that the platoon had not fended off the communist attack. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images) Marco is determined to find out why.Ī poster for John Frankenheimer’s 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate. Marco and the other survivors of the firefight are wracked by terrifying nightmares in which Raymond kills the two soldiers who had supposedly died in battle. It just so happens that Shaw is the son of a politically ambitious Lady Macbeth (Angela Lansbury) and the stepson of an opportunistic, alcohol-addled Joe McCarthy clone named John Iselin (James Gregory), a US senator who is angling for the presidency and for whom Raymond’s medal is a boon.īut something is amiss. Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey, returns to the States and to a Congressional Medal of Honor awarded for his valor in saving all but two of his men. The 1962 movie, directed by John Frankenheimer and written by George Axelrod based on Richard Condon’s best-selling political potboiler, stars Frank Sinatra as Major Bennett Marco, an army intelligence officer posted with a platoon that withstands a fierce firefight during the Korean War. It is the possibility that we now have a Manchurian president, a Manchurian Congress and a Manchurian government. It isn’t just the possibility that we had a Manchurian candidate for the presidency. Second, and perhaps more significantly, the film demonstrates not only how much our narrative bearings have been lost but also our political and moral bearings, and how an admittedly paranoid movie may actually be insufficiently paranoid when it comes to our new reality. Outlandish plots suddenly seem credible, and not just to conspiracy theorists. It goes to the very heart of this bizarre and frightening political moment.įirst, the fact that this implausibly plotted Hollywood thriller could now be applied, not altogether implausibly, to a sitting American president demonstrates just how far off the rails this country has gone.
But the relevance is more than skin or celluloid deep. I am not the first observer who has noted the relevance of the movie The Manchurian Candidate. We are in entirely uncharted waters.īut there is an antecedent in our popular culture that provides a prism through which to view the contemporary calamity, especially the alleged collusion between Trump’s henchmen and Russian intelligence to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency. (Photo by John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)Īs the Trump presidency unravels, unraveling the country along with it, there is no real political antecedent, no lessons from American history on which to draw and provide guidance. Yen Lo in a scene from the 1962 suspense drama The Manchurian Candidate. Frank Sinatra as Bennett Marco, Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw (center), and Khigh Dhiegh as Dr.