Manchurian Candidate leads the pack

The Manchurian Candidate is a really weird movie. It's by turns a conspiracy thriller, a political satire, and a tragedy; it contains what's apparently the first - and definitely the lamest - karate fight ever put to film; it's got one of the cooler dream sequences that come to mind; and it features Angela Lansbury as a really great villain. That last fact alone is reason enough to suspect that nothing is what it seems in John Frankenheimer's film, and today, more than 30 years since its 1962 release, it stands as a great cinematic achievement.

The intervening years have only made it resonate that much more deeply; watching it, you can understand why it went unseen for political reasons for twenty-five years after its debut. It retains a power to shock and engage in ways that few movies from three decades ago - let alone from three years ago - do. It's not that The Manchurian Candidate hasn't aged, but that it's aged unbelievably well, and while it's clearly the product of a different era, its themes have taken on new meanings; it's become, pretty remarkably, a contemporary film.

The story begins in Korea, in 1952, where a U.S. army platoon is captured by Communist soldiers. It then jumps ahead two years; a member of the platoon, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), is being given the Congressional Medal of Honor for his instrumental role in his platoon's escape from their captors. But while Shaw is being valorized for his deeds, his commanding officer, Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra), begins having strange nightmares about his Korean captivity that suggest that things are not what they appear to be: that the platoon was the subject of a Communist experiment in brainwashing and mind control, and that Shaw may pose a serious threat to American security.

It's a great premise, and while the movie could have been merely a paranoid political fantasy about the Red Menace, it also introduces a McCarthy-like Senator whose Communist witch hunt conceals a darker purpose. It's hard to say exactly where the thing falls politically - you can read in it attacks on both the far right and the far left. In the end, though, the connections and parallels that it draws between those supposedly opposed political stations suggest something scarier, and something less easily identifiable than simply Stars & Stripes vs. Hammer & Sickle.

The performances are uniformly excellent: as Marco, Sinatra's tough-guy exterior barely hides the mass of neuroses he's become following Korea. Lansbury's role as Shaw's mother is a classic of icy manipulation (her final scene with Harvey is the film's most chilling moment). Harvey is brilliant: there's a scene towards the end when Shaw is forced to come to terms with actions he'd kept suppressed. The camera holds Harvey in extreme close-up, and the shudders of self-loathing that flick across his face are near-terrifying.

Weirdest of all is Janet Leigh, as the woman Marco meets and falls in love with, and her scenes with Sinatra are some of the creepiest and most unexplained in the movie. It's hard to tell if they - Leigh and Sinatra - are supposed to be flirting or not, but something about the vacant, plastic look that never leaves Leigh's face, and the near-Dadaist lines that come out of her mouth, give the intimation that there's something else going on that we're never really allowed to see. It's a strange subplot, and while it seems to stand out from the rest of the movie's action, the oddness of it all only serves to heighten the sense of a lurking malevolence just behind the normal facade of things.

In a decade where The X-Files is a dominant cultural event, The Manchurian Candidate seems more prescient than ever; in a way, it's easy to see the themes that David Lynch has made a career out of exploring embedded in this film. But to see it only in terms of more recent works misses the point. The Manchurian Candidate is a classic on its own terms, a brilliant, paranoid Cold War horror story. Its genius lies in its refusal to make plain just who the good guys and bad guys are, and, in doing so, makes everything that much more suspect.

The Manchurian Candidate shows tonight at Kettering 11 at 7 p.m., 9:15 p.m. & 11:30 p.m. $1.