The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco, finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and soon races to uncover a terrible plot.
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What critics compared The Manchurian Candidate to
He’s always been an inexpressive actor with a stiff demeanor, who might remind you of the cruel comment that Pauline Kael once made about Laurence Harvey: that he finally found a role he was capable of playing convincingly in “The Manchurian Candidate”—that of a “brainwashed zombie.”
Nothing is what it seems or appears to be, and Boyle and Dod Mantle are influenced by another remarkable movie involving hypnosis and fleetingly recalled dreams: John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate .
…watered-down Manchurian Candidate riffs…
Clearly, shenanigans of the Manchurian Candidate sort are afoot…
Now Brave New World makes direct reference to a classic of the genre, The Manchurian Candidate, when Isaiah Bradley (Lumbly), a forgotten victim of the super soldier program, tries to assassinate former general, now president Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Ford, stepping in for the late William Hurt), but claims to have no memory of the crime.
One of the central plot devices borrows the notion of the hypnotized zombie killer from the recently rereleased The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — another example of the movie’s tendency to grab at everything in sight rather than limit its focus to one (or even two or three) genres.
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Blazing away amidst all these stock and semi-stock figures is Diane Ladd's scene-stealing Marietta Fortune, who gives Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate some fierce competition as the screen's wickedest Mama.
The sequence is formally inventive, beautifully acted by Buckley and Plemons as they engage in a low-key game of One-Upsmanship to see which one of them is more erudite and dialogue that makes the first meeting between Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh in “The Manchurian Candidate” seem straightforward and direct by comparison.
However, “Ocean’s 8” is every bit as good — if not better — than the 1960 flick, which doesn’t hold up nearly as well on repeat viewings as other classic flicks by Frank Sinatra (“The Manchurian Candidate”) or Dean Martin (“Rio Bravo”).
Just as Angela Lansbury said, “How about some solitaire?” in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), Keener achieves similar creep factor saying, “How about some tea?” before plunging us into a mental state known as “the sunken place.”
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Set pieces involve an intricate assassination scheme in the Vienna Opera House that steals lovingly from Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate” and Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”; Ethan holding his breath underwater for three-minutes-plus to replace a computer chip; and a motorcycle chase in Casablanca and into the desert with Ethan trailing Ilsa and Syndicate goons chasing them both.
It seems as if Silva’s contempt for M — his vengeance is like that of a spurned child — and her discovery of an orphaned James might push the film into strange psychological territory, that M might be some rethinking of the manipulator Angela Lansbury played in “The Manchurian Candidate,’’ that the “M’’ might stand, sardonically, for “Mommy.’’