Word: manchurian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Manchurian Candidate (1962). John Frankenheimer directs Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury in a political chiller. Savvy and memorable dissection of anti-Communist paranoia in Washington; the garden-party scene...
...peddles a racist ideology that, surprisingly, he doesn't even subscribe to. Gary Sinise, in one of his best performances, portrays the four-term Governor and three-time presidential candidate's Faustian descent from liberal to conservative rabble-rouser as a human tragedy. And director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz) uses all his old tricks (handheld cameras, black-and-white scenes, jarringly quick cuts and time jumps) along with some newer ones (slipping Sinise, Forrest Gump-style, into real TV footage) to keep the history immediate...
...turns out, of course, that there is nothing theoretical about the conspiracy that primarily obsesses Jerry. We learn that decades earlier it seized and victimized him (among many others) in a government-supported attempt to create our very own Manchurian candidates; that this program has been directed undetected all these years by the visibly wicked Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart), one of those shrinks who in life would lose their license but whose malpractices are never questioned in the movies; and that it is the purity of Jerry's love for Alice that is bringing him back to his senses...
...knew there was so much to satirize. Throw in star-studded Senate classic Advise and Consent for a briefer on the Weld mess. But if you're a campaign finance junkie, and you need a good Asian infiltration plot to get through the weekend, just go get The Manchurian Candidate. As a watchdog, committee chairman Fred Thompson has absolutely nothing on Chairman of the Board Frank Sinatra...
DIED. RICHARD CONDON, 81, author; in Dallas. The movie made of his novel The Manchurian Candidate, a crazy quilt of Asian communists enmeshed with U.S. fascists, seemed fantastic at the time--until the political killing at its core was echoed in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Suddenly Condon's Freudian analysis of America as a nation of dark impulses, largely hidden from itself, was the only explanation that made sense...