Khigh Dhiegh – Movie Musings

Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey are brainwashed in The Manchurian Candidate

Director: John Frankenheimer

Cast: Frank Sinatra (Major Bennett Marco), Laurence Harvey (Raymond Shaw), Janet Leigh (Eugenie Rose Cheyney), Angela Lansbury (Eleanor Shaw Iselin), James Gregory (Senator John Yerkes Iselin), Henry Silva (Chun-jin), Leslie Parish (Jocelyn Jordan), John McGiver (Senator Thomas Jordan), Khigh Dhiegh (Dr Yen Lo), James Edwards (Cpl Allen Melvin)

Spoilers: Herein the biggest twist in The Manchurian Candidate is revealed

Korean War hero Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is cold, uncommunicative, reserved and difficult. So why, when asked, does everyone in his platoon say “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life”? Welcome to the world of sinister brainwashing and mind-control. Welcome to The Manchurian Candidate.

Shaw returns from the war in Korea as a Medal of Honour winner. He saved his entire platoon – with the exception of two casualties – under heavy fire and is America’s blue-eyed-boy, already being hijacked by his ambitious mother Eleanor (Angela Lansbury) as a prop for the Presidential campaign of her second husband, her McCarthy-like puppet Senator John Iselin (James Gregory). But if things are fine and dandy, why does Shaw’s commanding officer Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) keep having a recurring nightmare of a hypnotised Shaw calmly murdering those two casualties in front of an audience of Russian and Chinese officers? Can Shaw be all he seems – or is he the new secret weapon in a deadly Cold War?

A film born at the heart of the paranoia of the sixties – it premiered shortly after the Cuban Missile and would be followed a year later by the assassination of JFK by the Shaw-esque Lee Harvey Oswald – The Manchurian Candidate captures the mood of its time in a way few other films have done. On top of which, it’s a brilliant, edge-of-your-seat ride, crammed with complex psychology and chillingly cold-hearted violence, directed with a more than a splash of cinema verité and plenty of panache by John Frankenheimer at the top-of-his-game. Touches of satire on politics and the media, are mixed with a terrifying fantasia on the powers of mind control. There is no other film that drips with as much sweat as this one (just look at some of those faces!) or plays more brilliantly into our own fevered nightmares of how we can be turned against ourselves.

The action in the film is dealt with all the expertise of a card sharp. The opening scene already tips us the wink about the lies in the memories of our heroes: not only do the soldiers clearly despise Shaw, as he plucks them out of a seedy bar in Korea, but we later see them bundled up by Commie soldiers into waiting helicopters. So, we’ve already got a pretty good idea why Sinatra’s Major Marco is as twitchy and sweaty as he is – and we’re immediately suspicious of just how Shaw managed to get his hands on the Medal of Honour (and why, perhaps, he doesn’t seem that happy about it – as if he already subconsciously knows he doesn’t deserve it).

The truth is revealed to us in an extended sequence that’s a tour-de-force or imaginative visual technique, that Frankenheimer doesn’t get enough credit for. Marco’s dream starts in a genteel hotel in America’s South, with a polite middle-class lady giving a talk about flowers on stage, surrounded by the platoon. The camera moves from the stage in a smoothly uninterrupted 360 turn looking at the audience of similarly middle-class, middle-age belles, before returning to the stage where the hotel backdrop has been replaced by huge banners of Stalin and Mao and our genteel lady has turned into a sinisterly jovial Chinese scientist.

During the sequence that follows, the camera shifts constantly from the subjective (Marco’s false memory of the hotel and ladies) and the objective (a surgical observatory pit with watching Communist apparatchiks), while never interrupting the chilling scientific explanation from Khigh Dhiegh’s (brilliant in every way) scientist. During this inspired barrage of false and true memories, spliced with alarming moments of violence, we witness just how far Shaw’s brainwashing programming has gone as, with complete politeness, he goes about shooting one soldier in the head and quietly strangling another. No wonder Marco – and the other soldiers who all share versions of the same nightmare – wakes up screaming every morning.

And why did they pick Shaw? Well obviously, his mother-fixation already makes him more than susceptible to external control (under hypnosis he describes Marco as his best friend – something that, Dr Lo points out, speaks volumes for his inclination to prostrate himself to authority). Played with an austere distance by Laurence Harvey – the film expertly uses Harvey’s prickly air of patrician woodenness – Shaw is desperately weak-willed and a natural follower, who has never escaped his mother’s influence. He’s already a lonely man, nursing heart-break, loathing the brashness around him with an elitist hauteur, but lacking the force of character to do anything about it. No wonder he’s ready to be reprogrammed.

And of course, there is no controller he is more likely to follow than his mother. Angela Lansbury excels in her finest, most iconic screen role, as Shaw’s ambitious, deadly, controlling and manipulative mother. Is there a finest reveal, than her sudden invitation at a fancy-dress party for Shaw to “pass the time by playing a little Solitaire”? The film skilfully suggests that it is power rather than ideology that motivates Eleanor – even before the reveal she’s clearly the brains in the marriage with her dull husband, and a forceful, overbearing presence to her son. It’s revealed she’s already wrecked poor Shaw’s life – forcing him to jilt his true love Jocelyn (Leslie Parish), because marriage to the daughter of a political rival ain’t part of the plan. Maybe as well she’s motivated by the unsettling air of incest between the two of them.

No wonder Marco starts to feel sorry for him. Sinatra is very good in this film, striking a perfect balance between twitchy unease and a growing fatherly concern for Shaw. Notoriously a one-take actor (a key scene where Sinatra appears slightly out-of-focus – an effect that suggests we are seeing him from the screwed up Shaw’s perspective – was in fact because Sinatra was most effective in the first take, but the camera was incorrectly set-up), Frankenheimer uses his presence extremely well. He has a brutal fight scene that uses every inch of his energy, while he’s not afraid to add a touch of vulnerability into his burgeoning relationship with Janet Leigh’s stranger on a train (despite an initial scene that suggests all sorts of intriguing possibilities, this is a rather thankless part for Leigh, which she still performs expertly). Like Harvey, his face is frequently studied dripping with sweat.

It’s all shot with a brilliantly immediacy. A press conference – where Iselin (the McCarthy satire is hilariously wicked) rants about Commies in the State Department – is shot with such observatory skill, it feels alarmingly real. Moments of lightness – the slightly dreamy flashbacks of Shaw and Jocelyn running playfully together near the sea – are immediately punctured by terrifying moments of unsensational suddenness, none more so than when a programmed Shaw assassinates Jocelyn and her father (the bullet passing through a carton of milk in his hand, which pours out across the floor). It culminates in a race-against time that’s played out with a hair-raising tension.

The Manchurian Candidate combines skilful acting with real cinematic force and invention from Frankenheimer. It creeps into the darkest corners of our mind and invites our nightmares to come out to play. Dark, at times even blackly comic, it’s possibly the finest and most influential conspiracy thriller ever made.

Trauma abounds in dull, self-important conspiracy thriller Seconds

Director: John Frankenheimer

Cast: Rock Hudson (Tony Wilson), Salome Jens (Nora Marcus), John Randolph (Arthur Hamilton), Will Geer (Old Man), Jeff Corey (Mr Ruby), Richard Anderson (Dr Innes), Murray Hamilton (Charlie Evans), Karl Swenson (Dr Morris), Khigh Dhiegh (Davalo), Frances Reid (Emily Hamilton), Wesley Addy (John)

In the 1960s, John Frankenheimer directed a string of conspiracy and paranoia thrillers, the most famous of which was The Manchurian Candidate. Seconds follows on in that genre, but where The Manchurian Candidate is first-and-foremost an adventure story with a deeper soul, Seconds is a self-important piece of overt arty cinema that quickly outstays its welcome.

This is particularly annoying as, on paper, this is a great story. A business makes its living from selling new, younger bodies (and new carefree lives), known as “seconds”, to old, rich people so they can start afresh. One such man is depressed banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), who is reborn as artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). The one rule? They can’t tell anyone about the procedure or about their old lives, and must leave everything behind. Needless to say, the prospect of a new life is a hell of a lot better than actually getting it.

Seconds really should go from there into a fascinating exploration of truth and identity: instead it swiftly gets bogged down in arty camera shots, self-important philosophising about the nature of identity, and tediously over-extended sequences of Hamilton/Wilson trying (and failing) to come to terms with his new life. The entire film never shakes the feeling that it believes it is stunningly important and everything it does is making crucially important, profound points, and it quickly loses the audience.

The basic problem with it, above all others, is that we are given no reason at all to care about Hamilton/Wilson in either of his two personae. John Randolph is so effectively beige as the original Hamilton, you genuinely end up not caring what happens to him. Nothing in either his life or personality sparks any interest, or any sense of loss. Pile onto that the fact that it seems to take an age for him to commit to having the operation in the first place and you have a rather slow, dragging half-hour opening with a character you care very little about. And that’s just the first act.

The point the film wants to make is that changing your face and your life cannot always change the man inside: that the basic unhappy discontent of Hamilton/Wilson isn’t going to be fixed by giving him Rock Hudson’s face. Sad people are going to be sad whatever. The fact that I have summed up all the ideas of the film in a few short lines tells you everything. The film takes over an hour to make the same statements, with Wilson as tedious a lead as Hamilton was. In fact, one of the main problems is that the most interesting characters by far are those on the edge of the film – from Will Geer’s seemingly benign, but deeply sinister exec running the business to Wesley Addy’s scarily omniscient butler, these side characters all offer a lot more interest than our lead.

Wilson ends up in a beach community, filled with a host of suspicious-looking people and staffed by company representatives determined to make sure Wilson doesn’t disgrace himself or blow the gaff. Hudson makes a decent fist of the job – many commentators have made the rather clumsy point that the famously closeted Hudson probably had more understanding of what it was like hiding your real identity than any other Hollywood star around at the time – but it can’t change the fact that he’s basically not that strong or compelling a performer. Or that, even in the new body, Hamilton/Wilson is still a pompous and dull stick-in-the-mud.

So even in a new skin the character is not one you can feel any investment in. The community sequences are as slow and overplayed as the opening half hour. We are never really clear what exactly Wilson/Hamilton finds so terrifying and unsatisfying about the community, or why he finds the idea of other “seconds” so deeply traumatising. The sequence is also cursed with a bizarre “grape crushing” ceremony, that plays out like a sort of Woodstocky orgy. I imagine it is meant to convey the sudden appeal of free living – but it’s so skin-crawlingly awkward and embarrassing in its staging that it makes Frankenheimer feel like a stuffy dad attempting to relate to the sexy young kids.

Seconds is basically too dry and empty the majority of the time to really care about or enjoy. Frankenheimer – and in particular his cinematographer James Wong Howe – shoot the film with an inspiring and trippy inventiveness as well as a disconcerting surreality. The woozy black-and-white photography constantly mixes unsettling angles, disconcerting zooms and intense POV framing to leave you uncomfortable and on-edge while watching the film. While this artiness and theatricality does sometimes make the film feel like it’s trying too hard (and makes it feel very of its time) it does at least offer most (if not all) of the interest in the film.

Maybe part of the problem as well is that Seconds is an almost unbearably depressing film, with possibly the most horrifyingly grim ending you can imagine, shot with intense horror by Frankenheimer (I’ll also say that Hudson’s desperation and fear as he realises the final fate the company has in mind for him is brilliant). It’s not exactly fun viewing, but it’s so intense you have to admire it even while finding it terrifying. It’s one of the few moments where the film’s pretensions, and pride in itself, really pay off with the final product.

It’s the problem all over with Seconds. There are moments in there you can admire – and you can totally see why it has been reclaimed by many now as a lost classic. However, it’s also really easy to understand why the film was a box office bomb, unloved by the cinemagoers and why it’s not very well known today. There is so little in there for you to feel an emotional connection to – its lead character is a bore and a cold fish, his love interest sinister, and huge chunks of the story are delivered with a puffed up pride at how clever the whole thing is. It’s a huge disappointment, considering its potential.