The Manchurian Candidate

The Manchurian Candidate is a fairly average, or perhaps even disappointing, adaptation of the seminal political thriller novel by the same name. While the film has some interesting ideas, both in its story and its visuals, the final product is underwhelming. Not all political thrillers need to be cut from the same cloth. They can have a visual flair to bolster a mystery plot, like The Third Man. Or they can be full of quiet but mounting tensions, like AMC’s criminally underrated Rubicon. Or they can be fast paced in a wild and action-filled way, like The Bourne Identity. Unfortunately, The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t excel in any of these categories.

The film has brief moments of ingenuity in its framing, but by and large it is shot in an uninteresting way. The recurring motif of Abraham Lincoln, a not so subtle nod to the theme of political assassination, is a neat idea and reasonably well realized. Some of the murder shots also create interesting perspectives or depth of field to disguise the violence of the murders for an early 1960s audience. On the other hand, the vast majority of the movie is, for lack of a better word, flat. The compositions are dull and the camerawork is uninspired. There are even some shots that are noticeably out of focus without a strong artistic reason to be so.

The pacing is also disappointing. It aims for the slow burn approach but is structured in a way where too many of the tools for building tension aren’t available. It reveals who the assassin is, what geopolitical force they kill for, and how they became an assassin very early in the movie. This greatly hampers generating tension through a core mystery. The film does hold who the assassin’s handler is close to the vest, but the audience doesn’t really have a reason to care about that until very late in the picture. The assassin also doesn’t kill that many people, so there is no mystery in why certain targets are selected.

The other option, what Hitchcock called the bomb under the table, isn’t utilized either, as the movie doesn’t want to show the totality of the conspiracy the assassin is serving until the very end. Without hinting at that outcome the film lacks the impending doom necessary to build tension. The result is that there is no sense of urgency for the people trying to unravel the plot and stop the killing. Without that urgency, The Manchurian Candidate’s slow pace isn’t taut and exciting, it is simply languid and boring.

While the two main characters are both well written and, for the most part, well acted, the supporting characters are distractingly weak, especially in their writing. For example, Marco’s love interest is introduced in such a bafflingly bizarre way that you can’t help but wonder why she would ever be interested in him. They meet for the first time while he is having a nervous breakdown on a train and she is immediately interested in him, sexually. I kept waiting for her to be revealed to be an operator/agent/spy, at least on some level, which would explain the peculiar manner in which they met and her strange attraction to a clearly mentally unwell individual. He would be her mark. But no such reveal comes. Instead she just exists as a body to which Marco can give exposition. To compound the clumsiness of this writing, the things he shares with her are often clearly classified intel that no right thinking intelligence agent would ever discuss outside of their office.

The exception to the weak side characters is Angela Lansberry’s performance as Shaw’s mother, which is exceptional. She is a total scene stealer almost every time she appears on the screen. As someone who mostly knew her as the kindly old author in Murder She Wrote and the tea cup in Beauty and the Beast it was a treat to see the immenseness of her talent in a more serious role.

The Manchurian Candidate has more thought put into its story than many political thrillers and for that I give it credit. However, there is a quaintness about it. One almost wants to forgive its follies for being of its time, constrained by the tastes and underdeveloped techniques of the early 1960s, without the benefit of post French New Wave advancements in editing and cinematography. But then you remember that movies like North By Northwest, Notorious, and The Third Man predate The Manchurian Candidate by a decade or more and that quaintness quickly fades to simple disappointment. The Manchurian Candidate is just too plain, too slow, too boring, and too low on tension to meet my expectations for a thriller.

Would Recommend: If you are curious about the film that popularized the ideas of brainwashing and mind control, especially as tropes of the espionage genre.

Would Not Recommend: If you are expecting an edge of your seat political spy thriller.