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The Manchurian Candidate



The name John Frankenheimer became forever synonymous with heart-in-the-throat filmmaking when this quintessential sixties political thriller was released. Set in the early fifties, this razor-sharp adaptation of the novel by Richard Condon concerns the decorated U.S. Army sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who as a prisoner during the Korean War is brainwashed into being a sleeper assassin in a Communist conspiracy, and a fellow POW (Frank Sinatra) who slowly uncovers the sinister plot. In an unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance, Angela Lansbury plays Raymond's villainous mother, the controlling wife of a witch-hunting anti-Communist senator with his eyes on the White House. The rare film to be suffused with Cold War paranoia while also taking aim at the frenzy of the McCarthy era, The Manchurian Candidate remains potent, shocking American moviemaking.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 1997 featuring director John Frankenheimer
• New interview with actor Angela Lansbury
• New piece featuring filmmaker Errol Morris discussing his appreciation for The Manchurian Candidate
• Conversation between Frankenheimer, screenwriter George Axelrod, and actor Frank Sinatra from 1988
• New interview with historian Susan Carruthers about the Cold War brainwashing scare
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Howard Hampton

Here are the extras from the Arrow release, for comparison:

- Audio commentary by director John Frankenheimer
- The Directors: John Frankenheimer, an hour-long portrait from 2000, including interviews with Frankenheimer, Kirk Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, Roy Scheider, Rod Steiger and many others
- Interview with John Frankenheimer, Frank Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod from the film’s 1988 revival
- Queen of Diamonds: an interview with Angela Lansbury
- A Little Solitaire: an appreciation of the film by director William Friedkin (The Exorcist)

If it's the same 4k restoration, I'd feel safer going with Arrow.

hearthesilence wrote:If it's the same 4k restoration, I'd feel safer going with Arrow.

likely the same master, but good compression on the arrow issue, and very likely terrible compression on the criterion issue. So I'd agree.

The Arrow isn't from a 4K Master.

Yeah, the Arrow is from the MGM Blu-Ray, whose transfer was from the MGM DVD. Compression is probably the only thing Arrow will have on Criterion's transfer (not that that's a negligible thing, of course).

Think Dressed to Kill.

In that case, I really hope the encoders for Criterion don't fuck this up...

A shame Criterion couldn't license out that Frankenheimer documentary included on the Arrow release. Otherwise, it seems like this edition (both transfer and extras) will be the one to beat.

I'm all for comprehensiveness, but I'm not too broken up about the exclusion of the Directors doc when it only exists in SD and the U.S. DVD can be had for less than a dollar plus shipping on Amazon.

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:I'm all for comprehensiveness, but I'm not too broken up about the exclusion of the Directors doc when it only exists in SD and the U.S. DVD can be had for less than a dollar plus shipping on Amazon.

That doc is not featured on the U.S. Blu-Ray.

I was referring to the standalone DVD, which has been OOP for ages (it's so old it's a Winstar title) but was evidently produced in absurdly excessive numbers (I still see unopened copies from this series at Half-Price Books all the time). Again, I see the value of having everything in one place, so to speak, but in this case it's not a big loss, especially considering Criterion would insist on upscaling it to 1080p and eating up more disc space.

criterion10 wrote:

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:I'm all for comprehensiveness, but I'm not too broken up about the exclusion of the Directors doc when it only exists in SD and the U.S. DVD can be had for less than a dollar plus shipping on Amazon.

That doc is not featured on the U.S. Blu-Ray.

The U.S. disc also didn't have the original mono for some reason, whereas the U.K. disc did.

swo17 wrote:• New piece featuring filmmaker Errol Morris discussing his appreciation for The Manchurian Candidate
• New interview with historian Susan Carruthers about the Cold War brainwashing scare

The Carruthers piece, more than anything else, might persuade me to buy the film for a fourth (!) time but the Arrow edition is so good that I see the Criterion compliment it rather than replace it altogether. The Arrow booklet is one of their absolute best so even if the transfer is properly encoded, I'll still wait for Chris' take on the Crit features and the B&N November sale next year.

It would be kind of cute if Criterion actually went through the trouble to license the easter eggs from the prior MGM release, not that I particularly care to hear Friedkin's outtake again but at least Lansbury's extra was actually informative.

Does anyone know if Arrow got access to these extras for their release?

britcom68 wrote:Does anyone know if Arrow got access to these extras for their release?

They are indeed on the Arrow disc, but I'll leave you to work out how to watch them.

And I'm glad someone brought up the booklet after Domino omitted it from his list of extras. As far as I'm concerned, a 12,000-word 40-page booklet most definitely counts as a substantial extra - especially when more than half of it was a substitute for a planned video piece that never got off the ground because I finally decided that the subject (actual CIA-backed brainwashing experiments) worked much better in print because of the need for extensive references and footnoting.

If a supplement can be done as printed material rather than a video segment, I think print is usually a better way to go. I'm finding more and more video content becoming unnecessary since there isn't enough visual material to justify it, either because they're not needed, they're unobtainable (e.g. a separate license is needed), or they just involve clips from the main feature in the set.

On Hard to Be a God, I had a choice between licensing a video interview with Aleksei German (which would have blown my entire extras budget) or printing an English translation of a much more recent print equivalent. I really wasn't impressed with the video interview, as it was extremely rambling and digressive and clearly aimed primarily at Russians, whereas the print interview was electrifying (I suspect it had been pre-edited to a much greater extent) - and while it was similarly aimed at Russians, it's much easier to add unobtrusive footnotes to text than to video material. So that's what I went with.

I don't recognise any distinction between print and video in terms of intrinsic value, so if I think that the information can be better/more efficiently conveyed in print, that's what I'll always go with.

Very nice!

This was pointed out at the Blu-ray.com forum, but it seems Criterion has dropped the Howard Hampton essay and haven't replaced it with anything.

Beaver

The transfer seems to improve on the Arrow, but Criterion really dropped the ball with the extras on this one (I understand not including the Lansbury interview, but why not port over the other MGM interviews? -- I, for one, would have like to have heard Friedkin's thoughts.)

Also: The documentary on Frankenheimer on the Arrow is a major inclusion.

dwk wrote:This was pointed out at the Blu-ray.com forum, but it seems Criterion has dropped the Howard Hampton essay and haven't replaced it with anything.

Very strange, is this the first Criterion without some variation of linear notes (essay, interview, etc.)?

criterion10 wrote: Also: The documentary on Frankenheimer on the Arrow is a major inclusion.

Not really. Those The Directors docs were pretty superficial.

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I was thinking about this in relation to Noiradelic’s comment in the new Parallax View thread, saying that aside from the test sequence that film is ‘rather thin’. My reaction was similar after a first viewing, and I think it was partly a response to aspects of the film that have since become central to my reasons for loving it.

There is something ‘off’ about The Parallax View, from the oddly vague characterisation of the central character, to the silly (and confusing) ‘looking for my parrot’ scene, to the ride on the mini-train, to the weirdly staged and timed action sequences. It’s more than tonal ambiguity – it’s an accumulation of small details that make you feel like something is ‘not quite right’ with the film. The brilliance of the Parallax Test sequence is a perfect encapsulation of this sort of counter-intuitive tendency – but I won’t go into spoiler territory for that film here.

It seems to me that The Manchurian Candidate shares this tendency to some extent: you see it in the (amazing) ‘dream’ sequences, in the banter between the goofy communists, in the bizarre dialogue between Ben and Rosie, in the jarring fight scene with Chunjin (with the accompanying repetition of ‘How did the old lady turn into the Russian?! What was Raymond doing with his hands?!’…and the later conversation between Ben and Raymond about exchanging festive greetings).

There’s something very special about the matter-of-fact way in which these films embrace bathos and anti-climax, right down to the final scene. Listen to Raymond’s tone of voice when he utters his last words, ‘Oh god, Ben.’ It doesn’t sound like deep, life-ending despair, but more like high-handed disgust and contempt – as if he’s mocking his own actions, rather than fully inhabiting the gravitas of the situation. It’s beautifully in keeping with the characterisation of this unlikely hero, who is neither a good nor bad person, just really obnoxious and supercilious.

What I’m describing is hard to pin down, and easier to define in negative terms. For instance, I don’t think you find this in other Frankenheimer films from the same time like Seven Days in May or The Train, nor is it quite the same as the off-the-wall satirical humour of Dr. Strangelove or the more subdued comic touches in All the President’s Men. It’s more like the weird humour in Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, in David Lynch films, in Jan Němec’s The Party and the Guests, or in Frankenheimer’s Seconds…but in a way it’s more troubling when it’s integrated into what is in many ways quite a conventional political thriller – i.e. it’s precisely because there isn’t a tone of surreal horror permeating the entire film (as in Seconds) that these ‘off’ moments are so uncomfortable.

The closest comparison I can make is to the Paul Kelly scene in Crossfire (the 1947 film noir), where a character shows up for one scene and spouts a confusing series of clichés, each of which he then recants: ‘What I just told you – that was a lie… You believe that? That’s a lie too.’ (I think there’s a kind of homage to this in Blow-Up.) It’s wonderful because it doesn’t seem to belong in the film; you almost find yourself doubting that you saw it. This adds an extra layer of psychological unease to Crossfire, rendering its message about prejudice and hatred more profound than the on-the-nose preaching towards the end would suggest. You feel you’ve been ‘opened up’ to a new layer of reality, an awareness of disturbed and self-contradictory elements in your mind (and in people’s minds generally) that you didn’t know were there, and might gloss over even if you noticed them.

In The Manchurian Candidate and The Parallax View, you get a similar eye-opening feeling. You could summarise the conspiracies at work in these films and make them sound coherent, but that wouldn’t capture the experience of watching the films themselves. It’s not just that the body snatchers are out to get you, or that politicians or corporations are self-serving and evil, or that the warmongers are scheming (or lashing out impulsively) to bring on World War 3. The real message here is both more restrained and more chilling: something is wrong, and the clues are there in plain sight, but you’ll never fully understand it.