The Manchurian Candidate (1962) on Netflix
Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Captain Bennett Marco return from communist China after their platoon is captured. Shaw comes home a hero, and his mother builds her husband's career on it.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.9/1085,281 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
A U.S. Army platoon is captured in Korea by Soviet and Chinese troops and held in communist China. Three days on, Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Captain Bennett Marco make it back to United Nations lines, and on Marco's word Shaw receives the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of his soldiers, two of whom were killed. At home, Shaw's mother, Eleanor Iselin, turns the medal into publicity for her husband, Senator John Iselin, who accuses the Defense Department of harboring communists. Men from the unit call Shaw the kindest and warmest of human beings, though the soldiers he led know him as a cold, unsympathetic loner. Marco, now a major in Army Intelligence, is troubled by recurring nightmares.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Manchurian Candidate cost $2.2 million, and nearly half of that production budget went to Frank Sinatra's salary for his performance.
- Sinatra broke his little finger while shooting the fight scene between his Marco and Silva's Chunjin, and his refusal to properly bandage or cast his hand for the rest of filming led to chronic discomfort throughout his life.
- According to her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh was served divorce papers on behalf of Tony Curtis the morning she filmed the scene where Marco and her character first meet on a train.
- Lansbury played Raymond Shaw's mother even though she was only three years older than Laurence Harvey, the actor playing her on-screen son.
- The fight scene between Sinatra's Marco and Silva's Chunjin is one of the earliest depictions of East Asian martial arts in a mainstream Hollywood film, following 1945's Blood on the Sun.
- Sinatra is slightly out of focus in the hotel-room scene where Marco tries to deprogram Shaw because it was a first take he could not match in retakes, and Frankenheimer chose to keep that out-of-focus take.
- Frankenheimer cast Lansbury as Eleanor Iselin after Sinatra suggested Lucille Ball for the part; he had worked with Lansbury on All Fall Down and told Sinatra to watch that performance before deciding.
- Ten years after The Manchurian Candidate, the film's fear of a US-funded mind control scheme came true with the 1975 reveal of Project MKUltra, in which the CIA looked to control human behavior through trauma programming and psychoactive drugs.
