Transcription
Whom do you dislike the least in your group here today?
>> The least.
>> That's right.
>> Well, I guess Captain Marco, man.
>> You notice how he is always drawn to authority. That won't do, Raymond. We need the captain to get you your medal. Who else?
>> Well, I guess Ed Mavi, ma'am.
Ah, >> that's better. Now then, Raymond, take this scarf and strangle Ed Mvoli, uh, to death.
Hello and welcome to every single sci-fi film ever. I'm Aish Khan. Today we are talking about the 1962 film *The Manchurian Candidate*, made by John Frankenheimer. Now, many people may not consider this to be a true science fiction film, but I was assured by Steven Flanigan on Blue Sky that Frankenheimer himself did consider this, and *Seconds*, which is perhaps a bit more obviously a sci-fi, both to be science fiction. And if we analyze how the main character is brainwashed in this film, it is through science.
So, moving on swiftly, I just wanted to give a little bit of historical context before we get into the conversation. So, 1961 is the year that JFK became president, and he also announced that in Congress that he wanted to focus on the space race and put a man on the moon. It's also the year that the failed Bay of Pigs invasion happened, when the United States supported the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front to invade Cuba, which was now being led by Fidel Castro. So, this is peak, peak Cold War tensions, and later on in 1962, we will have the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is the year that this film was released.
So, moving on to my absolutely wonderful guests. First up, we have Ian Scott, who is a professor of American film and history at the University of Manchester. He has written extensively about American politics and Hollywood, including the book *American Politics and Hollywood Film*. Welcome to the show, and how are you doing today?
>> I'm well, thank you. Thanks for having me again.
>> Wonderful. Joining Ian is Cheryl Vint, who's professor of science fiction media studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has written/edited extensively about science fiction. Welcome back to the show, Cheryl. How are you doing today?
>> Uh, very well, and thank you for having me back. It's always lovely to be on this podcast.
>> Thank you.
Um, wonderful. So, I do feel this film is from the films that I've covered so far is the first one where I feel there's a huge departure from the 1950s. Like, this feels like a completely new thing. Um, so I want to talk a little bit about Frankenheimer and the concept of these New Hollywood directors. So, Ian,
>> Yeah, I I agree with you. I I think one of the things that's starting to happen by the 1960s is that you've got a whole new generation of people who are very cine-literate, and you're going to have a bunch of other uh people who come along, the Mike Nichols of this world and others through the through the 1960s, who are going to be that transformational generation that bring forward the so-called New Hollywood. Um, you know, you're going to get Peckinpah and Polanski and a new generation of people coming from outside the US, as well as homegrown directors. Alan J. Pakula, I guess, who perhaps in some ways stylistically and in terms of subject matter, is one of the closest people to to Frankenheimer's own concerns. So, you're going to have all of those people starting to come through. And on one level, they're a product of their own philosophy. You know, we don't we don't really care for the old generation. And it's, you know, simple kind of transformation and change, isn't it? You know, the the young Turks come forward and they don't care much for the the old fogies who've been doing it for a long period of time, even though they're taking their influence from that canon of filmmakers who've been, you know, part of Hollywood's Golden Age. So, there's all of that going on, but of course, the system, the industry itself is both falling apart and rebuilding itself at the same time in the 1960s and on into the '70s. So, it's providing an opportunity for those kind of filmmakers, you know.
Um, *The Manchurian Candidate* was made by United Artists. They'd always considered themselves, I mean, it's a company that went back to the very beginnings of Hollywood in many ways. You know, as you know, it was a company that was founded by some of the legendary greats of the industry right at the beginning of the um uh of the studio system, still in the in the silent era, but it was always a company that kind of had a reputation for taking um taking risks, for looking for different and interesting subjects. So, you know, there's a lot on the side of young directors like Frankenheimer who are being being given a chance in this new system. Um, and he was helped a little bit by the novel. You know, the the book itself had made quite a splash. It was both critically lauded and it was very popular at the same time. You know, it was that duality that sometimes you don't get with with certain novels.
>> Interesting. Um, Cheryl, can you talk a little bit about the the original book which um which I believe was a little bit different? Can you tell us your experience of it?
Some of the differences are interesting, and particularly uh the emphasis on the sort of family unit and the mother. Um, you know, a hint of the closeness between her and her son being a little excessive in the film, but it's um clearly represented as incest in the novel, or as as clearly, and I don't mean to seem there's um extensive descriptions of incest, but it's clearly, as as a popular novel will get to um suggesting that. And I think it's connected to the novel's interest in sort of brainwashing, conditioning, how it is psychologies are shaped, that in a way Raymond Shaw is set up as being um susceptible um to control because of this very strained family dynamic he has, that his mother's excessive control of him. Um, much, much more is made of his resentment of the absence of his real father, and Johnny being there as his mother's husband instead. Um, and at least in my opinion, um Marco is also not quite as heroic in the novel. He's certainly still the hero, but he um has his own struggles to um adjusting um to civilian life, I guess one could say. Um, and uh Rosie actually seems to be a vector of him actually being rehabilitated in some way, whereas I feel the Marco character is made much more heroic in the film, which I presume is Sinatra's influence, but I don't know.
>> And maybe Hollywood's influence as well.
>> Maybe Hollywood's as well. Yes. I mean, it would be better if he was a better actor, but.
Um, I did want to talk a little bit about science fiction literature earlier on because there was a really interesting book in 1951 called *Brainwashing in Red China* by Edward Hunter, who was an American journalist who used to work for the OSS, which was a precursor to the CIA, so the first intelligence agency in the US. Um, and that talked about brainwashing as a Chinese term, which people aren't quite sure if it's true or not, if it's a direct translation or if it was something that was influenced by the intelligence agencies. But you were saying that in 1940s um pulp literature, the concept of both telepathy, mind control, and brainwashing were all quite common in stories at that time.
>> Yeah, there was a period in the 1940s especially where there was a real interest in in parapsychology. So brainwashing, not or not so much brainwashing, but mind reading, telepathy, um all kinds of stories about sort of um the next evolutionary generation that were going to have these telepathic or other powers, and how they might be able to control the brains of uh normal humans who didn't have this these sort of parapsychology abilities. There was some real research at the time about whether parapsychology was real or not. Um, and I but I feel that that sort of faded away much more quickly than the appeal of the idea faded away in science fiction. Uh, which was in part because John W. Campbell, who was a very influential pulp magazine editor, was quite interested in these topics.
So, um, I think that that is part of how I understand the film as connected to science fiction, is that these interests in the sort of the plasticity of the mind and powers to control or program the mind, um, they're taken up quite a bit in pulp SF, although not strictly in this sort of Red China um framework that we see in the film. >> But I know from other work that I've done, there was also um a sort of an effort in the US at the time to portray the suffering of Korean PS propaganda about how terrible communism was compared to America, and particularly it sort of intersected ed with um um anti-Asian racism in this sort of oriental figure, which also has like connections to like fumans and other kinds of pulp ideas like that, that there's something particularly insidious about the East. Um, and there's a long >> tradition of of so-called yellow peril stories in pulp SF as well. So I think that that's another vector that connects science fiction to this film.
>> Thank you. Very interesting. Um, Ian, I wanted to talk a bit about how, you know, the Cold War tension feels very, very intense in these early '60s years. Can you talk a little bit about that? And also the choice, like when we are when we've gone through the 1950s, we're thinking Russia for most of these kind of like subtext or whatever these stories are about. But they've chosen Manchuria, *The Manchurian Candidate*. So can you talk about the Cold War in the Far East a little bit, please?
Yeah, I mean, it, you know, it's it's clear both the novel as it was released and then um by 1962 in the film, you know, we're midway into John Kennedy's short tenure as president. Um, there's a whole series of events and issues going on, isn't there? That that make the film uh that much more contemporary and that much more um threatening uh as a as a text. You know, you don't just have to point to the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs or any of those obvious uh elements, nuclear testing going on in the Pacific. Um, the repercussions and fallout. I mean, historians have been working much more recently, perhaps over the course of the last decade or so, about the fallout and ramifications of the Korean War, which because it fell, you know, Vietnam fell hot on the heels of what happened in Korea in the 1950s, it was a war, you know, cliche goes, long forgotten in many ways, uh, and one that was not examined in in quite the amount of depth, certainly in terms of its legacy. And there's much more of that being done now. And that legacy from the 1950s is clearly being seen and played out in some of the some of the later events. You know, history has traditionally given us that connection between the Korean War stalemate and the negotiated settlement in 1953 that was done as a result of that, in a link with Joe McCarthy and with the anti-communist uh witch hunts and purges going on domestically within the United States. But both had ramifications long beyond their time. You know, much of McCarthy's legacy ran on through the 1950s, ran on beyond his death. He, you know, he died only a few years later, 1957. And in actual fact, even by the turn of the 1960s, Hollywood was still recovering to some degree from uh multiple inquiries into its activities, uh accusations of communist, particularly in organizations like the Screenwriters Guild. So, there's a huge amount of things that are going on that sort of prompted um the way in which people regarded and thought about the Cold War in relation to the film.
Uh, the issue of brainwashing has also seeped into the public consciousness just a little bit. You know, it's very interesting how Yenlo, who becomes the sort of leader of the infiltrated group in America when Raymond returns to the US, back in that famous sequence which revolves around the garden club in New Jersey and the uh the the lecture, the very clinical lecture hall in Manchuria. Yenlo makes that point, doesn't he?
>> "Brainwashed them, which I understand is the new American word."
And the film is always doing that. It's always referring you back to that. Oh, you remember when this came up, and we've now started debating and talking about this issue in this manner. And you remember that you guys have already started and begun conducting these kind of interesting experiments. And of course, that was what was happening with secret programs like MKUltra. You know, they were indeed engaging in almost the same sort of scientific experiments to see whether people could be influenced, brainwashed, susceptible to ideas, philosophy, or even actions that would somehow be passed off as a counterpoint. This was an advantage, you know, in the Cold War. We could infiltrate these kind of groups, organizations, maybe even nation states.
One thing that that I've always enjoyed about this film, um, it is that kind of doubled sense that it's like, is it a left-wing film? Is it a right-wing film? Um, both sides could see themselves in it, both sides could be offended by it. And I think that that's part of what makes it interesting, including how it comments on the historical situation, because there's this notion that, you know, there there becomes this like moral panic about the Chinese are brainwashing, and so therefore we have to start MKUltra. And so, in a way, the sort of things that they're um uh paranoidly fantasizing that their enemies are doing, that sort of pushes America toward for certain choices that actually make them more like than unlike the very thing that they're frightened by. Right? And so I think that that the film does capture that somewhat beautifully. >> Especially in its sort of what I think of as a kind of weird um narrative structure, in the sense that we know from the very beginning that he's programmed, right? It's there's no suspense there. We see from the beginning the the way in which his understanding of himself is different than the historical reality. And so, in a way, the film is like, well, what what is the actual suspense? What is the question? But then the question becomes, it's actually the family unit is the source of the betrayal. And they sort of in a way overly delay revealing who his handler is so that they could make it as dramatic as possible, be like, ah, it's his mother. >> Um, and so I think that that's also an interesting comment on a kind of um paranoid tendency, like I'm thinking of Richard Hofstadter's book here, *The Paranoid Style in American Politics*, that we see come out especially in McCarthyism. >> Um, the like on the one hand, it's a parody of McCarthy because he can't even get the numbers right. He's like, how many communists? We don't know. >> But then that turns out, in fact, to be the disinformation style of politics too, right? That she explains to him like, oh, well, instead of saying, are there communists now? Everybody's asking, how many? Because you keep changing the number. So I think there's a kind of cleverness in in those ambiguities around who is actually the source of the dysfunction, the US um state fighting communism, or the communist state itself.
>> Absolutely. Um, I wanted to mention a few more things about MKUltra because I just find it really fascinating. So, it's uh started off as Project Bluebird under Harry Truman. Then it went to Operation Artichoke, and the actual MKUltra came about in 1953, which was um covert operations on humans, um testing them to see if they can be brainwashed or manipulated, truth serums, all that kind of thing, um through various electroshocks, other types of treatments, and various drugs, which ended up in large part with MKUltra being LSD, which was also becoming a huge counterculture influence. Um, so with that in mind, I just wanted to also go to the brainwashing scene because it is such a cleverly shot scene, and it has those kind of echoes of 1950s, like, you know, when you go into things like *Invasion of the Body Snatchers*. Cheryl, you were on that episode or something like um *Invaders from Mars*, where things that seem very kind of homely and suburban, um, like the garden club in this um brainwashing scene, are actually very, very kind of like nefarious. So yes, Cheryl, let's talk about the brainwashing scene.
Yeah, actually, I think that that scene is probably the main thing that makes me really like this film. And I think it also is part of this New Hollywood um uh aesthetics that that you were talking about at the beginning, that it's not exactly like a New Wave, like a French New Wave film, but you can see that they've sort of watched some French New Wave films and decided like the visual mise-en-scène can be a little more interesting than the classical Hollywood style. And I think, you know, what makes it um so visually interesting is the filming it three times. And it's so it's not simply that that you have the round that's the women, and then you have the round that um I also think it's interesting that it's staged very um vertically when it's the generals, and very horizontally when it's the garden club. So I think that that shift is >> is interesting. But then you also have times where the two scenes kind of blur together, that it seems like the garden club, but then you see a soldier there. And so the sort of blurring of realities is very cleverly conveyed by that film, and the disorientation that's associated with all this moral panic about brainwashing is conveyed there. So I think all of that makes it interesting. It's also very interesting that when the one um uh African-American soldier remembers the scene or has the nightmare, it's actually black women rather than white women that are in the garden club.
>> Uh, it touches on questions of gender because on the one hand >> presumably it's a garden club because that's the most innocuous >> thing. Women, what power, power could they possibly have? And so, in a way, it's a that's part of the disguise. But on the other hand, once the revelations about Elelanar are made, that takes on a more nuanced sort of, you know, where does power actually reside? Why is it that all these generals are being doubled by sort of like elderly women? In a way, the people that are invisible and dismissed in society are the ones with the real power. So, it's also part of this whole um way that the sort of paranoia um intersects with spy culture, which is very big in the 1960s. And then one more thing I might throw in is like Richard Condon works as a publicist in Hollywood. And so I think that part of this moral panic around sort of agency and who can control you and stuff like that, it also touches a bit on advertising culture, not really explicitly in the film, but I mean, he knew that world. And we're also going to start getting a whole bunch of stuff about like subliminal advertising and how like visual images can imprint on your brain without your consciousness knowing. And there's going to be several sort of films um that are thinking through what does that mean for sort of the sites of control in American culture. So I think that that the fact that the brainwashing scene is staged almost like a visual hallucination is also interesting in that context.
>> Thank you for that. Um, Ian, I want to go to you, but I just also wanted to mention that it's such a stark kind of like difference to have this kind of death, murder um kind of scene, and then you have these kind of like lovely ladies from the village preservation society.
>> Flowers.
>> Yeah. But at the same time, we're we're in a period of history where the pushback is against all of that kind of like, you know, traditional families, the suburbia, all of that type of stuff is is what I feel learning about it, cuz I wasn't there. But what we're learning about it, what the youth and the new generation is kind of pushing against. And and it feels um I saw another film recently in which they describe it as I can't I can't live that life because it would be like a death to me. Admittedly, not like a literal death, but it's it's quite a a scary prospect to be put into boxes um in that era, I think, and that's why it was such a cultural shift. Um, Ian, any thoughts on the whole scene?
Yeah, I I mean, we've talked before, haven't we, about science fiction films out of the 1950s um beginning to sort of challenge the conformity of suburban life and the nuclear family and all of the um the consensus talk and politics of that era, and what it actually meant, as Cheryl's been pointing out, what it meant for gender, what it meant for race, what it meant for wider societal relations and politics. So all of those things are in play. Yeah, absolutely no coincidence, is it? Joe McCarthy's one of his very first speeches about anti-communism was to the Women's Institute of Wheeling, West Virginia. And it plays in some part again to that sense that Frankenheimer and the filmmakers knew full well that they were tempting the audience with little kind of signifiers and signals. Oh, do you remember what how this started and what this was about? And also about that breakdown of consensus. What what could be more kind of homely and um uh foundational than something like the Women's Institute within American domestic life, you know, uh a uh organization that is for people with a certain amount of resources, a certain amount of social standing, a certain kind of level of uh of influence. And so of course, there's a there's a sense that it doesn't just have to be political elites or the military, but there are all sorts of other organizations right across society that have influences and have certain kind of prerogatives and certain kind of agendas feeding into the society more generally. Uh, and I think that's what makes the scene so so classic in its uh in its own way. So if you go back to the 1930s and even through the 1940s, quite often in political movies where there's a certain there are scenes where which require a certain display of authoritarianism, you find that kind of setup quite similar to the one that Frankenheimer employs for Manchuria. That sort of clinical lecture hall with authority figures sitting uh and and um laying out justice. It occurs much earlier in a very early B-movie *Washington Merry-Go-Round* in 1932, directed by James Cruze, has an almost exact copy of a very similar kind of it's meant to be a court scene, in fact, >> which is actually a court scene that happens to be ordering a kind of gangland mafia boss um uh to face the death penalty for the crimes he's committed against society. But it has a very similar visual feel to it and sense that that is being created here in *The Manchurian Candidate*. An overarching presence of authority, of dictatorship, of some kind of authoritarianism going on.
>> It's interesting because you're saying that kind of setup, but it's actually just reminded me of two science fiction films. One's *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* and the other one is *The Man Who Changed His Mind*, where they're in university lecture halls where it's similar, where you've got all your peers in front of you in that kind of like vertical seating. Um, and yeah, it's it's a very intimidating kind of structure, I suppose.
>> In academic terms, those kind of lecture halls are often associated with medical buildings because they require a lot of um visual eyes on the uh the the um experiments that are being conducted further below. So they tend the seating tends to be raked very, very steeply in it in its own way. So um you you've got that sense that there's a kind of scientific gathering here as well, that's interested in what the quote unquote experiment actually involves and will will will become.
>> Yeah. Thank you. Very, very interesting. Um, okay, let's go on to some of the main characters in this, and I think we'll start with Raymond Shaw, who is our brainwashy, I think is the right word. Um, Cheryl,
>> I should have mentioned this when you asked me previously about differences between the book and the film, because I he's sort of known for his uh sexual dysfunction, I guess one could say, in the book. It's tied up with the sort of >> um incest theme and the kind of dysfunction of the family unit as being at the root of his problems. But he in the book is um really terrible with women. Um, and uh uh it's only through Marco that he sort of has any success with women at all in the book. Um, it led me to wonder if maybe he's in some ways being coded as queer. It's not quite that. But of course, another thing to remember in this whole context is that it's not only communists that McCarthy is seeking to force out of government, right? It's it's um queer people as well. Um, and that's uh a huge part of that story that I think is is less understood than the persecutions for political affiliation. And then he's also, you know, he's um speaking to the way that this film is really interesting in terms of gender. He's also just not a man's man, right? Like he doesn't want to go to the brothel with them, and he's boring and talking about like the rules of military command. And there's even almost like a class sense of, you know, he's the elite uh um commander class, and he doesn't understand how to be one of the boys with the sort of enlisted class. Um, and so there's all kinds of ways that his sort of failures and susceptibility to communism is also tied up with the failures of his masculinity, it seems to me.
>> Interesting. Ian,
>> Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? I I remember showing the film years and years ago to a to a group of students, and they they were kind of looking at me slightly baffled um and said, "This guy's in the American army, isn't he? So why is he a Brit?" And and of course, they're right because Harvey was British, and he doesn't really make much of an effort to put on even a transatlantic accent, let alone an American accent. Um, Shaw was a perfect embodiment in many ways for him. Um, because his career in many ways was littered with characters who were quite uptight, rather reserved, somewhat kind of dysfunctional, a little bit kind of uncertain about their place in society. There's a couple of scenes, isn't there? It's only when, you know, Marco's scientific attempts to find out how Raymond's been brainwashed involves getting him drunk, doesn't it? To see how, you know, will will that have an effect, and will he just, you know, declare things to me because he's had a few few too many um whiskies? And then right at the end, of course, you know, which which is actually both Harvey and as Shaw, you know, one of the most affecting moments, isn't it? When he turns around in the sort of projection high um cupboard of the of the convention hall.
>> "You couldn't have stopped them. The army couldn't have stopped them. So I had to. That's why I didn't call."
>> You know, he turns into a >> totally kind of focused character who knows exactly what what needed to uh what needed to be done. It's one of the flaws, incidentally, in the remake many years later. You know, that what what Raymond's character understands by the end is that there is only one route left to all of this, which is sacrifice. He is really kind of like cold and standoffish, apart from the part where he's talking about how unlovable he is. And I'm like, oh, that's that's quite. But I think that's the bit where he's drunk as well. So it's kind of >> kind of interesting.
Um, Ian, this time we'll go to you. Sinatra as Marco. Thoughts on Sinatra's role and and how well he did or didn't do. He's got his critics as as to where this where this all goes, but there's there's an awful lot that he's um uh that he's quite striking and good in what he actually does in uh uh in the film. He lobbied, of course, for it. I mean, there was I I think initially maybe there were designs that on him being Shaw, but he's I I think within his own boundaries, he's quite good in a certain way in this film. I mean, it's I mean, the other story about Sinatra surrounding the film, aside from his performance, is the fact that, you know, it spooked him so much what had happened following to Kennedy, and he'd known the Kennedys very well, you know, that really kind of scared him so much. In a way, it was a reflection in some respects of the impact that the film had had on him. Um, there's an interview on the DVD between him and Frankenheimer and George Axelrod, the screenwriter, in which Sinatra kind of, all he doesn't say anything explicitly, but he alludes to this implicitly, you know, that the film sort of had a profound effect on him. And I think he would recognize that not just for his film career, but actually for his whole career, he owed a little bit of a debt to it, because people who remember his acting career tend to associate him with this film perhaps almost more than than any others. And and of course, he was in a lot of classic kind of musicals and uh and other films of the of the late '40s and '50s. So I think he, you know, he recognized he had a debt for his whole career in it, and that was kind of important, and that he put in. It's not a career-defining performance, is it? But it's an interesting performance in its own way, and I think he understood what Marco should be, you know, I think he understood that he was this guy who's a little bit lost, slightly out of his depth. He has that scene right at the beginning, doesn't he, when he becomes a PR for um uh political figures, goes on Capitol Hill, you know, and he doesn't really know what he's doing, does he? And it's a car crash of a scene where the senator stands up and starts accusing Eisenhower of, you know, "What are you saying? And what are you trying to tell me? You're saying how many communists?" And of course, it's all being captured on television, >> which is the point for for both Elelanar and for for Johnny Elelanar. Um, so he he kind of understood that that sort of slight man out of his depth um persona, which in in a way is what he was being asked to do with Marco.
>> And and although he may not be a Brando, I think if he was really terrible, Cheryl, we probably wouldn't like this film as much as we do. Can we say that's fair?
>> It might be. In part, I'm not a big fan of his performance in this film. Like I feel the sort of um roboticization of Shaw when he's under the influence as part of the point, and maybe I'm very influenced by my my deep love of *Invasion of the Body Snatchers* because I do see some connections between the two films, and in including that sort of >> um, you know, is it the conformity to fight communism, or is it the communism that's producing this? And the problem is that um Marco's a little too robotic at times, do because he's not he's not as in the scenes together, he's just not as strong an actor. Um, >> but it could also be like I'm expecting him to be like, you know, a Philip Marlowe kind of hard-boiled character, and he doesn't quite pull it off. So it feels to me like he's trying to be that and failing, or something. But >> as you say, the film is um well remembered and remade and continues to be watched. So it couldn't have been that awful.
>> Yeah, thank you for that concession.
Okay, let's talk about who I think is the most interesting character. I grew up in the '80s um as I'm sure many people listening and maybe you did did as well, watching *Murder, She Wrote*, and here we have Angela Lansbury as the conniving and scheming and amazing Eleanor Shaw.
>> "What is it, mother?"
>> "What sort of a greeting is that at 3:30 in the morning?"
>> "It's a quarter to 11, and what do you want?"
>> "I want to talk to you, Raymond. About what?"
>> "I want to talk to you about that communist tart."
>> "Shut up with that, mother. Shut up."
>> "You know what Jordan is. Are you out to crucify me? Are you out to crucify?"
>> "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't want to know."
>> "Go to bed."
>> "Raymond."
>> "Sit down."
Cheryl, I'll let you take that one.
Part of what's interesting here is the sense that the the kind of risk comes out of the nuclear family, whereas a lot of Cold War propaganda was suggesting that in fact, it's the defense of the nuclear family is what makes America different and better, and, you know, women are just the same as men in the Soviet Union, and they're having careers, and the family is not sort of celebrated enough. And so there's something really quite interesting about both the novel, because of course this comes from the novel, that the mother is the source. Um, and the film uh suggesting that in fact, the the communist agent no one sees. I mean, it's not Johnny Elelanar, right? He he is Manchuria's candidate, but he is a pawn as much as Raymond is. And they didn't even have to brainwash him. He just has um uh his wife is able to to dominate him because her intellect is a lot greater. So, I love scenes like when she meets with Senator Jordan, and she's like, "Yeah, like right along now, Johnny." The uh the adults need to talk here. The McCarthy figure also, who is a pawn of a woman, right? Because he's the one making these like dramatic pronouncements and waving his pieces of paper around, just as McCarthy did. And he doesn't even really have a political project of his own. He just does what he's told by his wife. Um, who is um consciously collaborating with the communists, as opposed to Raymond, who's been programmed and conditioned. You know, as part of the backlash to get women out of the workforce and back into the homes, and all that stuff that happens at the end of World War II, there is this book, I don't know how influential it would have been on uh Richard Condon, but it's sort of influential in the science fiction space because the author also wrote a ton of not very good science fiction in the pulp era. But Philip Wylie writes this book, *Generation of Vipers*, which comes out initially in 1942, but it's actually reprinted in 1955 because it's very popular. And it basically, um, uh, it often happens to America during periods of political crisis. It's a big rant about how women and softness and too much worshipping of moms uh has created a kind of vulnerability uh due to softness in America, and we need to sort of like remasculinize things in order to be able to rise to the the techniques of our enemies. And I think brainwashing itself has this kind of like feminizing it's like it's like a sneaky way instead of confronting your enemy in their face, which is also associated with a lot of like misogynistic stereotyping, as well as orientalized stereotyping. So, I think there's all kinds of interesting things around gender because on the one hand, she's um like many of the villains in some pulp SF, and I know we've talked about some of these figures before, she is the villain, but she's like much more interesting and fun to watch than the heroes in certain kinds of ways. And so there's like an interesting dynamic there of on the one hand, it's um giving voice to these sorts of misogynistic viewpoints, but it also is maybe um undermining them in in the sort of strength of the performance. And then of course, for anyone watching the film now, it's very disconcerting to see essentially the mom figure of um uh Angela Lansbury from her various uh >> what is it? *Mrs. Fletcher* is it? Um, yeah, that for her to be both uh a sort of sex symbol, have all this sexuality, but also to be manipulative is very jarring for audiences contemporary.
>> Yeah, it is funny, although people do often joke about the fact that she was supposed to be a writer in *Murder, She Wrote*, and yet every week there would be a new murder wherever she happened to be, you know, like there are >> she wasn't very good at preventing murder, that's for sure.
>> Definitely not.
I just want to talk about Janet Leigh in this because she comes in, and she is as soon as I see what's going on between her and Sinatra's character, I'm like, well, she's obviously some kind of plant. She's a honey trap. This is all going to go, you know, she's not going to be one of the good guys. And it's not. It's just that it's the '60s, and we suddenly have a woman with, you know, some agency who's going for what she wants.
>> "Before I even took my coat off, I telephoned my fiancé."
>> "Well, I told you I wasn't married."
>> "I never said I wasn't engaged."
>> "Well, I called up my fiancé, and he came over as soon as he could, which was instantly. And I told him I had just met you, and I gave him his ring back."
Ian, first this time.
You know, it's almost like Janet Leigh sat in the in the in the train car and has woken up and thought, "Do you know what? I didn't die in *Psycho*. I'm actually in this film now, and I'm going to act in more or less the same kind of manner and say a lot of the same things that I did there where I was having an affair in *Psycho* before, you know, my comeuppance came quite early in the film." And I think there's an element of uh of of her bringing that portrayal. I mean, it as a compliment, because, you know, she was a terrific actress um in so many different movies through through that era, but she brings that same kind of insouciance, that same kind of sexual energy to the role that uh and in a good way that she had in in *Psycho*. You know, she's a woman of the 1960s who clearly, you know, has an idea of where she wants to go and and the ways in which she wants to do it. Again, the scene in the back of the cab where um she um she gives uh Marco a lift and sort of rather blithely tells him, doesn't it? Well, I went around to my fiancé. I told him it was all over, you know, and now here I am in the back of a cab with you, and we're going to have a life together, aren't we? You know, it's and and you think, well, that jars a little, doesn't it? Because surely it wouldn't happen quite like that. But she makes it believable as her character, and you can't ask for more than that from an actor.
Cheryl, do you want to talk a little bit about I suppose comparing Janet Leigh's character with um Raymond Shaw's on-and-off girlfriend, should we say, which is um played by Leslie Parrish,
>> especially science fiction is not uh uh in the '50s is not the best genre for women. And so to have a woman who um is not a villain because she has agency in a science fiction film is interesting. And I think yeah, actually, it's novel. >> And I think to hear we have to credit the novel to some extent because she has even more agency in the novel. She runs her own business, and in fact um uh Marco is sort of uh struggling with his nightmares, and she's the one who suggests to him like, maybe you should look into this, maybe you should talk to the FBI. And so he sort of goes from somebody plagued by nightmares to somebody who investigates their source and uncovers this conspiracy in part due to her urging in the film >> um or in the novel, rather. And the the scene on the train where um she they they meet, and she introduces herself, and she says like, "Oh, my name is Eugenie Rose. Um, and but she prefers to be called Rose." He says like, "Well, why did you introduce yourself as Eugenie if if you prefer to be called Rose?" And she's said, you know, "I don't like the name Eugenie because it seems too fragile." And this is all dialogue from the novel. And she's like, oh, well, I guess I was feeling a little bit fragile in that moment when she met him. And then she, you know, gives up on her her current partner, pursues him. So, there's a way that her agency has to be kind of tempered by his masculinity or something, like she introduces, even though she continues to have a leadership role in their partnership, and she is called Rosie, and Rosie is also like Rosie the Riveter is is an association there. Um, it's still like, oh, but when she meets someone, she's really in love, then she's Eugenie, then she's like the delicate flower of a woman. So um that that dynamic is quite interesting there. And then as compared to um uh Josie, uh Josie is basically the girlfriend, and that's it, right? Like she appears in the film >> first of all as a fantasy slash memory. Um, it's a little unclear which I think the film tends to lean into. It's a memory of this very like bucolic time when the one summer she and Raymond were together. She immediately has to take her top off so she can like soak up his wound from a snake. So there's some kind of like Garden of Eden kind of thing going on there. I'm not sure why he has to be bitten by a snake. It's a very odd scene, I feel. Um, and then she's, you know, when she shows up, um, uh, and they meet again, her costume immediately turns him into his subliminal programming. So, this kind of >> what are the chances? So, >> and she's like, and I ended up just walking walking by the shop and I thought, why not? I will >> why not the Queen of Diamonds? >> Why not? >> Of all the things I could possibly be, the one thing that's going to trigger is brainwashing. It seems like it's maybe a bit of a failure, honestly, on the part of their Pavlovian programming, because he also gets like triggered by accident in the bar, which is very helpful to uh Marco, but I'm like, they maybe could have chosen a signal that was a little less easy to stumble across in daily life, you know. >> Yeah. Um, but yeah, that that Josie, I feel, is very much there as um like an appendage to her father and an appendage to a different version of Raymond who could have lived happily in heteronormativity and beyond that. Um, she doesn't really like, like, you know, she's a mannequin rather than a person in certain ways in the film, which I guess by contrast then makes um uh Rosie that much more interesting.
>> Thank you. Um, Ian, I want to talk a little bit about a few of the things that were happening because this is very much about conspiracy, and you know, there is um as you've put in your book, there is kind of a boom of these types of conspiratorial stories coming in the well, they go along, they carry on continuing, there's a there's kind of a growth in the '70s and then a big boom in the in the '90s. Um, I just want to talk a little bit about Eisenhower's warning when he leaves office. Um, and then going into kind of the the political landscape as I suppose of the second half of the 20th century, as briefly as possible, please.
>> Yeah. Yeah. An easy task, really. I Yeah, we can definitely do that in a couple of sentences. Let's let's see how we go. Well, >> I mean, in one sense, here are my three words for you: Oliver, Stone, JFK. It's not three words. Not one word, is it? That's what we'll we'll count it as that. So, you know, no no coincidence, perhaps again, that at the start of JFK, Stone's, you know, for some his seminal movie, I guess, which of course, in in itself, is a conspiratorial film all the way through. But how does he start the film? The film is started by showing a fairly extended clip of Eisenhower's famous farewell speech in which he talks about the military-industrial complex and the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Now, again, historians in more recent years have suggested that, you know, apart from the fact that Eisenhower might himself have been complicit in the way in which the military-industrial complex was evolving and growing in American life since World War II, it's also not so much a warning as a kind of tacit acceptance.
That this is where our society and our world will move and shift in the later half of the 20th century. That you're going to see, and I don't think he just means, does he war, endless wars, um, an endless kind of determination that there should be an enemy, another. And in that sense, you, you might make the, you know, the, the, the argument that here's a much more prophetic statement about all sorts of things that are going to come in our society. It's hinted at in the >> remake of the uh of the Manchurian Candidate. There's much more of a focus in that film on, for example, surveillance culture. There's much more of a focus on the way in which um officials coming out of the Pentagon, the CIA, all sorts of other kind of institutions working at the heart of American life. Indeed, Manchurian Global itself is a kind of multinational shady conglomerate, much in the manner of Polanski's Parallax View, indeed from the 1970s. So all of that added up, I think, gives you a sense of where the military-industrial complex was going. It was interesting. I'd done, I, I, I'd been looking at some things over the last year or two in relation to Silicon Valley, and of course, that was part of the military-industrial complex as it was growing up from the late 40s and 50s, you know, and um, uh universities in California, um, all sorts of uh defense contractors, chemical companies, uh, let alone before we come to to the giant kind of computer firms that will spring up by the 50s and 60s, were becoming involved in government operations. So in a way, I think Eisenhower was making, you know, a statement about an awful lot of things that were aligning as part of a jigsaw in American and Western life as we move into the 1960s. Um, and those things become, you know, Stone's thesis is, or all of those forces are aligned up against this sort of heroic figure, which is Kennedy for him. But you could name check a number of others. Robert Kennedy might be another. Uh, Martin Luther King might be another. Malcolm X might be another. All people who, incidentally, of course, are going to be subject of assassination or indeed assassination attempts in time. And that seems a much more, uh, deeper, possibly more frightening in, in, in many ways interpretation than simply, I say, in quotes, conventional ideas of Eisenhower that it was all a part of the military buildup.
>> Cheryl, can we talk a bit about the legacy of this film?
>> Yeah, I could talk a little bit about the remake, although I haven't rewatched it recently. Um, so I don't know if this is exactly legacy of the film, but I do find it really interesting that the remake happens in the 1990s or um >> 2004.
>> 2004. Okay. So, it's a little later.
>> So, it's post. Well, it's, it's in that kind of Dick Cheney, let's Halliburton, all that kind of stuff that's going on, I think, is is kind of >> Yeah.
>> And it sort of renewed suspicion about like the whole weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy, governments lying, all these things. I read a book recently by John Gance that's called When the Clock Broke, which is about um politics in the 1990s, but it's particularly about um sort of conspiracy theory and all kinds of things that were going on in the 1990s that seemed sort of um at the edges of politics and sort of start of sovereign citizens or various other conspiracies that I think now have moved much more into the center. And so I think maybe that's part of the legacy and maybe 9/11 has a lot to do with that in the sense that that that seems to have informed the remake in some sense. Although >> um it's the first Iraq war and I guess that's why I'm also thinking about the 1990s in terms of the remake because it's Kuwait where Raymond Shaw has his military experience, right?
>> Yeah, that's right.
>> So, it does seem like there's a lot of like conspiracy brewing in the 1990s that we that seems um uh not at the center of political power, but you know, now when we see these conspiratorial sorts of things amplified by social media, it seems like that's a more important legacy to think about than I at least realized during the 1990s. Looking back, I was like, maybe I should have taken some of these things more seriously than I did at the time. And the other thing I think is worth noting when thinking about the remake is um, I think the original is a better film than the remake.
>> And part of it, the reason I think that is >> it has a very different um conclusion around sort of what mobilizes um Shaw's choice at the end. So, I think that difference is something that's really worth reflecting on in terms of like what these two cultural moments um were interested in projecting.
>> Because the novel, as I read it, suggests that it's actually um Marco with his like deck of of uh queens of diamonds who reprograms Shaw. And that's why it's the mother in Iceland who are killed rather than um the presidential candidate, clearing the way for Iceland to become the president or at least the nominee. I don't know why they were so so sure they would win the election, but be that as it may. Whereas in the film, we do, it's a moment of heroism for Shaw, right? He's, you know, um reclaiming his agency out of the brainwashing and also saying it's only by his reclaimed agency he can stop this. But then we also get this like, in my view, really strange scene at the end where Marco is reading about um Medal of Honor awardees and kind of like saying like, even though the first medal was fake, in the end, he did this heroic thing. And so that it's like, like in case we didn't notice he was heroic, there's this like little epilogue to tell us he was heroic.
>> Um, and that's very different than how that scene plays out in the remake. um >> where it does still seem to be Shaw's choice, but much more motivated by his kind of personal animosity towards um his mother and stepfather.
>> Um, so those, those are some differences I find like in terms of how like one, I guess, is pre-Watergate, one is post-Watergate. So where we're how much we're still willing to invest in narratives of national heroism seems maybe one of the things differentiating the two.
>> Interesting. Yeah. Um, okay. So, let's move on to our final recommendations of what you would pair with the film. And, um, Ian, >> um, I'm going to recommend a a film from back in the 1950s. And I'm I'm I'm going to, you know, continue my one-person crusade for making Frank Sinatra a respectable actor in some way. um, in there's there there's a lot of talk, we mentioned it previously, there was a lot of talk about Sinatra being very spooked by the reception of The Manchurian Candidate and its alleged, it never really was in fact, but its alleged banning in the aftermath of Kennedy's killing almost a year later, um, but in actual fact, one of the things that led to the controversy over, you know, what had been shown or who had seen what was the fact that in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, when all had been interviewed and the various leads had been trailed, Marina Oswald, the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald, had actually said that in the days leading up to the assassination, her husband had watched another film. He hadn't watched The Manchurian Candidate. And the film that he'd been watching, which allegedly had been shown in the Dallas area in the week or so leading up to Kennedy's death, was a Lewis Allen film from 1954 called Suddenly. And in it, Frank Sinatra plays John Baron, who is contracted, we never know by who, to assassinate the president of the United States. And it's, it's a B-movie by any other name, but it is a taut sort of 80, 85-minute film in which Sinatra is this really cold-blooded, unaffected killer. He doesn't mention or care about motivation. We never learn who his handlers or the people who have contracted him actually are. And he doesn't really care. What he cares is is about the process, him in the setup, the murder and the shooting itself, and his um reward for for that murder. And it's a really kind of cold-blooded but very, very effective performance in a film that's modest in its outlook and style. It has an okay script, but something that's very typical for 1950s B-movie fare, and Sinatra actually makes something of it, and it's just a really, really interesting little film.
>> Brilliant. Thank you so much, Ian. Um, Cheryl recommendation.
>> Another Frankenheimer film, uh, Seconds from 1966. Uh, even more leaning into science fiction. Even more leaning into, um, sort of interesting visual techniques to to match sort of what's being conveyed with the way the visual image works. And uh, as well as sort of uh a shared director, I think there's um, I don't want to give away the plot too much, but I think there's some connection to uh The Manchurian Candidate in the sense that we've talked about how um these conspiracy theory films say something about um Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech and uh uh Biden when he left office talked about the tech industrial complex. So the Silicon Valley piece we sort of briefly touched on. Um, and uh Seconds has to do with sort of uh elite wealthy men uh wanting to extend their lives and wanting to extend their kind of youth and virility and uh various kinds of life extension and other augmentation technologies are a big part of today's Silicon Valley. So, I think there's perhaps it's time for a remake of Seconds also.
>> But again, it's a really good film. I will be covering it, so you might as well get ahead and watch it if you're listening. Um, but yeah, thank you for that. And yeah, thank you to both of you so much for coming on the show.
>> Always a delight to talk with you. So, thank you.
>> Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.
>> Thank you. That's it for this episode. Next episode, we will be talking about the film X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes by Roger Corman. If you want to find out where you can watch that, please check the show notes. And if you would like to support the podcast, please do. You can do that by leaving a rating or review in your favorite podcasting app so other people can know if this is a good podcast to listen to. Aside from that, if you can share the podcast with anyone who you think might be interested, that really helps the show grow. And lastly, you can support the podcast financially by visiting my Patreon channel at patreon.com/everyriesciifilm where for £3 or $3 a month, you can get ad-free versions of the podcast. Thank you so much for listening and extra thank you for all of my patron subscribers for their support, and I'll see you again next time. Bye-bye.