The Manchurian Candidate: Dread Center By Howard Hampton Essays — Mar 15, 2016

 

In short, it was a hugely commercial enterprise that, through a combination of serendipity, headstrong ambition, and opportunistic abandon, managed to tap this mother lode of disquietude. At the same time, every actor looks to be having a blast, even while convincingly essaying the grimmest fates this side of the inferno. Everything about The Manchurian Candidate is continually, subtly shifting between brightly illuminated, diamond-edged spaces and fifty-seven darkening shades of gray. From sneaky satire to unbearable tragedy, fist-in-the-face bluntness to elusive, whispery insinuation, the entire movie is bathed in an acidic, wholehearted glow of contraction.

Instead of staking out one position or discourse and then pivoting to its opposite, Frankenheimer’s film dedicates itself to the sensation of American reality in a permanent state of flux (not to mention emergency). Placing the macabre in the service of the everyday, the director and Axelrod take the material—assorted eccentric speech patterns and aberrant behaviors and garroted plot twists—and render it as tough, mordant Americanized poetry. Here you can’t tell the difference between Joe Stalin and Joe McCarthy without a scorecard, or at least the playing cards from the movie’s “little game of solitaire.” (Or are they actually tarot cards in disguise?)   https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3970-the-manchurian-candidate-dread-center