Here their “instructor” is a squat, fearsome psychiatrist named Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh) and what happens to them is like some monstrous nightmare, as diabolically funny as it is hair-raising. The brainwashers are Red China Communists, the brainwashed several members of an American Army patrol, led by Harvey and Frank Sinatra, who are betrayed by their interpreter, Henry Silva, ambushed and whisked aboard a helicopter to a brainwashing “class” in Manchuria. Some will dismiss the concept as sheerest fantasy, or see in Raymond Shaw just a nuclear-age version of that older, less complicated Frankenstein’s monster. I don’t know how far this fiendish “science” has progressed or that it could do to any human organism what it does here to Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey. But what IS it about? A Manchurian? A candidate? A candidate for what?Īmong other things, this is the most frightening picture about brainwashing ever made - and there are moments, particularly in the earlier sequences, during which the viewer may begin to believe he is undergoing a session or two himself. “The Manchurian Candidate” is not only fascinating because it is so unpredictable as storytelling but also because it reverts to the kind of movie-making that made cinema - sheer “film” - a joy, and an end in itself.
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