From Failure to Cult Classic

By RICHARD CORLISS

A pair of paranoid fantasies:

1) America's most rabid right-wing Senator is a paid Soviet agent whose stepson has been programmed by Moscow and Peking to assassinate this year's presidential candidate and thus sweep the Senator into the White House "with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy."

2) The most improbable plot threads from Hollywood's blackest comedy thriller of the Camelot era unravel in real life: deja vu of McCarthyism, prophecy of the Kennedy assassination. The film's star, a Kennedy pal, withdraws this daft, dark masterpiece from theatrical circulation, then keeps it hidden for a quarter-century.

You need not wholly believe either of these scenarios to accept both as rousing good stories. The first one made a nifty movie: The Manchurian Candidate. The second is the film's own tangled history: the Case of the Vanishing Thriller.

In the beginning, Arthur Krim, the United Artists studio boss who was also national finance chairman of the Democratic Party, was skeptical about this volatile blend of satire and surrealism -- until Frank Sinatra, the film's star, persuaded President John F. Kennedy to give his blessing to the project. Candidate opened in the fall of 1962, to mixed reviews and soft box office. "We had both sides of the political spectrum mad at us," says George Axelrod, who fashioned a terrific screenplay from Richard Condon's scathing comic apocalypse of a novel. "In Paris Communists picketed outside a theater on the Champs Elysees at the same time that Red-baiters were picketing in Orange County. Trouble was, all these people were outside the theater, not inside."

A year later Kennedy was dead, and the film was interred in Sinatra's vaults, where, except for 16-mm rentals and a few TV airings, it remained for 25 years. Alas for conspiracy buffs, the star's suppression of the film cannot be linked with Kennedy's assassination. It was all about money. In a dispute with U.A. over profit participation -- there were suspicions, says Director John Frankenheimer, that the studio was cooking the books -- Sinatra withheld rights to the movie. But it is of such snits that cult films are made. As Axelrod has said, "It went from failure to classic without ever passing through success." Now the filmmakers have their chance. The New York Film Festival coaxed Candidate from Sinatra last year, and the picture is doing robust business in six cities, as a promo for its spring debut in video stores. See? Happy endings all around.

It couldn't happen to a weirder film. Just try to imagine a 1962 audience sitting down to this scene: a company of G.I.s sprawl half-dozing through a women's-club lecture in a New Jersey hotel. The camera pans 360 degrees around the room and back to the soldiers and the speaker, who is now revealed as a Chinese specialist in mind control. He orders Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) to shoot one of his men, and the victim's brains splatter across a poster of Stalin. What's going on here? And what is one to make of the right- wing firebrand, inspired by a bottle of ketchup (57 varieties) to invent the number of Communists lurking in the State Department? Or of the liberal Senator who, when shot in his kitchen, bleeds the milk of human kindness? Or of Raymond's silky schemer of a mom (Angela Lansbury), who confides her plot to rule the world, then kisses her son full on the mouth?

No one should be confused by The Manchurian Candidate today. Axelrod's urbane cynicism plays like aces Wilde. Frankenheimer's aptly flashy technique is now a part of Hollywood's visual vocabulary. The performances are daring and assured, especially Lansbury's holy terror of Momism and Harvey's snide, pathetic pawn, brainwashed by both KGB AND CIA. And the movie's theory of endemic political corruption, which read as seditious in 1962, now feels like the sweet breath of reason. Few movies attempt to anatomize a whole sick society, to dissect the mortal betrayals of country, friend, lover and family; fewer films achieve this goal with such energy and wit. Voters will make their own choices this year, but for moviegoers the election is over. This Candidate delivers.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/Los Angeles