The Manchurian Candidate directed by John Frankenheimer MGM Home Video   Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	The Manchurian Candidate is the kind of movie one studies in a university film course. It's entertainment, but it's also literature: a layered, carefully assembled time capsule. Based on a late-1950s novel by Richard Condon (who later wrote Prizzi's Honor) and released in 1962, during JFK's presidency, it eerily foreshadowed his assassination -- and was famously withdrawn from exhibition by its producer, Frank Sinatra, after that fateful day in November 1963. A few years ago it reappeared, and now there's even a remake in theaters, produced by none other than Nancy Sinatra. The original film starred Frank Sinatra as Ben Marco, a veteran of the Korean War; Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw, Marco's superior officer and holder of a Medal of Honor; and Angela Lansbury as Raymond's mother, a manipulative, controlling figure who's got to be one of the most frightening characters in all of cinema. The film is about politics, paranoia, and power. Marco is suffering from a dream that seems to be repeating every night. In it, he's seeing a version of the events that earned Shaw his medal, although the events in the dream do not match what he remembers actually happening. Marco's memory paints Shaw as a hero, saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. But his dreams shows Shaw as a monster, first brainwashed and then killing his men. The dreams -- and the discrepancy -- are driving Marco to the edge of sanity. To get some sense of equilibrium, of truth, he searches out Shaw. As this plays out, there's a parallel story. Shaw's stepfather, anti-Communist Senator Iselin, is in line to be the vice presidential candidate. His wife (Lansbury) will do anything to see that this occurs. While the senator himself is a bit of a dolt, his wife is power-hungry, a dominatrix of backroom manipulation. It is really she who's interested in the power of the White House, and she feeds her husband his every publicly-uttered word. As Shaw battles his mother and stepfather, all is clearly not right with him. Strange and terrible things are happening to him, and we can see that the trigger for all of them is a glimpse of the Queen of Diamonds, which Raymond sees when he plays solitaire. Soon enough, with the tension wound up as tight as it can be, the plot becomes clear to us and to Marco. Both men have been brainwashed -- and Shaw has been primed to act something out. Though Marco is in the dark, we know that it has everything to do with Senator Iselin's upcoming nomination. Shaw is to use a rifle to shoot the presidential candidate so that Iselin can step in as the new leader -- and ride the wave of emotion into the White House. What was intended as a pitch-black satire on politics and manipulation comes across both as a morality play and as an almost prescient take on JFK's assassination. Lone gunman. Rifle. Political gathering. The whole bit. One could almost say The Manchurian Candidate put ideas in Lee Harvey Oswald's head -- or in the heads of the men who controlled him. (It really depends on which assassination theory you believe.) Everyone involved in the film did superior work. Sinatra was never better than he is as Marco, the desperate, paranoid soldier who knows something is amiss. Harvey's Shaw is a creepy, even-tempered guy who plays by the book, much to his own dismay (and downfall). Though he despises his mother, he finds it impossible to defy her. And Lansbury is no less than chilling, a probably-incestuous puppeteer who'll stop at nothing to buy herself power, not even the sacrifice of her only son. Director Frankenheimer doesn't use any trickery or flashy style to tell his story. He knows it's plenty powerful on its own, without embellishment. Still, there are flashes of brilliance in all that restraint, especially in the way he uses the film frame to tell his story visually, without relying on dialogue. Now available in a new special edition DVD ("curiously" timed to the release of the new film of the same title), The Manchurian Candidate is probably the most strangely appropriate movie of the political season, when we're not only in the midst of political conventions, but also the most important presidential election the United States has seen in decades. | October 2004   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. He writes advertising for a large marketing firm and is building a small book publishing company in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	Director Frankenheimer doesn't use any trickery or flashy style to tell his story. He knows it's plenty powerful on its own, without embellishment. Still, there are flashes of brilliance in all that restraint, especially in the way he uses the film frame to tell his story visually, without relying on dialogue.