Cinema: Down South in North Korea

The Manchurian Candidate. On a dais in a shabby-genteel parlor down in Dixie, an exquisite little old lady stands and twitters to the Garden Club on a subject dear to her heart: “Fun with Hydrangeas.” But gracious, what is the little old lady saying!

“Raymond,” she coos, “have you ever murdered anyone?”

The camera turns abruptly to look at Raymond (Laurence Harvey), a U.S. Army sergeant who is sitting stolidly on the dais with a U.S. officer (Frank Sinatra) and eight other soldiers.

“No, sir,” says Raymond. But did he really say sir? Must be some mistake.

The camera turns back to the little old —what the deuce is going on here! The little old lady has inexplicably become a little old Chinese Communist professor, and the Garden Club is alarmingly transmogrified into a conclave of Russian and Chinese military and police officials meeting secretly in Manchuria.

“Very good, Raymond,” the professor coos. “Now take this scarf and strangle Ed Mavole.” Stolidly. Raymond takes the Scarf and strangles Ed Mavole.

“Very good, Raymond,” the professor coos. “Now take this gun and shoot Bobby Lembeck.” Stolidly, Raymond takes the gun and shoots Bobby Lembeck.

“Marvelous!” a Russian general exclaims, and the auditorium rustles with applause. The professor—but the professor has vanished as mysteriously as he appeared, and it is the exquisite little old lady who makes her audience a dithery little bow.

An eerily effective scene, but what does it mean? It means that the professor is real, and that the little old lady is a hallucination experienced by the U.S. soldiers, who have been captured and hypnotized. Sent back to their units in

Korea, they remember nothing of what has happened. Sent back to the U.S., the gruesome Raymond proves under posthypnotic suggestion to be a police-proof mechanism of murder. At the climax, he holds in his telescopic sights a U.S. presidential candidate whose death would clear the way to the White House for a Communist puppet.

As told by Richard Condon in his psychopolitical thriller, the story of Raymond was notable for its metaphoric extravagance (“There she sits . . . preening the teeth of her power with the floss of my joy”) and its intellectual exhibitionism (“They tittered like thlibii”). As translated into cinema by Director John Frankenheimer (Bird Man of Alcatraz), the story is notable chiefly for a systematic error it makes. It tries so hard to be different that it fails to be itself.