About The Manchurian Candidate: Strayed Too Far

RonPrice

In 1962 I moved with my parents from the little town I had grown-up in to an equally little nearby town some 10 miles away where I did my matriculation studies. My mother was closer to her job and it was she who brought home the bacon for our little family of three. I played my last game of baseball that year and the film The Manchurian Candidate(1) was released during the Cuban missile crisis.(2) In 1962 my parents also helped to form the first local spiritual assembly in that town, Dundas Ontario, for the Canadian Baha’i community.

The novel by the same name came out in 1959, the year I had joined this new world religion. I don’t remember when I saw the film, but last night I saw a reimagining, a remake so to speak, of this film.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)“The Manchurian Candidate(2004),” Wikipedia, 16 February 2011; and (2)The United States requested an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on October 25 1962 to discuss the Cuban missile crisis; the film was released on 24 October 1962.

I don’t remember seeing you in this film,
Frank,1 perhaps it was because they took
it out of circulation from 1963 to 1988...
after JFK's assassination. Controversial
on publication, and just as timely today,
is that novel The Manchurian Candidate.
It is & was a riveting take, a sci-fi concept,
of American soldiers captured, brainwashed,
programmed by first Chinese captors and, in
this new version, American conspirators who
returned to the states as unsuspected political
assassins to secure by techno-psycho-means
the top job in the nation: the Presidency!

You can read all about it if the topic interests
you;2 the film showed to me what I had come
to believe as early as the 1960s that humanity
had strayed too far, suffered too great a decline
to be redeemed by the political forces of the left
or the right, however disinterested their motives
or concerted the action, or unsparing the zeal &
devotion of the socialists or liberals, labour or
republican, democrat or conservative: channels,
pursuits that are ultimately doomed to failure!*

1 Frank Sinatra starred in the 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate
2 Several internet sites will provide a detailed outline of the plot of this film

Ron Price
18 February 2011
Updated for: International Military Forums
On: 21/2/'11