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He overhears the bartender telling some of the patrons a story about an argument he got into with his brother-in-law. In a later scene, Shaw sits in a bar waiting to meet with Marco.
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Once he sees the card, he’ll obey anything anyone tells him without hesitation and without any recollection of what he did afterwards. In order for him to see the card, he is told to play a game of solitaire. The Queen of Diamonds playing card, or as it’s referred to, “the Red Queen,” is Shaw’s brainwashing trigger. The eye flits between the animated senator on the shaky screen and the real life senator in the background, adding to the overall paranoia and confusion of the situation. The senator at the podium yells and screams about the evils of communism, while the news footage shows the event from the television audience’s perspective.
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An early example in which Senator Iselin is giving a speech shows him in the background, while a television broadcast of the event is placed in the foreground. Apart from the “garden club” sequences, many of the scenes are shot in a way that conveys a sense of bizarre uneasiness.
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The film weaves such scenes of surrealism into a series of cold, politically-charged exchanges. Marco wakes from this nightmarish flashback and goes on to use it as the basis for his claims and eventual investigation of Shaw’s brainwashing. Shaw does this immediately, and with no sign of emotion or hesitation. In a brutal show of force, the doctor commands Shaw to murder two members of his unit.
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Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), who has brainwashed them all, demonstrates the full power he now has over them. They all sit calmly and compliantly as Dr. The editing cuts between the soldier’s subjective reality of a brightly lit room surrounded by plants and older women in dresses and hats, to the objective reality of the stage on which they are being shown, surrounded by huge pictures of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. The members of his unit all sit in what they believe to be a garden club, but is, in reality, a meeting of various communist leaders and politicians. We witness this dream, and it’s a fantastically surreal sequence. While his position is good, his main issue is a recurring nightmare that is later shown to be a horrifyingly real flashback. He has been promoted to Major and assigned to Army intelligence. He, like Shaw, was part of the unit captured and conditioned by the communists. The film then shifts attention to Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra). Her son’s response? “Well, for one thing, we discovered that we both loathe and despise you and Johnny.” “What could you possibly have in common with that dreadful old man?!” She demands. When Shaw explains that he’s gotten a job from a left-wing newspaper publisher, his mother becomes enraged. He meets with his mother, Eleanor (played by Angela Lansbury in a sinister and calculating performance), and her husband, ultra-conservative Senator John Iselin (James Gregory). One of the soldiers (Raymond Shaw) receives the Medal of Honor for supposedly saving the lives of almost all the members of his unit. It then moves forward in time to a point after the war is over. The Manchurian Candidate opens with a unit of American soldiers being captured and taken prisoner in the Korean War. The film’s main themes have since become tied to both Kennedy assassinations as well as the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Released in 1962, the film follows Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), a Korean War veteran who has been captured and conditioned by Chinese communists to become an assassin. By Jacob Schaffel-Scherrer “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” These seemingly innocent words are turned chilling as they are spoken to trigger the brainwashing of a United States soldier in John Frankenheimer’s neo-noir/political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate.