JOHNNY ISELIN
'The Manchurian Candidate,' 1962

Sunday, November 5, 2006

Known for: Demagoguery, venality, stupidity, treason.

James Gregory's Johnny Iselin was a truly carbuncular malignancy on the body politic in John Frankenheimer's still-sensational "The Manchurian Candidate."

Iselin is a stand-in for Joe McCarthy, but Gregory, a skillful character actor, took it a step further; he didn't simply and lazily count on McCarthy's reputation to build his character. What I loved about his skankiness was a certain fleshy, blurry, alcoholic rolling of his head, as if his neck had been dissolved in the spirits loading his system, and had turned to suet. I happen to have had acquaintance with the phenomenon of the drunken, malevolent old bastard -- don't ask, not pretty -- and the precision of Gregory's performance haunts me to this day.

The script, an adventure in controlled paranoia and conspiracy gone exponential, posits that McCarthy/Iselin was really a secret communist pawn manipulated by a shrewd, amoral wife (Angela Lansbury at her chilliest) and helped along the way by a brainwashed assassin who was his own stepson (Lawrence Harvey). The movie ends up bringing him to the point of assuming the presidency under the mantle of anti-communist crusader, when he's actually working for the reds. In other words, it tracked back from the conclusion many Americans reached in the '50s, that McCarthy did the KGB far more good than he did the United States.

It helps immensely that this was one of director Frankenheimer's first features; as one of the pioneers of live television, he was able to bring a great deal of TV-style excitement to the film. And it helped that Frank Sinatra, as the Army intelligence officer who penetrates the plot, actually cared enough about the movie to bother to act. The whole thing, then as now, is probably one of the most pointed political satires ever made.