| Matthew Christensen |
The Manchurian Candidate plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 6th, through Sunday, September 8th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
If you are a Gen-Xer like me, your first introduction to Dame Angela Lansbury was probably not through her phenomenal stage career, nor her remarkable film appearances. No, your first introduction to Lansbury was through her work as the pragmatic, somewhere between motherly and grandmotherly, amateur sleuth, Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote. And it was that calm, maternal presence that engaged us through the uncertainties of the 80s and 90s. And if you are prone to getting sucked into cults of personality with actors, as I am, you may have soon taken a look around to see what else Lansbury had done to get more of that comforting hit. You might next have discovered that she played Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d (1980) and rushed down to the video store to rent the VHS tape one cozy Friday evening. Or you may have been lucky enough (unlike me) to have caught her in Sweeney Todd (1979-1980) on Broadway. This one might have given you pause, considering she had moved out of the sweet and into the morbid, but you could still accept it because she played Mrs. Lovett with endearing zaniness. Next, because you think of yourself as something of a cinephile and you think you will find that same presence in her earlier work, you rent Gaslight (1944). You are struck by the notion that despite the fact that her portrayal of Ingrid Bergman’s saucy, disdainful maid creates a disconnect, here is an electrifying presence. Here is someone who’s really “got it!”
I could go on and reference Lansbury’s impressive work in The Harvey Girls (1946) or The Court Jester (1956), but let’s jump straight to her riveting portrayal of Eleanor Shaw Iselin in John Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). After all, my intent here is to move past all of the tough, dare I say masculine, bravado of the movie (fronted by Frank Sinatra in perhaps his finest performance on film), and examine the politics of female power. In a film that quite visibly (and cleverly) undervalues and underestimates women, Lansbury delivers a chillingly angry depiction of a mother scorned, a woman whose hidden agenda is multilayered and ruthless.
The Manchurian Candidate tells the story of Raymond Shaw (Lawrence Harvey), a pouty, unlikeable Korean War veteran who has returned home to receive the congressional medal of honor. His homecoming is punctuated by the frenzied political whirlwind that is his mother, Eleanor Iselin, and step-father, the McCarthyesque Republican Senator John Iselin (James Gregory)—two people who take full advantage of their son’s reported heroism to strengthen Iselin’s bid for Vice-Presidential nominee. Through the course of the narrative, Captain Ben Marco (Sinatra), Shaw’s commanding officer uncovers a Communist plot to take control of the US government from the inside, using the brainwashed Shaw as an unwitting assassin.
The feeling of paranoia and Cold War dread the film exudes through its characterizations and plot is still palpable when viewed today, giving us some indication of the impact the film had on audiences in Kennedy’s America. And it is in this feeling of unease that Frankenheimer plays on our need for refuge, for a stable family, for a mother to guide us, for a lover that makes us feel loveable, for someone next to us when we awaken from a recurring nightmare, for a return to domestic tranquility. Yet it is the subversion of these safe havens that leaves us feeling even more existentially adrift by the end of the film. The veneer of security is notably established early on through the garden party nightmare sequences that both Marco and fellow soldier Al Melvin (James Edwards) experience. These moments, like others in the film, establish safety in matronly familiarity only to shock us by lifting back the curtain. In this case, the assembly of prim society ladies becomes a nest of high-ranking Soviet and Chinese officials—male and female—come to see the effectiveness of their new human weapon.
This stereotypical feminine imagery is used to disarm the soldiers whose slumped, bored, body language suggests both a patriarchal belief in the innate goodness of women and a serious underestimation of their potential power. Frankenheimer continues to utilize instances of matriarchal control through the film’s three major women: Eugenie Cheyney (Janet Leigh), Eleanor Iselin, and Jocelyn Jordan (Leslie Parrish). Each take on the dual role of mother and lover to the men with whom they associate.
Eugenie, also known as Rosie—the name she prefers because it “smells of brown soap and beer”—meets Marco on a train. Noticing his state of anxiety and distress, and quickly acknowledging her own attraction, she engages him in a superficial, stream-of-consciousness conversation that leads to her motherly protection of him. Like Marco’s Manchurian brainwashers, Rosie knows how to quickly impress upon her vulnerable love interest information that will ensure that he continues to rely on her. Indeed, we see this play out when Marco is arrested after a fight and calls on Rosie to bail him out of jail. Rosie’s manipulation of Marco at his weakest point in the film is the catalyst for his stabilization and the two quickly move past erotic passion to a typical domestic relationship.
Eleanor Iselin, like Rosie, also manipulates the men in her life, mothering Senator Iselin as though he were a simpleton son rather than a husband and lover and hovering over Raymond as he tries to free himself from her influence. Lansbury’s ability to turn on a dime from being sweetly patronizing to venomous and back to sweet again is masterful. This is most humorously shown when the dimwitted Iselin confesses he cannot keep track of how many communists there are in the defence department. After lashing out at him, Mrs. Iselin sweetly asks if it would be easier to remember a single number. As her husband pours an ungodly amount of ketchup on his breakfast, Mrs. Iselin glances at the bottle. Cut to a press conference in which Iselin states definitively that there are 57 known communists. We laugh at the joke but it is Eleanor Iselin’s calculating stare that lingers and takes on deeper meaning when we better understand her agenda. As Jocasta to Raymond’s Oedipus, Eleanor Iselin’s more personal interests emerge as we understand her communist allegiance (punctuated by her not-so-subtle mandarin gowns). In two moments that always elicit gasps from the audience, we discover first that Raymond’s mother is “in on it” when she uses the oft repeated, “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire,” the hypnotic signal used to control Raymond, and second, when she amorously kisses her son after explaining her plans to destroy those who took his soul from her. Her impassioned talk of tearing down democracy is sidelined by the fierce anger she feels as a mother.
Jocelyn Jordan, Raymond’s love interest, becomes a major obstacle between Eleanor and Raymond. Jocelyn shifts rapidly from mothering Shaw when treating a snake bite (in a flashback sequence showing how the couple met) to embodying Raymond’s latent sexual desires when she tears off her shirt to bandage the wound. Years after a painful breakup orchestrated by Mrs. Iselin, Jocelyn returns from Europe. She is invited by Raymond’s mother, along with her senator father, to a costume party in a bid to gain the senator’s support of Iselin’s candidacy through the marriage of their children. This matchmaking scheme, while serving the Iselins’ political aspirations, creates for Eleanor a conflict between her incestuous love of her son and her hunger for ultimate power. When the order comes for Raymond to assassinate Senator Jordan and Jocelyn is also killed, one cannot help but acknowledge that for Raymond’s mother, the latter murder was as necessary as the first.
As I consider my opening lines in which I fawned over Angela Lansbury and her career (in what amounts to what English teachers call a “hook”), and then further consider how to, in closing this piece, reconcile Lansbury’s retroactive departure from the sweet, clever Jessica Fletcher I grew up knowing to the truly wicked, conniving Eleanor Iselin, I realize that the most obvious full-circle connection is the idea of motherhood. Whether presented through gentle nurturing or intense love, through clever advice-giving or calculated badgering, Lansbury elevates the role of motherhood to the mythic. Shape-shifting between fairy-godmother and Machiavellian matron, her performances continue to delight decades on. I remember reading somewhere about how Angela Lansbury’s daughter had taken up with the Manson family in California. How Lansbury protectively chose to pull up stakes and relocate with her children to Ireland. How she probably saved her daughter from damning notoriety. Considering her performance as Raymond Shaw’s mother, perhaps Charles Manson got off easy.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon