13 Conspiratorial Facts About “The Manchurian Candidate”

Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Conspiratorial Facts About The Manchurian Candidate.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. JOHN F. KENNEDY HELPED IT GET MADE.
Frank Sinatra had a deal with United Artists and wanted the studio to make an adaptation of Richard Condon’s 1959 novel. But the execs at UA thought the subject matter was too politically controversial and wanted nothing to do with it. Lucky for Sinatra, he had friends in high places, including President John F. Kennedy. Frank visited JFK, who’d been a fan of the novel, and the president made a personal appeal to UA head Arthur Krim, who was especially apt to listen because he was also the Democratic Party’s finance chairman. Condon later told a Sinatra biographer, “That’s the only way the film ever got made. It took Frank going directly to Jack Kennedy.”

4. THE BLURRY SHOTS WEREN’T AN ARTISTIC CHOICE.
Near the end of the film, when Marco visits Raymond’s hotel room and interrogates him, trying to undo the effects of the brainwashing, some shots of Sinatra are out of focus. Director John Frankenheimer said he got a lot of praise from critics for this “artistic choice”—showing Marco the way the addled Raymond sees him—but, in fact, it was the assistant cameraman’s mistake. Frankenheimer was horrified when he saw the footage and called Sinatra back in to reshoot those scenes, but Sinatra couldn’t deliver a performance better than that first, blurry one.

5. SINATRA WANTED LUCILLE BALL TO PLAY THE CONNIVING MOTHER.
Frankenheimer, who’d worked with Angela Lansbury just a few months earlier on All Fall Down, always wanted her for the part of Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin. But Sinatra had an interesting suggestion, too: Lucille Ball. Putting TV’s queen of slapstick in such a malevolent role would have been perversely amusing, but, alas, it was not to be.