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IN THE ORIGINAL VERSION, THE OPENING CREDITS CONFUSED AUDIENCES. Sinatra dropped out the project stalled Friedkin made The French Connection instead and Clint Eastwood (with director Don Siegel) became Dirty Harry. Eight years later, Sinatra was preparing to play the title role in the police thriller Dirty Harry-to be directed by William Friedkin-when he discovered the old hand injury prevented him from holding and firing a pistol correctly. Though the injury wasn't serious, it had lingering effects. It was during the karate fight with Chunjin (Henry Silva). SINATRA BROKE HIS WRIST MAKING THE FILM-AND THAT'S HOW CLINT EASTWOOD BECAME DIRTY HARRY. Putting TV's queen of slapstick in such a malevolent role would have been perversely amusing, but, alas, it was not to be. But Sinatra had an interesting suggestion, too: Lucille Ball. SINATRA WANTED LUCILLE BALL TO PLAY THE CONNIVING MOTHER.įrankenheimer, who'd worked with Angela Lansbury just a few months earlier on All Fall Down, always wanted her for the part of Mrs. 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. 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. 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. THE BLURRY SHOTS WEREN'T AN ARTISTIC CHOICE. The film made $2.7 million at 2016 ticket prices, that would be around $34 million. It didn't help that it was released on October 24, 1962, right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which America and the U.S.S.R.
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IT CAME OUT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF A REAL INTERNATIONAL CRISIS.Ī movie that's dark, political, or satiric is a hard sell under the best of circumstances, so The Manchurian Candidate-which is all three of those things-had an uphill battle at the box office anyway. Angela Lansbury, who plays his mother, was born less than three years earlier, on October 16, 1925. Laurence Harvey, who plays the brainwashed Raymond Shaw, was born Octo(in Lithuania). It took Frank going directly to Jack Kennedy." 2. Condon later told a Sinatra biographer, "That's the only way the film ever got made. 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. Lucky for Sinatra, he had friends in high places, including President John F. But the execs at UA thought the subject matter was too politically controversial and wanted nothing to do with it. KENNEDY HELPED IT GET MADE.įrank Sinatra had a deal with United Artists and wanted the studio to make an adaptation of Richard Condon's 1959 novel. Stare intently at the Queen of Hearts and let these behind-the-scenes details wash over you. But the movie is significant for other reasons, too, besides its contribution to the English lexicon. Since then, whenever a new political figure has emerged from seemingly out of nowhere, a small subsection of paranoiacs has theorized that he or she was a "Manchurian candidate," secretly bent on destroying America. People who love movies and people who love conspiracy theories have common ground in The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 Cold War satiric thriller about an American soldier brainwashed by Communists into becoming an assassin.