The Manchurian Candidate (1962 Special Edition) (DVD)

The audio commentary by director John Frankenheimer starts off with him saying, "This movie was turned down by every studio in Hollywood," but once it was out it garnered two Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe win for Angela Lansbury, which means, a couple of studios made a mistake.

I am not a huge fan of older movies, but with the upcoming remake of The Manchurian Candidate coming out, and this special edition being released I knew it must be something I had to see, and boy was I right. This is one hell of a movie and I actually really started to realize how good it was the second time I watched it, while playing the Frankenheimer commentary.

The film revolves around Raymond Shaw (Harvey) as he comes home from the Korean War and he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Members of his platoon suddenly begin having horrible nightmares involving a ladies' garden club party and a secret cabal of enemy leaders. One of the soldiers having this dream thinks there is something more than night sweats to the story that is being told and Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra) and soon finds that there certainly is more to the story than originally meets the eye.

This film is absolutely excellent and the remake has a lot to live up to, as they have apparently changed the story a slight bit and set it in modern times, using the Gulf War as its catalyst. As far as this being a "special edition" I wouldn't put too much stock in that since the only new features are two featurettes, one featuring Angela Lansbury and the other featuring William Friedkin. The Lansbury commentary is a decent watch and the Friedkin feature is a bit of a mystery considering he had nothing to do with the production, but he does give a good bit of insight into his take on the film that I did find interesting.

The two best features have to be the audio commentary with Frankenheimer and the interview sequence with Frankenheimer, Sinatra and writer George Axelrod. The interview feature isn't exactly an interview, but it is cool to see Sinatra gabbing it up with the two men he respected enough to join their film before he had even seen any pages.

As for the commentary, I already quoted a bit at the beginning of this review, but Frankenheimer ahs so much more to say and it is worth listening to, primarily when he begins going over the extremely well done dream sequence that takes place early on in the film, where special effects would easily help the scene out now, he goes through the whole thing as it is being done. Back then editing was the only way to really put the whole thing together, and the best way to tell you how good it is, is to tell you that it was nominated for the Oscar for Film Editing, losing to Lawrence of Arabia, which is saying a lot!

I was extremely happy to have seen this version before I go see the remake with Denzel, since this film has become a classic, it is always nice to know what a newer version has to live up to, and hopefully with the release of this special edition DVD a new generation will get a chance to see Ol' Blue Eyes in what is considered one of his best performances.