![]() ![]() With its always-present sense of threat, it was indeed Hitchcockian and Janet Leigh, one of Hitchcock’s favourites, was one if its stars. But the film went further: it was also about covert mind-control and actual, rather than McCarthyite imagined or trumped-up, infiltration into the state and its instruments. The film’s buffoonish Senator Iselin (James Gregory) was a McCarthy cipher. Set during the Korean War, The Manchurian Candidate was explicitly about an America where Senator Joe McCarthy led America’s Reds-under-the-bed war on Communism. Whatever the Express had thought, the point was clear. ![]() Despite also mentioning Hitchcock, the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker was less equivocal, saying it was “a fiendishly clever spy thriller that might have been devised specifically to scare the stars and stripes off Old Glory”. ![]()
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