Trivia / The Manchurian Candidate

• Billing Displacement: Janet Leigh over Angela Lansbury, who plays a much more important role.
• Completely Different Title: The French title of this movie is Un Crime dans la Tête, which can be translated as A Crime in the Head or A Crime in Mind.
• Creator-Chosen Casting: John Frankenheimer insisted on casting Angela Lansbury, having worked with her on All Fall Down.
• Denied Parody: Meryl Streep denied that her character in the remake was a parody of Hillary Clinton. Given that the original version of the film was released in the 1960s and its source novel in 1959, she probably has a point. (Although, they do have similar Power Hair...)
• Fake American: Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey, who are both British.
• Fake Nationality: American Henry Silva and Khigh Dhiegh as the Korean Chun-Jin and the Chinese Dr. Yen Lo, respectively.
• Joisey: In the hotel scene, the soldiers have been brainwashed by Dr. Yen Lo to believe they are waiting out a storm in New Jersey (which the placard for the "flower club" reads as Spring Lake Hotel), while they are actually being displayed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the brainwashing to an audience of Communist officials. American actor Khigh Dhiegh who plays Dr. Lo was born in Spring Lake, New Jersey.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original film was rarely available in the years in between its initial 1962 release and its 1988 reissue. This has led to rumors that Frank Sinatra had the film pulled from distribution after the Kennedy assassination. In reality, the film's shelving had more to do with studio politics than regular politics. When the film bombed at the box office, United Artists reneged on a deal that kept Sinatra out of any royalties. When the rights reverted to Sinatra in 1972, his lawyers, angry that their client was screwed over, had the film suppressed and pretended it never existed. The only explanation as to why the film was re-released was because Sinatra had new lawyers.
• No Stunt Double: In an interview with Starlog Magazine in 1990, Henry Silva said "no one was doubled" in the fight scene between him and Frank Sinatra.
• On-Set Injury: Frank Sinatra injured his hand during the filming of his fight scene with Henry Silva. Accounts vary as to whether it was a broken finger (according to Nancy Sinatra) or a broken wrist (according to other sources), but all agree that he carried on filming through the injury and it never healed properly as a result.
• Playing Against Type:
  • It wasn't playing against type at the time, as Angela Lansbury had played her fair share of schemers and antagonists. But for a modern-day viewer who might know her from Murder, She Wrote or Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (the latter of which came out less than a decade after The Manchurian Candidate), watching her play Mrs. Iselin could be jarring given how ruthless and un-motherly Iselin is compared to characters like Mrs. Potts.
  • This is sometimes seen as applying to Frank Sinatra in this film, including on the trope's main page. However, it should be noted that by this point in his career, he had already established himself as not only a singer but a serious actor in critically acclaimed projects like The Man With the Golden Arm and From Here to Eternity - the latter which won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. So, while technically true, it wouldn't have been seen as THAT much of a departure at the time.
  • Lloyd Corrigan as Holborn Gaines. Corrigan was a character actor regularly typecast as bunglers and doddering old fools subject to constant slapstick - usually in B-Westerns and family friendly sitcoms. And while Holborn Gaines is certainly an effeminate character (getting murdered in bed while wearing his dead wife's frilly bed jacket), it's mostly played straight and then in a much darker, more political context. Before the audience even officially sees Gaines, he's already been labelled a communist by a furious Mrs. Iselin (the first such character in the film to be the object of her incessant red-baiting).
• Real-Life Relative:
  • When Major Bennett Marco is shown a photo of the Communist official Gomel at a child's birthday party, the two children in the photo are the children of writer and producer George Axelrod.
  • The 2004 film co-stars Pablo Schreiber, half-brother of star Liev Schreiber.
• Throw It In!:
  • The scene where Marco tries to break Raymond's brainwashing using a deck of cards comprised totally of Queens of Diamonds is out of focus. Frank Sinatra didn't quite match the intensity of his first performance in subsequent takes, so they used the blurry one. It kind of works to represent Raymond's disorientation.
  • The fight scene where Ben punches his hand through a table is actually Sinatra accidentally punching his hand through a freakin' table and breaking a finger. The injury didn't heal properly and bothered him for the rest of his life.
  • John Frankenheimer notes on the DVD Commentary that the scene where Senator Iselin argues with the Secretary of Defense was entirely ad-libbed.
• Uncredited Role: Reggie Nalder is uncredited for his part as Gomel.
• Underage Casting: Angela Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey who played her son.
• What Could Have Been: Sinatra originally wanted Lucille Ball to play Mrs. Iselin, until John Frankenheimer suggested Angela Lansbury (whom he'd directed in his previous film, All Fall Down) instead.

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