This was screened at the Grove Theatre, Eastbourne film club on Wednesday 22nd November 2023, the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The story is a little implausible. It tells of a platoon of US soldiers who are abducted during the Korean war and, in only three days, brainwashed and returned to the front. The leader of the patrol is decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honour for ‘saving’ his patrol (except for two of them) but he has actually been programmed to assassinate. When he hears the word ‘solitaire’ he has to play a game of Patience. When he sees the Queen of Diamonds, whatever he is then told he will obey (it gets quite funny when he’s playing patience in a bar and overhears someone say ‘get and cab and go to the lake and jump in’, which he does). Meanwhile another member of his patrol has been having recurrent nightmares (obviously his brainwashing wasn’t quite so effective) and, since he gets a job with that well known oxymoron ‘military intelligence’ he is hunting down his ex-boss. This is all linked to the programmed assassin’s dreadful relationship with his mother and step-father, a drunken buffoon of a senator, and his falling for the daughter of a political rival. The whole thing positively reeked of US paranoia during the cold war, with hints of McCarthyism. The film was released in 1962 and had a short run but was pulled by the distributors as being a little too close to home when JFK was assassinated (by, as it was thought at the time, Lee Harvey Oswald who has a Russian wife and Soviet and Cuban connections). It didn’t resurface until 1984!
But it was a brilliant film. I found the sound quality was such that I didn’t catch some of the words, and the acting occasionally strayed into old-school film star acting, but the plot was strong and most of the actors were incredible. In particular, I was super impressed by Angela Lansbury as the awful mother (she was nominated for the Oscar), John McGiver as the avuncular father of the girlfriend, Frank Sinatra (unbelievably impressive) as the intelligence officer, Janet Leigh as his girlfriend, and Laurence Harvey as the would-be assassin.
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The story is a little implausible. It tells of a platoon of US soldiers who are abducted during the Korean war and, in only three days, brainwashed and returned to the front. The leader of the patrol is decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honour for ‘saving’ his patrol (except for two of them) but he has actually been programmed to assassinate. When he hears the word ‘solitaire’ he has to play a game of Patience. When he sees the Queen of Diamonds, whatever he is then told he will obey (it gets quite funny when he’s playing patience in a bar and overhears someone say ‘get and cab and go to the lake and jump in’, which he does). Meanwhile another member of his patrol has been having recurrent nightmares (obviously his brainwashing wasn’t quite so effective) and, since he gets a job with that well known oxymoron ‘military intelligence’ he is hunting down his ex-boss. This is all linked to the programmed assassin’s dreadful relationship with his mother and step-father, a drunken buffoon of a senator, and his falling for the daughter of a political rival. The whole thing positively reeked of US paranoia during the cold war, with hints of McCarthyism. The film was released in 1962 and had a short run but was pulled by the distributors as being a little too close to home when JFK was assassinated (by, as it was thought at the time, Lee Harvey Oswald who has a Russian wife and Soviet and Cuban connections). It didn’t resurface until 1984!
But it was a brilliant film. I found the sound quality was such that I didn’t catch some of the words, and the acting occasionally strayed into old-school film star acting, but the plot was strong and most of the actors were incredible. In particular, I was super impressed by Angela Lansbury as the awful mother (she was nominated for the Oscar), John McGiver as the avuncular father of the girlfriend, Frank Sinatra (unbelievably impressive) as the intelligence officer, Janet Leigh as his girlfriend, and Laurence Harvey as the would-be assassin.
- Angela Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, the third of her three nominations (the others were in 1945 for BSA in Gaslight and in 1946 for BSA in The Picture of Dorian Gray). Nowadays best known for Murder She Wrote (appearing in all 264 episodes), she also sang the Oscar winning song ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in the film. Intriguingly, given the political dimensions of the MC, Angela Lansbury was the granddaughter of one-time UK Labour Party leader George Lansbury and her dad was a member of the British Communist Party for a time.
- John McGiver mostly played character roles including in films as diverse as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Midnight Cowboy.
- Frank Sinatra was Frank Sinatra, of course.
- Janet Leigh is best known for her Oscar nominated (BSA) role as the murdered woman in Psycho.
- Laurence Harvey had been nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor in 1960s Room At the Top. He had a long and varied career, mostly in film. In 1954 he played Romeo and R&J and in 1955 he was Christopher Isherwood in ‘I am a Camera’. He was the sleazy agent exploiting Cliff Richard’s character in the film Espresso Bongo and the star of the 1964 film of On Human Bondage.
November 2023
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