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The surreal enigma of McCarthyism. Hail the conquering hero, "Captain Idiot in Astounding Science Comics," back from Korea into the homegrown nest of vipers. The sergeant (Laurence Harvey) returns as an assassin programmed by the Pavlov Institute folks, "his brain has not only been washed, it has been dry-cleaned." Stepdad (James Gregory) is a braying senator and second in line on the presidential ticket, Mom (Angela Lansbury) is the shrewd gorgon playing Caligari to her son's Cesare. (She purrs in the middle ground between red-meat shenanigans in a conference chamber and flickering TV monitors in the foreground.) The haunted major (Frank Sinatra) inches toward the truth, to "rip out all the wiring" is his goal. The new level of warfare, of signs and thoughts and their manipulation, John Frankenheimer and George Axelrod give it a most gleeful go. A deliberate complexity in each image is mated to an insistence on parallels and doubles, which sets up the famous circular pan that turns garden matrons into Commie agents. "Those uniquely American symptoms, guilt and fear," shorn to create the killing machine, reinstated for its climactic short circuit. The Queen of Diamonds and Lincoln's ghost, Gertrude and Claudius by any other name in the scabrous travesty of Hamlet. Wellesian gags flourish throughout, from Citizen Kane's flashback to Mr. Arkadin's masquerade, elsewhere the Chinese mastermind looks forward to sneaking to Macy's. (Liberal resistance is equated to a stuffed eagle and embodied by the human Droopy himself, John McGiver.) The mysterious train ride with Janet Leigh registers the Marienbad shock, the Oedipal kiss goes into 8½. "My magic is better than your magic!" Science-fiction plus prophecy, a stunning political cartoon. The Congressional Medal of Honor is earned at last in a finale remembered by Cronenberg in The Dead Zone. Cinematography by Lionel Lindon. With Leslie Parrish, Henry Silva, Khigh Dhiegh, James Edwards, Albert Paulsen, Barry Kelley, and Lloyd Corrigan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |