I\u2019ll start off by saying this is a terrible movie.\u00a0 But maybe it\u2019s so bad it\u2019s good.<\/p>\n
Frank Sinatra is an Army Major named Bennett Marco who is captured along with his platoon during the Korean War and sent into China to be brainwashed to be part of a political assassination plot that the Russians have arranged.\u00a0 The platoon sergeant Raymond Shaw is the assassin and as it turns out his mother, played by Angela Lansbury, is the Russian agent who is his handler.\u00a0 He is programmed to obey instructions that he gets after he\u2019s been triggered by seeing the ace of diamonds during a solitaire game.\u00a0 His mother is married to a United States Senator that she is going to get elected President by having her son assassinate the Republican presidential candidate.\u00a0 If this isn\u2019t crazy enough, his mother gets Shaw to assassinate his own newlywed wife and her United States Senator father in order to further the plan.<\/p>\n
So, the plot is pretty crazy but it\u2019s kind of fun in a way because of the way they present it.\u00a0 We get these flash backs of the brainwashing camp.\u00a0 The Russian doctor demonstrates the control he has over the prisoners by having Shaw kill two of the other prisoners on command.\u00a0 And based on the false memories that are implanted in the prisoners Shaw gets the Congressional Medal of Honor for supposedly freeing them and killing some ridiculous number of North Korean troops.<\/p>\n
Now this could have been a political thriller that works.\u00a0 But the acting is unbelievably bad.\u00a0 Some of the dialog is borderline ridiculous.\u00a0 For instance, Janet Leigh plays a woman who meets Sinatra accidentally on a train and within a day she bails him out of jail for assaulting a Korean house boy and still decides to leave her fianc\u00e9 to marry him.\u00a0 And then there is this hilarious karate fight between Sinatra and a fake Korean guy.\u00a0 It\u2019s like something out of one of the Austin Powers movies.\u00a0 One of his karate chops misses and ends up knocking an enormous chunk out of a wooden table.\u00a0 But it looks as if it\u2019s made of styrofoam.\u00a0 I think that fight may have been the inspiration for Inspector Clouseau’s battles against his Oriental House Boy Kato in the Pink Panther movies.<\/p>\n
I read that this is considered to be in several top 100 film lists.\u00a0 I guess there\u2019s no accounting for taste.<\/p>\n
On a personal note, there is a scene in the movie that was filmed in a restaurant in Manhattan called Jilly\u2019s.\u00a0 Jilly Rizzo, the owner of the restaurant and the guy who is seen tending bar in the movie was one of Sinatra\u2019s closest friends.\u00a0 Jilly was convicted in 1990 of a loan fraud scheme on his restaurant that involved some very old acquaintances of mine.\u00a0 And some of these acquaintances worked at Jilly\u2019s and even knew Sinatra from his visits there.\u00a0 I think the fraud scheme and this movie are in some ways kindred entities.\u00a0 They both possess a spirit of inept dishonesty.\u00a0 A bungled fraud.<\/p>\n
So, this movie has a personal connection for me.\u00a0 But that in no way changes my opinion of its quality.\u00a0 If I remember correctly Sinatra did sometimes do some decent acting.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to watch \u201cThe Joker is Wild\u201d again because I think he was pretty good in that.\u00a0 I never noticed any acting going on in Ocean\u2019s Eleven.\u00a0 People say he was good in \u201cFrom Here to Eternity.\u201d\u00a0 That part seemed a little melodramatic to me.\u00a0 \u201cThe Man with the Golden Arm\u201d never interested me.\u00a0 Maybe he was good in it.\u00a0 But without a doubt, The Manchurian Candidate was abysmally bad.<\/p>\n
Recommended only as camp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ll start off by saying this is a terrible movie.\u00a0 But maybe it\u2019s so bad it\u2019s good. Frank Sinatra is an Army Major named Bennett<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[3021,3022,43,38,1355],"class_list":["post-14287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-frank-sinatra","tag-jillys","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n