Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

number (57) of Communists he claims to have identified
in the State Department off a ketchup bottle, and partners
him with a monstrous wife (Angela Lansbury) who
wants him swept into the White House with ‘‘powers
which will make martial law look like anarchy.’’ This
indictment of the blacklist mind-set coexists with plot
developments that suggest McCarthy was not paranoid
enough. The Iselins are actually Communist tools out to
undermine America (the inspiration is the suggestion that
McCarthy could not have hurt the United States more if
he were a paid Soviet agent); Mrs. Iselin has collaborated
with the transformation of her own son, Raymond
(Laurence Harvey), through brainwashing by Sino-Soviet
villains into a zombie assassin.
The Manchurian Candidate is as much sick comedy
as thriller, signified by the splattering of blood and brains
over a poster of Stalin during a demonstration of
Raymond’s killing abilities. It has a certain ‘‘plague on
both your houses’’ tone, far more vicious in its attack
than Peter Ustinov’s (1921–2004) across-the-curtain
Cold War
The war room in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
romantic comedy Romanoff and Juliet (1961), and it is
as much remembered for its prescience in the matter of
presidential assassination and conspiracy theory as its
acute dissection of the paranoia of both West and East.
A stark, black-and-white nightmare, with stylish bursts of
martial arts action and walking political cartoons, its
zero-degree cool bled into the highly colored cynicism
of the Bond films. These wallow in luxury and voluptuousness,
brush off murders with flip remarks (‘‘shocking!’’),
and routinely climax with an intricate world-threatening
scheme, foiled by individual heroism and the prompt
arrival of an Anglo-American assault team to overwhelm
the diabolical mastermind’s secret base. These tactics failed
in the real world at the Bay of Pigs, an operation badly
fumbled by Bond fan Kennedy, just as the Cuban missile
crisis led to closer scrutiny of the mechanics of the balance
of terror.
Dr. Strangelove, like Sidney Lumet’s (b. 1924) more
serious Fail-Safe (1964), is a brink-of-doom thriller, a
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