Colin wrote:
< The Guardian runs a Notes and Queries (readers answers)
column and this week one of the questions concerned a film
thriller. Said thriller was slated for release in 1963 and
supposedly starred Frank Sinatra. It concerned the attempts
of a gang to assassinate the US president, it was apparently
withdrawn and never shown again when JFK was assassinated in
not dissimilar circumstances. Does anyone out there know of
this? >
There are actually *two* assassination movies starring Frank
Sinatra: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which has already
been mentioned, and Suddenly (1954), which was described by a
fan-reviewer at the Internet Movie Database thus:
< "Suddenly" takes its name from the small western town
where the action takes place. It's a taut drama about an
assassination attempt on the President of the United
States...Reportedly this movie was viewed by Lee Harvey
Oswald shortly before he assassinated President Kennedy. For
this reason, Frank Sinatra withdrew this movie from
circulation. >
The Manchurian Candidate, a masterpiece, was also withdrawn.
This account is from filmsite.org:
< Although the film initially failed at the box-office,
its importance as an un-nervingly close-to-the-truth
statement was underlined when it was withdrawn and suppressed
from movie theaters after the death of President Kennedy one
year later - JFK was gunned down by the hand of a suspected,
robotically docile, trained and 'brain-washed' assassin. Star
Frank Sinatra purchased the rights to the film in order to
permanently remove it from circulation. Coincidentally,
Sinatra had also been featured as a would-be presidential
assassin in Suddenly (1954). Since then, the fictional film
has attracted a cultish following for its tense, intriguing,
relevant, and sophisticated story-line and symbolism
(superbly filmed with innovative cinematography). >
According to another website, it was not just the JFK factor
that kept The Manchurian Candidate out of circulation for 25
years, but also a profit dispute between Sinatra (who was
instrumental in getting the daring film made at all) and
Arthur Krim, the head of United Artists. (Other websites
agree that there were fights over distribution rights.) And
to confuse things further, here is yet another account from a
1988 Washington Post article on the occasion of the movie's
re-release:
< Twenty-five years after its original release, John
Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate" is back, and the
mysteries surrounding the film as it returns to theaters are
almost, though not quite, as compelling and bizarre as the
movie itself.
Explanations of why the film -- which stars Frank Sinatra and
Laurence Harvey and deals with a Communist plot to send a
brainwashed American war hero to assassinate a presidential
candidate -- was withdrawn are not as clear cut as the
popular film lore might suggest. Even the exact length of
time that the picture has been unavailable is hard to pin
down.
One version has Sinatra, who obtained ownership of the rights
to the film from United Artists in 1972, withdrawing it from
release, along with the 1954 film
"Suddenly," which also was about an assassination plot, after
it was revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched the latter
before he shot President Kennedy.
The screenwriter George Axelrod, who adapted the Richard
Condon novel for the screen, says "The Manchurian Candidate"
has been out of release since immediately following the
president's death in 1963, when the film's producers and
United Artists decided to call it in.
"The climate of the times was such," says Axelrod, who
produced the film along with Frankenheimer and Sinatra, "that
having an assassination picture floating around seemed to be
in grotesque bad taste. Particularly since Frank had been
friends with the president."
As for whose idea it was to withdraw the film, Axelrod says,
"We practically all picked up the phone at the same time."
But, he adds, "The decision was Sinatra's with our agreement
-- we were the tail of the kite, really."
Axelrod reports that United Artists, the company that
produced the film, had always been nervous about making the
picture, but not because of any fear that it would encourage
assassinations. "They didn't want to make it because they
thought that it was un-American," he says. Ironically, it was
a phone call from President Kennedy -- made at Sinatra's
request -- that persuaded Arthur Krim, then head of United
Artists and also the national finance chairman of the
Democratic Party, to change his mind and start
production.
(An additional irony, which may be more curious than telling
but is entirely in keeping with the tone of the film, is that
it was Frankenheimer who drove Robert Kennedy to the hotel in
California the night he was assassinated.)
Seductive as all the theories may be, Richard Condon isn't
buying them, and his response to Axelrod's version of the
events is unequivocal. "Ridiculous!" he said when reached by
phone at his home in Dallas. "I don't think it was ever
actually 'pulled' from release. It had begun to peter out and
play on late-night television. I know Sinatra has a very high
regard for it. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if he put
the film away, as one does, as an anchor to windward."
According to Frankenheimer's office, the film has, in fact,
not been seen in this country, either on television or
theatrically, except for scattered festival screenings, since
its original release. But a spokesman there says that the
Kennedy assassination was only "one of the reasons" the film
has been out of circulation. The others, he says, are largely
financial.
"It was money that held this thing up," says Axelrod, who
first came up with the idea of turning the book into a movie.
"Unromantic economics."
Sinatra himself was unavailable for comment, and when
questioned on these matters, his spokesperson had no comment,
except to say that Sinatra was "pleased and delighted" that
the film would once again available to moviegoers. >
If Sinatra did buy the rights in order to "bury" the film for
a while, only to have it re-surface to acclaim later, the
strategy is a familiar one: Hitchcock did this with the films
he owned personally
(Rope, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The
Trouble with Harry), and Jack Nicholson is currently sitting
on The Passenger, the great film he made with
Antonioni.
There may be a better, more definitive account of The
Manchurian Candidate's history out there than what I've been
able to find web-searching. Anyone?
Mark
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