Tag: The Manchurian Candidate

Goin’ Coconuts (1978)

GOIN’ COCONUTS (1978) 1/2*

In the distant future, one of the great mysteries of human behavior will be why there were so many teen idols after, oh, let’s say, 1955. Imagine trying to explain Tiger Beat, Joey Lawrence, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, and Justin Bieber to future generations.

I can only hope that future rational beings will reach the conclusion that many people (mostly girls, but also boys with such beacons of humanity as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, et cetera ) in the late 20th and early 21st centuries obsessed about the shallow and the superficial and the stupid and such attributes as perfect hair, perfect teeth, and dimples. “He / She has got such a perfect body. He’s so cute. She’s so hot.” All that jive can just go fuck off.

I thought about this “teen idol” angle during and after GOIN’ COCONUTS, the motion picture debut and finale of former teen idols Donny and Marie Osmond. Since I watched it after SLITHIS, I just might have survived the worst two movies I have ever seen back-to-back; I am blanking on whether or not I ever watched BATTLEFIELD EARTH after LEONARD PART 6 or vice versa.

Anyway, I hated just about every second of GOIN’ COCONUTS. Hated every musical number. Hated every bit of perfunctory dialogue. Hated every single attempt at humor. Hated the jewelry caper story and every single plot development that we have seen before from a million different movies and TV shows. Hated seeing legendary movie villains being reduced to buffoons for comedic purposes that miserably failed. Hated it the longer it went on. I rejoiced at the first sight of the end credits and turned off the movie. I didn’t even care all that much about the Hawaiian scenery, just because we had to watch this stupid movie take place within it.

I felt especially bad for actors like Kenneth Mars, Ted Cassidy, Khigh Dhiegh, and Harold Sakata. But, hey, not that bad, since they got paid and had the opportunity to make a movie in Hawaii. That sounds great right about now. I could go for that, even a movie as shitty as GOIN’ COCONUTS.

The reason I felt bad for them was they had to play cosmically inept. Like, for example, Sakata’s Ito could not take out Donny Osmond, for crying out loud. The filmmakers made the dread mistake of costuming Sakata (1920-82) in the same hat that he wore in GOLDFINGER as super henchman Oddjob. Sure we all remember what Oddjob did with his hat in GOLDFINGER; let’s just say that he wears the hat throughout GOIN’ COCONUTS and that’s that. It’s so insulting to see a World War II veteran and an Olympic silver medalist in weightlifting (Sakata represented the United States in the 1948 Summer Olympics in London) reduced to playing the fool, thwarted at every churn of the plot by a couple teen idols and their perfect teeth.

Dhiegh (1910-91) played a key role in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as brainwashing expert Dr. Yen. Yes, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, one of the most intelligent movies ever made. Then, 16 years later, Dhiegh appeared in GOIN’ COCONUTS, which should have borrowed from THE WIZARD OF OZ its musical theme … “If I Only Had a Brain.” Again, it simply defies all credibility that Dhiegh’s character would be outsmarted by a pair of coconuts.

In GOIN’ COCONUTS, Mars (1935-2011) more or less gives us a variation on his characters from the Mel Brooks comedies THE PRODUCERS and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, only without the laughs.

Cassidy (1932-79) played Lurch on “The Addams Family” and would it have been too much to ask director Howard Morris (who played Ernest T. Bass on “The Andy Griffith Show”) and screenwriters William Marc Daniels and Raymond Harvey to include a gag where Cassidy’s Mickey answers the phone with “You rang.” Yes, of course, it would have been too much to ask. That’s silly to ask if you’ve survived GOIN’ COCONUTS.

It was a pathetic sight every time watching these villains shoot their guns at Donny and Marie. They should have been sent back to marksmanship class or had their diabolical henchmen licenses revoked.

Aside from the end credits, there was something else great about GOIN’ COCONUTS. Since it failed at the box office, Donny and Marie made only this one movie rather than a series of Donny and Marie spectaculars. They returned to their variety show where they belonged with their aw shucks gee whiz nature and perfect teeth intact.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

DAY 81, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) Four stars
John Frankenheimer’s political thriller is one ripped, twisted movie, borrowing famous words from Hunter S. Thompson.

It should make one reconsider both Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, for example.

I did.

Before I first watched THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, I held Sinatra in very little (miniscule) esteem. Maybe it was Phil Hartman’s savage impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” Maybe it was Sinatra’s appearances on Jerry Lewis’ MDA telethon on Labor Day and when you only have three channels and one of them’s gone all weekend, all booked up, man, we’re talking about Pits City. Maybe it was his crooning that provided the soundtrack for seemingly innocuous yuppie consumption (we all know what seemingly innocuous really means) and little old swooning ladies and every movie that wants to evoke a certain mood just by slapping one of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ standards on every few minutes. Maybe it was the fact that he lived and breathed crusty, old guard establishment, whose reactions to Elvis and the Beatles were not surprising. There was just something about that man that gave me the creeps.

Why, of course, like any child of the 1980s and 1990s, I knew Lansbury from “Murder, She Wrote” and I know I saw her in old Disney entertainments somewhere along the line. I knew that she wasn’t quite this doddering old lady, because, man, if I saw her Jessica Fletcher coming my way, I would have moved to another town or put a down payment on a passport and an one-way plane ticket and move to another country because I know that homicide’s afoot and I want no damn part of it. The homicide rate in Cabot Cove, Maine, must have rivaled Chicago.

So, yeah, in many different ways, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE warped my fragile little mind, including seeing Sinatra as a legitimate dramatic actor and Lansbury as the most wicked mother in screen history. I have no doubt she plays the most wicked mother in screen history, because I don’t want to see anybody else more wicked.

I don’t know if reading or having somebody tell you the plot summary for THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE can even adequately convey how messed up the movie’s events are, like this one I just read on the Internets: “Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco (Sinatra), finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and, together with fellow soldier Allen Melvin (James Edwards), races to uncover a terrible plot.”

Strange nightmares, you can say that again, because they incorporate those Communist brainwashing sessions.

It seems that Shaw’s platoon are surrounded by sweet little old ladies, when in fact they are Chinese and Soviet officials performing their brainwashing routine. Shaw murders two of his men, one by strangulation and one by gunshot through the head. Yet when they come back home, Shaw’s a military hero, just all part of the plan.

These nightmares are very disturbing to watch, of course, and establish the movie’s disorienting tone. We rarely catch a break.

This was one dark movie for 1962 and like DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), it holds up today because of that darkness. In her 1962 review, Pauline Kael said that it may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood. Here we are, decades later, and her statement holds true.

There’s a lot about the plot I don’t want to consider in this space, but there’s still a lot one can discuss considering THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.

For example, it was released October 24, 1962, right in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis during which Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached their coldest.

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE builds up to an assassination.)

For over two decades, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE became withdrawn from circulation.

Some believe it was because JFK’s assassination had such a toll on Sinatra that he sat on the film.

Apparently, Sinatra had made such a poor deal with United Artists on the film that his attorneys planned for Sinatra to buy the movie’s rights himself and bury his mistake. Sinatra’s plan succeeded in 1972.

Eventually, though, the New York Film Festival organized a 25th anniversary screening of the movie in 1987 and its success led to a theatrical re-release in 1988. Apparently, Sinatra got a better deal this second time. We all got a better deal when THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE saw the light of day once again.

The film’s tagline certainly gets at the truth of the matter: “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about! When you’ve seen it all, you’ll swear there’s never been anything like it!”