I have long been a fan of the film The Manchurian Candidate   an early 1960s thriller about Raymond Shaw, a Medal of Honor winner, his overbearing zealot mother, and his idiotic, easily manipulated, step-father who also happens to be a U.S. Senator. Part of a vast Russian/Chinese communist conspiracy to undermine and deliver control of the U.S. Government to a foreign power, the film is a fantastic example of cold war paranoia.

Despite being a fan of the film for decades it was only in the last week that I decided to purchase and read the Richard Condon novel upon from it was adapted.

While I have not finished the novel I have already gathered some impression of the adaptation.

First off Frank Sinatra looks nothing like the character he plays in the movie. Captain Ben Marco, as a character, is well translated to the silver screen, his love of learning, his gruff manner, and bull dog determination, are all elements that were reproduced but his ethnicity and appearance is vastly different. Marco described with bronze colored skin, thick black hair, a wide face, and looking as though he were half Aztec and half Inuit, while being stocky and muscular, which is a far cry from the crooner’s physique.

The novel has a number of subplots and excursions into various characters’ backstory, which the screenwriter adeptly either folded into the main plot or discarded entirely. The essence of a great adaptation is not being 100% faithful to the original material but understanding the core or that material and pulling that out for a screenplay which does not have the luxury of long, lingering digressions.

Perhaps the most striking thing about read the novel at this moment in time is the sense the story and the characters are quite contemporary. Now more than 50 years old quite a few elements have aged and the world no longer works the way it the novel depicts but simultaneously there are striking similarities to current events.

Senator Islen, Raymond’s step-father, is a loud-mouthed lout, a braggart, a man with an entirely fictional story of success, a populist and rabble rouser that undermines US institutions at home and vital alliances abroad. Stirring up paranoia and fear Senator Islen, following his cold and calculating wife’s instructions, ruptures American political norms, breaking ground for an abandonment of democracy in favor of a fevered dream of enemies internal and external sapping the country’s strength unless he, again all this is due to his wife’s manipulations, leads the country back to its lost greatness.

I have to ask, has any really checked into Melania’s history?