Janet Leigh's Character
"Manchurian Candidate" director John Frankenheimer praised Janet Leigh for bringing great emotion and flair to a character he conceded was "just...The Girl" in "The Manchurian Candidate."
Frankenheimer kind of shrugged. Movies were like that in those days, and sometimes still are. The men are the leads and the protagonists and the antagonists. In TMC , Sinatra is our shell-shocked hero and Laurence Harvey is our cold until tragic villain, and the two men are surrounded by as many scary, vicious plotters as in any thriller(with the great contrast of Kheigh Deigh's jovial Chinese commie mastermind and Angela Lansbury's absolutely humorless Ultra-Beyotch of a Monster Political Mother.)
But there seems to be a lot more to Janet Leigh's character than being "just...The Girl."
Leigh shows up on that train with Sinatra and boy does she look great, with her 1962 bouffant and her low-cut sweater and jacket showing off her famous chest.
The train "meet cute/meet weird" of Sinatra and Leigh has become one of the great man/woman scenes in cinema. Sinatra's character is such a sweaty basket case that most women would walk away in fear; but he's Sinatra after all and Leigh's Rosie seems to go "instant mother" in wanting to care for him. She exchanges bizarre chit-chat on the train(such as saying she was one of the original Chinese workmen who built the train tracks) and the shaky Sinatra responds, stabilizes...comes to feel like a man again.
The superspeed with which Leigh gives Sinatra her NYC phone number and later announces that she has just broken up with her fiancée to hang exclusively with Sinatra ...creates "plot suspense": is Leigh working for the bad guys? Is she going to be Sinatra's Communist "handler"?
The movie never takes action on that, right up to the end(with Leigh accepting a marriage proposal from Sinatra) but her sudden attachment to Sinatra on first meeting him, leaves us wondering even at the end: will Leigh eventually be Sinatras "controller?" Are there new assassination plots ahead?
This "what if?" possibility has hung over "The Manchurian Candidate" for decades now, but on the evidence of the film story itself...no, Janet Leigh isn't playing a "hidden villain." She's playing a very special woman, who seems to intuit from the get-go that Frank Sinatra is a basket case for a REASON, and needs to be helped, taken care of, loved. She also soon realizes he's a tough guy, and is touched that he can only call her to bail him out of jail after he fights -- and beats "that big Chinese man"("Korean, dear," Sinatra gently corrects her.)
Despite all her great lines in the movie, I like the moment when Sinatra walks in distraught with a newspaper that tells of the killing of the Senator and his daughter. The newspaper doesn't know what Sinatra does: Laurence Harvey killed them, against his free will.
But Sinatra announces this to Leigh, and she looks at the paper, and how she says "But it doesn't say that..." is real and human and touching, to me. Leigh is trying to provide Sinatra with solace, she's his touchstone.
"The Manchurian Candidate" goes so creepy, so bizarre, so byzantine, that by the time its over, Janet Leigh stands tall as the film's "humanity anchor," not only rescuing Sinatra from the horrors of the plot, but rescuing US.
PS. This is two years after Psycho, where Janet was so brutally murdered in ANOTHER black and white movie featuring a Monster Mother and her weird son. Leigh looks better in TMC than in Psycho, the hairstyles and clothing of two years into the sixties are better on her. And we worry that -- if Janet is NOT a Commie villain -- she might be a murder victim again this time. But this time, she is not.