The Manchurian Candidate

As a long time fan of this film I note there is little that has gone unmentioned in the positive reviews - except this. I would like to put in a word of praise for the academy award winning editor Ferris Webster. Webster's crowning achievement was the famed 'garden party' sequence in which the malevolent communist agents are transformed into ladies at a garden club and back again, the vertigo of the circling camera draws us into the actual mental state of the brainwashed captives. Each camera movement, each shot was so exquisitely timed and placed that this is almost equal to the shower-bath scene in Psycho as a classic of modern editing. This scene is still studied in film schools by future editors. Also, the cutting in the finale scene at the convention expertly creates a Hitchcockian suspense totally dependent on the editing.

Another aside, Angela Lansbury 'cut her teeth' for this role playing the ruthless newspaper owner in the Tracy-Hepburn film State of the Union. In that film she managed to upstage Hepburn herself! And it was obvious that she should play the 'biggest, baddest mother of all'.