The Manchurian Candidate

Label: Premier Recordings    
Catalogue No: PRCD 1059

Release Date: 1997

Total Duration: 64:26 

UPN: 71861-41059-2-8

It took 35 years, but David Amram’s masterful jazz-based score for John Frankenheimer’s elusive political thriller is available in complete form, including several elements not fully heard in the film. While jazz-based, the score is more than just a jazz score. Amram reaches the film’s psychological underpinnings and accentuates what’s going on behind the scenes. His gentle trumpet main theme, representing the tragic Laurence Harvey figure, the hero soldier whose brainwashing has made him into an unknowing assassin, not only captures the past nobility of the man but portends his ultimate heroic sacrifice at the film’s end.

The modern jazz elements support the contemporary world of Frank Sinatra’s character and his romance with Janet Leigh, much as it supports the film’s gritty, contemporary 1963 realism, just as it offers a striking contrast to the film’s post Korean War Asian elements. The nightmarish dissonance that opens ‘Oueen of Diamonds’ segues into a quietly miasmic harpsichord motif which represents the subliminal effect the card has upon Harvey due to his brainwashing. The harsh, uneven sound of the solo harpsichord perfectly underlines Harvey’s confusion, apprehension, and compUlsive obedience to psychological suggestion. There are moments of orchestral warmth and foot-tapping rhythm (‘Some Soul’ .. ‘From Seoul’ is an irresistibly swaying cue thankfully presented in its full 7:50 length), but the core of Amram’s score rests in its musical psychologies. Just as he’s ennobled the Harvey character – portraying him as a tragic hero unable to escape the compulsion that shapes his destiny – he’s enabled the music to reach into the film’s dramatic depths and support the film’s underlying temperament in a rare and unforgettable way.

Originally published in Soundtrack Magazine Vol.17/No.66/1998 - With permission of the editor, Luc Van de Ven