"There are sublime things in the picture: the dream in which a ladies' flower-club meeting slips in and out of brainwashing; the entire conceit of Lawrence Harvey as someone not quite there; the furious, digestive satisfaction of Angela Lansbury feeding on all around her;...."
David Thomson, Have You Seen...?, (2006) p. 514
"....The effect of Miss Page's increased power and leisure, which expects no reistance from the movie, is to eviscerate the entire film. The same is true of Gregory Peck's pious Lincoln impersonation in To Kill a Mockingbird and of Angela Lansbury's helicopterlike performance in The Manchurian Candidate, in which every sentence beings and ends with a vertical drop."
Manny Farber, "The Decline of the Actor", The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, p. 546-47.....
"....Angela Lansbury is at her most splendid as the mole.... Even today, after a quarter century's worth of bold cinema, Lansbury's portrayal terrifies, flighty and flinty on the surface but rigid with cold passions underneath. Her grandest passion is the Sido-Soviet advance, but her greatest, to our horror, is her son Laurence Harvey. "They" have destroyed him in the brainwashing, and she will avenge him. She is the Queen of Hearts. She is Mrs. Bates. And she is the Manchurian Candidate, the choice of the East, her regency to be guaranteed by assassination...."
Ethan Mordden, Medium Cool (1990), p. 26
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