While we are under the spell of a haunting thriller about the Cold War and brainwashing, we are in fact being fed the most sophisticated political satire in American cinema. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate is rightfully called "the mother of all conspiracy drama". It's ingenious, provocative, inventive, and proved to be prescient for decades to come.
This mother of all conspiracy dramas is a particularly ingenious, provocative American thriller that ridicules political extremism (from both left and right) in razor-sharp satirical excesses. The frenzied plot revolves around an American war veteran who, while incarcerated in Korea, is programmed to shoot the presidential candidate. Because of its prophetic tangents to the Kennedy assassination a year or so later, Frank Sinatra (he plays the comrade-in-arms who tries to foil the plot) bought the rights to the film after the Dallas tragedy and this bleak and toxic-paranoid conspiracy drama was taken out of circulation for years. John Frankenheimer directs George Axelrod's brilliant and complex screenplay, based on a novel by Richard Condon, with an iron hand.
Image gallery
Credits
John Frankenheimer
David Amram
Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh
George Axelrod, John Frankenheimer
Lionel Lindon
Ferris Webster
John Frankenheimer, George Axelrod
M.C. Productions
More info
Spanish, English
United States of America
"The Manchurian Candidate" (Richard Condon)
1962
