The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

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.