The Manchurian Candidate

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," Pauline Kael wrote of The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, the film is also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. There are unforgettable performances in The Manchurian Candidate from Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury as an incarnation of murderous perversity. But Frank Sinatra is at the heart of the film, horrified, then devastated, by what he has to see until, finally, for Greil Marcus, he is "a man almost dead with sorrow and guilt." As Marcus reconstructs the drama, this is a movie in which the director and actors were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. He shows how The Manchurian Candidate has burrowed deeply into American culture, becoming at once an ineradicable piece of folklore and a mystery yet to be solved. "It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," Pauline Kael wrote of The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, the film is also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. There are unforgettable performances in The Manchurian Candidate from Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury as an incarnation of murderous perversity. But Frank Sinatra is at the heart of the film, horrified, then devastated, by what he has to see until, finally, for Greil Marcus, he is "a man almost dead with sorrow and guilt." As Marcus reconstructs the drama, this is a movie in which the director and actors were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. He shows how The Manchurian Candidate has burrowed deeply into American culture, becoming at once an ineradicable piece of folklore and a mystery yet to be solved.