The Manchurian Candidate

Director: John Frankenheimer

1962 / 126min / DCP

The 1960 U-2 incident, and rumors of the brainwashing of downed Air Force pilot Francis Gary Powers by Soviet captors, were fresh in the imagination when Frankenheimer’s taut political suspenser hit screens, featuring Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw, a Korean War vet returned stateside with decorations after going MIA—unbeknownst to himself and the wider world, a sleeper agent programmed to do the bidding of the Commies—and Frank Sinatra the Army Intelligence officer who suspects all might not be right with Sgt. Shaw. “One of the strangest and most mercurial movies ever made in Hollywood… Conceivably the only commercial American film that deserves to be linked with the French New Wave, full of visual and verbal wit that recalls Orson Welles… A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader

Distributor: Park Circus

Part of Neuro-Noir