(1962)

The Manchurian Candidate is a compelling viewing experience in its own right, but one enhanced by its incredible backstory. Remember this is 1962, a year before Dealey Plaza. We have actor Laurence Harvey, whose very name makes him sound like Lee Harvey Oswald, playing a loner ex-serviceman planning a Presidential assassination.

The paranoia extends to the film’s existence post-Nov.22, 1963, where it became notorious by its ‘disappearance’, amid rumours of suppression and cover-up analogous to those swirling around The Warren Commission and its conspiracy-theory aftermath.

Fact: The Manchurian Candidate was never released on home video (prior to its gala 25^th Anniversary reissue in the late 1980s).

Myth: it was ‘pulled’ from circulation for 25 years by its star, Frank Sinatra out of respect for the Kennedys. Yet as Richard Condon, author of the novel avers (and I can confirm), it continued to surface occasionally on late night television and repertory cinemas.

The weirdness didn’t stop there, underpinning a slew of intriguing mysteries.

Fact: it was director Frankenheimer who drove Bobby Kennedy to the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, the night he made his fateful last speech.

Whatever, The Manchurian Candidate works completely on its own. Along with Seven Days in May (1964) and Seconds (1966), it comprises Frankenheimer's ‘paranoia trilogy’, easily his best work. It’s surreal from the opening sequence, a bravura setpiece of editing (for which it was Oscar-nominated) revealing the soldiers’ brainwashing through 360 degree pans between Communist Korean puppetmasters and their projected image of a spinsters’ garden party in New Jersey. Thus destabilised, we are ready for anything and the exaggerated Machiavellian mother-horror Angela Lansbury (eerily prefiguring Thatcher, in more ways than one) takes up its central energy quite seamlessly.

Having shots at McCarthyism, television reporting and the entire political process, The Manchurian Candidate stands revealed as not only rich satire but one of the first U.S. conspiracy theory thrillers (Elia Kazan’s excellent 1957 A Face in the Crowd easily predates it). Its verve, wit and breadth of vision dwarf those to come a decade later around Watergate (in fact the detail of its buildup to the assassination scene, the gunman walking through the girders of the auditorium, etc, so closely match those of 1974’s The Parallax View that it forces a rethink of this – admittedly small – subgenre).

But most of all the film is funny, with a very arch humour consonant with the dysfunctional blue-blood family portrayed by the serpent’s tooth team of Harvey and Lansbury. They play their feud with a droll self-mockery that’s as dry as a martini and it’s this that keeps The Manchurian Candidate fresh today.

Richard Condon (in his memoir, And Then We Moved To Rossenarra) says he set out in this 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate to highlight Americans’ "unrelenting conditioning to violence … [as] … for some time all of us in the United States had been brainwashed to violence". He extends this acceptance of ‘violence’ to the selling of cigarettes in the face of medical evidence, TV, comic books and even popular music – and all levels of the U.S. government.

In Reagan:The Movie, Michael Rogin sees a commonality with Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the way that 1956 film and The Manchurian Candidate "united deceit with bodily invasion" through the kisses of female figures – Angela Lansbury’s Mom and Invasion’s brainwashed girlfriend, Dana Wynter. There is a strong link between these two films but it lies elsewhere. Both foreground a profound fear of slipping into dream states, ie a fear of the unconscious – the id. Sleep makes one wake a ‘pod’ in Invasion, while it is only when dreaming that the soldiers in Manchurian recall the pain associated with their ‘reprogramming’. This link makes these films’ timing a crucial issue. Though separated by six years, both catch that wave of late/post-Eisenhower frustration where the cracks are beginning to show in the American suppression of the wild forces of unconscious nature - already seen breaking out in rock’n’roll and the new teenage market (qv The Wild One, Rebel Without A Cause). This social volcano would explode just after JFK, with The Beatles igniting the eruption into the expansive 1960s.

Linked in this way, these two films inadvertently reveal just how big a stumbling block 1950s conformism had become to the American psyche. Interestingly, an even funnier Cold War satire, Kubrick’s unhinged Dr Strangelove, shows no signs of such suppression - but it came out in 1964.