A classic blend of satire and political thriller that was uncomfortably prescient in its own time, The Manchurian Candidate remains distressingly relevant today. Read critic reviews
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The Manchurian Candidate videos
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - A Cold War
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - I Wanted a Killer
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Rose Picks Up Marco
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Marco Fights Chunjin
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Killing Sen. Jordan and Jocie
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Marco's Nightmare
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - 52 Red Queens Say Its Over
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - The Red Queen
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Manchurian Garden Club
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Assassination
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Meeting Rose on the Train
The Manchurian Candidate: Official Clip - Melvin's Nightmare
The Manchurian Candidate Photos
Movie Info
Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and, together with fellow soldier Allen Melvin (James Edwards), races to uncover a terrible plot.
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Rating: PG-13
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Genre: Mystery & thriller, Drama
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Original Language: English
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Director: John Frankenheimer
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Producer: John Frankenheimer, George Axelrod
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Writer: George Axelrod
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Release Date (Theaters): original
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Release Date (Streaming):
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Box Office (Gross USA): $1.9M
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Runtime:
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Distributor: United Artists, MGM/UA Home Entertainment Inc.
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Production Co: M.C. Productions
Cast & Crew
News & Interviews for The Manchurian Candidate
Critic Reviews for The Manchurian Candidate
Audience Reviews for The Manchurian Candidate
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The film's concept sounds like outrageous Cold War propaganda but in execution it's a thoroughly surreal and cynical thriller that has very little to do with political or patriotic ideology. Further proof of Frankenheimer's underated brilliance.
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Warning, this review contains spoilers, and if you've never seen the film before, you should definitely watch it without knowing anything first, for maximum enjoyment. :) With that out of the way ... fantastic performances by both Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra, great direction by John Frankenheimer, and an excellent plot all make this a film that is still highly enjoyable today. In a nutshell, American soldiers in the Korean War are captured and subjected to sophisticated brainwashing by Russian and Chinese communists, and one of them is programmed to carry out assassinations back in America. Frank Sinatra plays one of the soldiers who has recurring nightmares about the brainwashing, and the sequence where Frankenheimer shows them thinking they're at a meeting at a lady's club talking about flowers, which seems very odd at first, and spins the camera around to gradually show us the horrifying reality of their predicament, and just how controlled they are, is absolutely fantastic. We come to understand the assassin's trigger, the queen of diamonds when told to play solitaire, which is a wonderfully chilling concept, and I loved how the story included a false trigger at a costume party. Angela Lansbury's character evolves over the film, from over-bearing mother and wife, the brains behind her Senator husband's McCarthyism, to the mastermind behind the whole conspiracy - and how this is revealed is as great as her performance. The movie keeps us guessing, perhaps as those swept up in fear of communism guessed at what may be happening around them in their paranoia, and an example of this is Janet Leigh's offbeat dialog with Sinatra when she first meets him on a train. It immediately seems to us as code and a way of controlling him in some way, but it's also flirtatious, and we're left wondering what her role will be. Brilliant as it is, from my perspective, the movie has one major flaw. Frankenheimer was happy to show the dangers of McCarthyism and even commented on this in interviews, and yet there WAS a communist plot to overthrow the government, and there WAS unsuspected (and very dangerous) communist infiltration. So at the end of the day, what was the message - that McCarthy was right? I don't think it's right to explain this away as satire of both the right and the left, because I don't see the movie as satire, I see it as a political thriller - but it is a very good one at that.
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"The Manchurian Candidate" is a film of great performances, fluid black-and-white cinematography and able direction from the always reliable John Frankenheimer. It's smart, startling and wickedly relevant, and Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin is one of the great movie villains.
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Not my cup of tea, classic-movie wise.
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