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Film · 1962 · Political thriller
The Manchurian Candidate
Directed by John Frankenheimer
1962
★ 7.4 editorial score
It sat out of circulation for fifteen years over a rights dispute, not the assassination myth people repeat: a Korean War veteran cannot shake a dream about his own platoon.
“"The Manchurian Candidate" is inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a "classic" but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released. "It may be," Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "the most sophisticated satire ever made in Hollywood." Yes, because it satirizes no particular target -- left, right, foreign, domestic -- but the very notion that politics can be taken at face value.”
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