Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
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 is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco, finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and soon races to uncover a terrible plot.
The Manchurian Candidate is a landmark Cold War thriller with an ingeniously constructed conspiracy plot, exceptional performances from Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury (who earned an Oscar nomination), and John Frankenheimer's visually inventive direction — including the famous garden party/brainwashing sequence that shifts perspective in a brilliantly disorienting way. Its paranoid vision of political manipulation and sleeper agents was genuinely singular for its era and remains strikingly modern. The ending, while dramatically powerful, is somewhat abrupt and its resolution slightly telegraphed once the key pieces fall into place, preventing it from matching the sustained brilliance of the film's middle act. Novelty is kept at 4 because the film's conception — blending political satire, psychological thriller, and McCarthy-era anxiety — was wholly distinctive and has never quite been replicated.