Excellent adaptation.

Absolutely Fantastic

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Time is the ultimate judge, isn't that what they say? Well 1962's The Manchurian Candidate is all the evidence I need. It feels ahead of it's time still and so relevant. In 2004, Jonathan Demme - one of my heroes - remade it with Meryl Streep - one my favorites - and Denzel Washington - one of my favorites - and the whole thing felt so old hat that I had to see John Frankeihemer's 1962 version again. Wow! Angela Lansbury creates one of the greatest villains in movie history. She is phenomenal and like it happens she's the kind of monster you can't have enough of. Frank Sinatra is really good here and the creepiness of Laurence Harvey is unsurpassed. So, well, yes, time has confirmed and protected the greatness of this outrageous thriller.

One has to have a bit of suspension of disbelief to really totally embrace this movie. What I mean is that there are so many variables that could go wrong. Still, it is a startling film that will stay with you for decades. A group of men have been imprisoned in Manchuria where they are subjected to brainwashing and hypnosis. They have been give post- hypnotic suggestions which will cause them to act in a certain way. One of the men, who supposedly saved them all, is the pivot man. He is spoken of by his men as the greatest thing ever. In reality, in the minds of the men, he is an unapproachable, cruel man. The other things that he is are revealed as the movie progresses. Angela Lansbury plays the wife of a political candidate. She is dangerous and is connected n a sick way to her son. She is working to get her husband elected President. One criticism of the film is the use of hypnosis and its implications but this is still a tense, enjoyable film.

I have always loved this movie and the first time I saw it was within a year after JFK was assassinated. I wonder these days if the Army DIA assisted or consulted with the movie.Did the director get all his input from the book?Did the author consult? The post Korean War era was sprinkled with stories of Brainwashing of US POW's captured during the Korean War. Generally speaking POW's captured during WWII were interrogated ,sometimes very brutally. The other intriguing parallel is that this movie was due to be released in the Fall of'63 but was delayed for several months after the JFK assassination. I don't believe there was a connection to this movies theme but the Oswald role in the JFK killing and this storyline are more than interesting?? I wish someone who worked on the creative /production side of the movie could enlighten some of us fans.

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.