John Frankenhiemer’s classic cold war thriller tells the story of a brain washed American veteran played by Laurence Harvey, programmed by the Communist Chinese to kill the president of the United States. Frank Sinatra stars as an Army investigator and Harvey’s war time friend but Angela Lansbury steals the film in her portrayal on Harvey’s opportunistic, communist hating mother. Film critic Roger Ebert ranked The Manchurian Candidate as an exemplary “Great Film,” declaring that it 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.”
