WINNER: Angela Lansbury, Best Supporting Actress, Golden Globes
“Here is a movie that was made more than 25 years ago, and it feels as if it were made yesterday. Not a moment of The Manchurian Candidate lacks edge and tension and a cynical spin.” - Roger Ebert (1988).
A familiar plot by today’s standards and one that has been parodied and pastiched since the film’s release in 1962 - think The Naked Gun or Homeland - the story, set during the Cold War, is centred around an international communist plot to create assassins by brainwashing a group of American P.O.W.s. The story follows two soldiers in particular Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) and Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who return to America where Shaw is welcomed back into society as a war hero. However Marco is troubled by recurring nightmares that cause him to suspect that all is not quite right with his comrade.
Selected by Newsweek as one of the ten greatest villains in cinema history, Angela Lansbury steals the show as the chilling Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin, whose marriage to a prominent Republican senator makes her son Raymond the prime candidate to carry out the communists’ assassination plot.
David Desmond
Audi Dublin International Film Festival