The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed and produced by John Frankenheimer.

The film's leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, with co-stars Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, and James Gregory.

The group, which includes representatives of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, plans to assassinate the presidential nominee of an American political party, with the death leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

It was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

After Marco is promoted to major and assigned to Army Intelligence, he has a recurring nightmare: a hypnotized Shaw blithely murders two soldiers from his platoon before an assembly of communist military leaders to demonstrate their revolutionary brainwashing technique.

When Melvin and Marco separately identify identical photos of the two male communist leaders from their dreams, Army Intelligence agrees to investigate.

To spite his mother and stepfather, Shaw takes a job at a newspaper published by Holborn Gaines, Iselin's harshest critic.

After Marco is arrested for assault, Eugenie "Rosie" Cheyney, an attractive young woman he met on the train, posts his bail.

Disguised as a priest, Shaw enters Madison Square Garden, taking a sniper's position in a vacant overhead spotlight booth.

An early scene in which Shaw, recently decorated with the Medal of Honor, argues with his parents was filmed in Sinatra's own private plane.

[citation needed] In the scene where Marco attempts to deprogram Shaw in a hotel room opposite the convention, Sinatra is at times slightly out of focus.

Concerned with the reaction to even a reference to a taboo topic like incest in a mainstream film at that time, the filmmakers instead had Eleanor kiss Shaw on the lips to imply her incestuous attraction to him.

[15] The Manchurian Candidate uses "science, the conditioned subject, and the moving image" to create a realistic framework for the existence of mind control.

[14] Janja Lalich, a counter-cult sociologist, notes that the term "brainwashing" used by this counterculture movement was first made popular by The Manchurian Candidate.

[18] The ever growing fear that anyone, even a decorated soldier like Raymond Shaw, could be coerced unwittingly by communists contributed to the United States’ expansion of their own mind control experiments.

The website's critical consensus reads: "A classic blend of satire and political thriller that was uncomfortably prescient in its own time, The Manchurian Candidate remains distressingly relevant today.

Professor Catherine Canino claimed that the film fulfilled the prophecies of "the imagined loss of cherished American autonomy and free will".

[25] Political scientist Michael Rogin concluded that The Manchurian Candidate "aims to reawaken a lethargic nation to a communist menace".

"[17] In 1994, The Manchurian Candidate was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".