THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) *** An important film, more than a great one. It's a lot of fun though, it's provocative, it's so far ahead of its time as to appear to be sci-fi forty years later, its star is a cultural icon for the kind of people who need to watch it, and John Frankenheimer puts it together with the intricate skills that allow some scientists to build functional automobiles out of Legos. This pinpoints that point in time when some intellectuals were still paranoid about communists in the washroom, but all intellectuals were becoming concerned about mobsters, fascists, and greedy bastards in the statehouse. It brilliantly highlights the tangled web that is inevitable in times of intense but unsupported name-calling. It's questionable whether most of the characters in the film have even a working definition of what a communist is-a communist to them is anyone who stands between themselves and personal aggrandisement. The milieu control psychology is fascinating if overstated, but the truth is that these experiments continue, there are scientific grounds to believe that something similar may yet be possible, and still no one has any realistic idea of where the ceiling is. Frank Sinatra is earnest and tough enough to keep the film rolling, as are the other principals (Leslie Parrish, John McGiver, Raymond Shaw, James Gregory, even Janet Leigh), but no one offers a career performance. It's the thoughts that count, the totems to manipulation, the abrasive ego and opportunism in even the most dedicated ideologue (Angela Lansbury is best of them all), the chilling calculation in a vacuum milieu devoid of truth (that would be U.S. politics), the affected gullability and parrot instinct of the media, the submersion of decency, and the fragility of love.