Has history finally moved ahead of The Manchurian Candidate as it turns 60 years old?
John Frankenheimer’s thriller, about a cold-war conspiracy to assassinate a political leader using a sleeper agent, managed the neat, eerie trick of looking prescient for multiple decades following its 1962 release. The murky real-life assassination of John F Kennedy the following year, the quagmire of the United States’ anti-communism involvement in the Vietnam during the 10 years that followed, general 90s-era cultural paranoia and Dick Cheney’s machinations during the George W Bush presidency were among the touchstones that looked, from certain angles, like refracted images of the film. (Jonathan Demme seemed to sense this, remaking the movie halfway through the Bush years.)
