Opening in the year of the Cuban missile crisis, the film immediately precedes and more than rivals Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Later, a somewhat sanctimonious, lily-white liberal senator is assassinated as he stands beside a fridge, a torrent of milk spurting from the carton the bullet penetrates on its way to his heart. A right-wing senator is trying to remember how many clandestine communists he’s claiming there are in the government, and Frankenheimer cuts from a bottle of Heinz ketchup to the dim-witted politician claiming that “there are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist party in the department of defence”. Two of the most memorable jokes take stabs at both sides. In creating the continuing vogue for the paranoid political conspiracy thriller, the movie combines the surreal (in its depiction of brainwashing), the documentary in the presentation of the way TV was coming to dominate American life, and ruthless black comedy in mocking both McCarthyism and the cold war. Adapted by playwright George Axelrod (author of the hit comedy The Seven Year Itch) from an ingenious, deadpan novel by Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate is astutely directed by John Frankenheimer, a sharp, fast-thinking film-maker recently recruited from live TV drama. In fact he’s been turned into a Soviet mole within the American establishment, ready to become an assassin at the sight of a coded queen in a pack of cards.

They’re convinced their charmless platoon sergeant (Laurence Harvey) is a hero who has saved their lives.

I n a brilliant opening sequence set in 1952, an American patrol in the Korean war is abducted by Soviet agents, flown to Manchuria, brainwashed and returned to the American lines.

The manchurian candidate torrent