Laurence Harvey

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: A Cold War Thriller for the Internet Age

Frank Sinatra, whose 100th birthday would have been this December, was one of the great entertainers of the 20th century. He had an exceptional voice that made him perhaps the most influential vocalist in history, but Sinatra doesn’t sing a note in his best movie, the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This deft political drama, which wouldn’t have been made without Sinatra’s intervention, uncannily predicts many of the tumultuous events of the 1960s and beyond.