A film that plays with America's oversized horror of Communist infiltration while it deals on another level with the very real brainwashing potential of media-induced fear, The Manchurian Candidate made John Frankenheimer an artist to be reckoned with in Hollywood. And in Washington, as well: in 1962, his outspoken satire announced an end to the stranglehold of fear that McCarthy-inspired politics had put on Hollywood filmmaking. The plot has a brainwashed Laurence Harvey returning from the Korean War with a Congressional Medal of Honor that exists entirely in his head, implanted there by Korean Communists who have taken him and his entire platoon to the cleaners, as it were, and sent Harvey home a walking time-bomb set to assassinate the Presidential nominee. Harvey's sensitive portrayal of this much-used soldier is a sobering antidote to the Kubrick-like absurdity of the plot. (Or, Sturges meets the Cold War: Hail the Conquering Hero, indeed.) The fact that the President-to-be (-murdered) is Harvey's stepfather is only the beginning of the film's reverberating Oedipal complex; Angela Lansbury's portrayal of the mother, steeped in the milk of politics, gives new meaning to the age-old struggle. She is the Queen of Diamonds incarnate. The brainwashing sequence involving that memorable playing card is a monument to Frankenheimer's innovative filmmaking; shot three times and intercut to be presented from three mental perspectives at once, it is the key to the disorientation that is basic to the common sense of the film.