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American cinema in the 1960s, and especially the 70s, turned out some fantastic paranoid thrillers, movies that placed an unwitting "ordinary person" in the midst of a labrynthine conspiracy involving both higher-ups in the government and trusted friends. Among the best known are director Alan J. Pakula's trifecta of impactful tales with Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men. We shouldn't forget, however, an earlier yarn that pushed the complexity envelope and featured a devastating climax: John Frankenheimer's 1963 masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, and Vivien Leigh.

Based on Richard Condon's novel from two years earlier, The Manchurian Candidate involves a convoluted brainwashing scheme that can turn a celebrated war hero into the coldest of assassins at the sight of the Queen of Hearts in a deck of playing cards. Power-hungry families, hysterical fear of communism, the nature of memory, weaknesses of the human mind, and a touch of incest all come into play by the time it's over. The rather unwieldy tagline is accurate: "If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won't know what it's all about! When you've seen it all, you'll swear there's never been anything like it!"

Frankenheimer opens this black-and-white classic during the Korean War, with a platoon of Americans enjoying some down time in a brothel. Staff Sergent Raymond Shaw (Harvey) busts up the fun, and the group heads out for a nighttime maneuver based on information from a Chinese informant. Without warning, the platoon is ambushed, and the screen fades to black. The next thing we know, Shaw is exiting a plane to fanfare and a Medal of Honor for having rescued the others after nearly three years in a POW camp. Elsewhere, Shaw's former Commanding Officer Ben Marco (Sinatra) has been having vivid nightmares of a united Chinese/Russian contingent brainwashing his platoon, forcing Shaw to kill two of his fellow POWs while the others look on, and Marco has reason to believe it might not all be a dream.

These first few minutes are simply masterful storytelling. They set up a surprising number of plot threads that will take the next two hours to play out, effortlessly sinking the audience into a world of multiple meanings and few easy answers. The brainwashing nightmare sequence is the highlight of the piece, an astounding achievement in editing that boils a complex conceit down to an easily-digestable form. The soldiers believe they are killing time at a garden party listening to a woman give a dull lecture about hydrangeas, but in fact they're in a communist stronghold, the audience of little old ladies actually members of the Russian and Chinese armies. The scene cuts seamlessly between the facade and reality - we're at the garden party hearing the lecture from the gardiner, then we're in the bunker as the soldiers are manipulated by a villainous communist, then the gardening expert is in the bunker doing the manipulation and so on. Words don't do justice to the sheer originality of visual storytelling at play here, but I guarantee it will sell you on this movie's importance.

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