John Frankenheimer came out of television's Golden Age of the 1950s, as the director of critically acclaimed dramas in such anthology series as Playhouse 90 and Climax!. He made his feature debut with a film adapted from a TV story he had directed about troubled youth, The Young Stranger (1957). That led to his real break, being hired by Burt Lancaster to direct The Young Savages (1961), a gritty tale of juvenile delinquency in New York City. Despite frequent clashes with Lancaster, the two worked together four more times, including the acclaimed Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). After a phenomenal rise in the early 60s, Frankenheimer's critical and box office stock began to fall due to a drinking problem. In the 80s, he alternated infrequent film work with projects for television that earned him much critical praise and several awards. He died in 2002.

Frank Sinatra reputedly had a swimming pool designed with a large painting on the bottom of the Queen of Hearts playing cards, the image used to trigger Raymond Shaw's brainwashed obedience in the movie.

Director John Frankenheimer later said The Manchurian Candidate didn't do well financially because the studio chose to promote another Sinatra picture, The Pride and the Passion (1957), but that film had actually been released five years earlier.

After its first run, The Manchurian Candidate was withdrawn from exhibition and withheld from distribution for many years. Several rumors have abounded to explain its disappearance. One held that Sinatra, who controlled the rights to the picture, locked up both The Manchurian Candidate and his earlier political assassination film Suddenly (1954) after the assassination of his friend John F. Kennedy, but that has now been disputed. In fact, Sinatra's control only extended to the film's rights after seven years. There is, however, apparently some truth to the story that after JFK was murdered a year after the picture was released, some exhibitors requested it be given another run to capitalize on the event but that United Artists refused.

Another reason given for the film's unavailability for so many years (put forth by Frankenheimer and others) was a financial and legal dispute between Sinatra and United Artists. That, too, has been disputed, and many now generally accept that the true reason is still not clear. What is certain is that during its "lost years," the film built up a great reputation. "The movie went from failure to classic without passing through success," noted its screenwriter, George Axelrod. When it was finally re-released in 1988, it was a big box office hit (as well as a success on its subsequent video/DVD release) and earned even more rave reviews as one of the best pictures of that year.

Sinatra arranged with United Artists for President John Kennedy to receive a print of the film in May 1962.

In his career of more than 30 years, writer George Axelrod's most personal project was the offbeat comedy Lord Love a Duck (1966), starring Tuesday Weld and Roddy McDowall. Many consider the film, which he also produced and directed, to be ahead of its time.

Film critic Roger Ebert zeroed in on the strange relationship between the characters played by Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh (who seems rather incidental to the plot). The two complete strangers meet in a train car. Leigh helps him as he appears to have a breakdown, immediately falls for him, urges him (in rather hushed and passionless tones) to memorize her contact information, takes him in and ditches her fiancé. "My notion," Ebert wrote, "is that Sinatra's character is a Manchurian killer, too - one allowed to remember details of Harvey's brainwashing because that would make him seem more credible. And Leigh? She is Sinatra's controller [as Lansbury is Harvey's]."

At 36 years old at the time of filming, Angela Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey, who played her son. It wasn't the first time Lansbury was called upon to play older than her true age. In her previous film, All Fall Down (1962), also under Frankenheimer's direction, she played the mother of Warren Beatty, who was less than 12 years her junior, and in Blue Hawaii (1961), she was the mother of Elvis Presley, who was only ten years younger.

British-born Lansbury has received three Oscar® nominations (including Supporting Actress for her film debut in Gaslight, 1944), 17 Emmy nominations, and 15 Golden Globe nominations, including her Best Supporting Actress win for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and for this picture and four wins for her role in the TV series Murder, She Wrote. Also a noted stage actress, she has won four Tony Awards for her work in Broadway musicals.

"Mine was a career that might have petered out had it not been for The Manchurian Candidate." - Angela Lansbury

Sen. and Mrs. Iselin's plane in the film actually belonged to Sinatra.

Leslie Parrish, who plays Raymond's ill-fated sweetheart Jocie, also played Daisy Mae in the film of the Broadway hit Li'l Abner (1959). She was married from 1977 to 1997 to Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. With Bach, she wrote the book One in 1988.

Cinematographer Lionel Lindon worked with Frankenheimer several times. Lindon received Oscar® nominations for his black-and-white work on Going My Way (1944) and I Want to Live! (1958) and won for his color cinematography on Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

Described by the Boston Globe as "the Renaissance man of American music," David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and many scores for theatre and films. His screen work includes Splendor in the Grass (1961) and the legendary Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy (1959), in which he also appeared, along with such other notables of the Beat movement as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac.

Production Designer Richard Sylbert contributed much to the look of this picture, as he had for such films as Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, an Oscar® win for Sylbert), The Graduate (1967), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974), Shampoo (1975), Reds (1981), and Dick Tracy (1990, another Oscar®). He worked with Frankenheimer again on Grand Prix (1966).

Famous Quotes from THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Phrase used by several people in the movie to initiate control of the brainwashed Raymond Shaw: Why don't you pass the time with a game of solitaire?

GENERAL (Harry Holcombe): (presenting Raymond with the Medal of Honor)
Congratulations, son. How do you feel?
SHAW (Laurence Harvey): Like Captain Idiot in Astounding Science comics.

MARCO (Frank Sinatra): Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

MARCO: It's not that Raymond Shaw is hard to like. He's impossible to like!

MARCO: Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it.

ROSIE (Janet Leigh): My full name is Eugenie Rose. Of the two names I've always favored Rose, 'cause it smells of brown soap and beer. Eugenie is somehow more fragile.
MARCO: Still, when I asked you what your name was, you said it was Eugenie.
ROSIE: Quite possibly I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant.

SHAW: It's a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I didn't always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.

CHAIRLADY (Maye Henderson): You will notice that I have told them they may smoke. I've allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes... Are you enjoying your cigarette, Ed?
MAVOLE (Richard LePore): Yes ma'am.
DR. YEN LO (Khigh Dhiegh): Yak dung! Hope tastes good, like a cigarette should!

DR. YEN LO: His brain has not only been washed, as they say. It has been dry cleaned.

SHAW: Twelve days of Christmas! One day of Christmas is loathsome enough!

RAYMOND'S MOTHER (Angela Lansbury): Raymond, why do you always have to look as if your head were about to come to a point?

RAYMOND'S MOTHER: I keep telling you not to think! You're very, very good at a great many things, but thinking, hon', just simply isn't one of them.

RAYMOND'S MOTHER: I know you will never entirely comprehend this, Raymond, but you must believe I did not know it would be you. I served them. I fought for them. I'm on the point of winning for them the greatest foothold they would ever have in this country. And they paid me back by taking your soul away from you.

Compiled by Rob Nixon