Film Forum

U.S., 1962
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, Henry Silva
Screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
DCP. Approx. 126 min.

A brain-washer orders Korean War POW Laurence Harvey to waste a politico at a Madison Square Garden convention – to clear the way for a brainless stooge for those Commies – but fellow ex-vet Frank Sinatra reshuffles those cards.

Reviews

“A daring, funny, and far-out thriller…This picture plays some wonderful, crazy games […] Maybe the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.”
– Pauline Kael

“THE KING OF COLD WAR COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY THRILLERS. Creepy, creepy stuff.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

“One of the strangest and most mercurial movies ever made in Hollywood…this exciting black-and-white cold war thriller runs more than two hours and never flags for an instant…It's conceivably the only commercial American film that deserves to be linked with the French New Wave, full of visual and verbal wit that recalls Orson Welles. Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey, both brilliantly cast, have never been better; Sinatra and Janet Leigh have never been used as weirdly; and the talented secondary cast […] is never less than effective. A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“A sensational piece of genre filmmaking: pacy, compelling, witty and cynical, it depicts, in unflinching detail, the beginning of the end for post-war American optimism.”
– Tom Huddleston, Time Out