Link: The Manchurian Candidate

Summary: A man is psychologically reprogrammed to do the bidding of evil foreign communists.  His mission: to assassinate an important political figure.  Can he be stopped in time?

Thoughts: Poor Frank Sinatra.  Good singer, lousy actor.  But even if he hadn’t been part of the film, the premise was rather absurd.  People can get psychologically reprogrammed through some mysterious special hypnosis?  What?  Granted, normal men can go crazy if pressured under the right conditions (as in the Stanford Prison Experiment), but to become controllable robots that will unquestionably do the bidding of someone else?  It ends up being rather silly.  Which would’ve worked if the film had treated itself like a comedy.  The film featured some interesting directing decisions, interesting photography and cinematography, but not enough to make up for the over-the-top storyline that seemed to try to take itself too seriously.