The Stranger, July 29th, 2004
When John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, it trod very fragile political ground. Based on a blatantly anti-McCarthyist novel, and produced just as Hollywood's notorious blacklist was gearing down, the film had to prove its capitalist credentials at the very moment it was indicting the paranoia endemic to the Red Scare. The simple question that it posed was this: What if a populist, red-baiting senator were in fact a pawn of Moscow, and his bid for the vice presidency a naked grab for Communist power in America?
In Jonathan Demme's 2004 update, the enemy is a cor...
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