This week marks the re-release of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate. This is the film’s second re-release having also been exhibited in 1988, and a modern remake hit cinema’s in 2004 wherein Denzel Washington starred as the damaged soldier, Ben Marco.

Based on a novel by Robert Condon, the original screenplay adaptation credits the likes of Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Lawrence Harvey and Janet Lee as its stars.

Released in the pre-Kennedy era, The Manchurian Candidate was an eerie and near-prophetic vision of what was to come for America off screen. Largely unappreciated in its time, this week’s re-release will find its audience much more accepting of the film’s conspiracy theories.

Raymond Shaw, an escaped Korean War POW, is given a hero’s welcome on American soil by the adoring public and his overbearing, dominant mother- played by the Oscar nominated Angela Lansbury. He is awarded the Medal of Honour for services in the field where he supposedly rescued his unit from behind enemy lines.

His commanding officer Bennet Marco (Sinatra) is plagued by nightmares of his time in Korea, recalling how he was subjected to numerous mind control experiments. He soon begins to doubt his memories from the war and also begins to wonder about the legitimacy of Shaw’s rescue.

1962 was dominated by the supposed threat from communism, a fear heavily exploited in the film, particularly by Lansbury. Her character is a right wing caricature, relentlessly hounding communist ideals at every turn.

The assassination plot is particularly powerful since the murder of John F Kennedy. Very few public screenings of The Manchurian Candidate occurred following the then US President’s assassination. Recently it has been discovered that Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, regularly made trips past a Dallas theatre where the film was shown.

Oswald also bought a rifle similar to that shown in the film. The disturbing parallels between the chilling final scene and the assassination of Kennedy severely curbed the film’s popularity in the subsequent years following its original release. Rumours that Sinatra used his influence to cut the film’s circulation are unsubstantiated, with Michael Schlesinger, the man who helped re-release the film in 1988, saying it was more to do with a share of studio profits than the death of JFK.

Clearly dated in terms of its pacing, cinematography and acting, the film does however quickly become captivating. The stern, structured voice over gives it a stiff nostalgic tone, with Frankenheimer creating tension and confusion by splicing images and memories together, elevating the already sky high level of paranoia.

In the world of 2010, MGM’s cinematic re-release of The Manchurian Candidate will still be relevant to audiences as the perceived threats to the western world continue to grow. From South Korea and Afghanistan to global warming and Facebook, we are now told to be paranoid about so much. Indeed, it’s nice to see how little humanity has changed in the last 40 years.