The Manchurian Candidate is a set of American thrillers premiered in 1962. The director is John Frankenheimer, and the actors include Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, and Jenna Lee.

This film is adapted from Richard Condon's thrilling novel of the same name in 1959. Both are based on the Cold War and describe a young man from a political family who was brainwashed by the Communist Party and turned into a controlled killer. But because the film was released on October 24, 1962, the United States was in a tense period of the Cuban crisis, so the film may give the audience a deeper image.

During the Korean War, the Soviet Union developed a "brainwashing" technology similar to hypnosis. This technology can make people trance and obey instructions. After the victim wakes up, he will forget everything he has done. The Soviet Union abducted a group of American soldiers during the Korean War. The group of soldiers was taken to Manchuria, China for brainwashing, and then secretly brought back to the United States. In order to conceal people’s eyes and ears, the Communist Party planted false memories in the brains of American soldiers, and set a trigger event in the brain of one of the soldiers, Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey). When the incident occurred, Lehman Will enter a hypnotic state. After this group of soldiers returned to the United States, they did not know that they had been brainwashed.

Major Bennett Marco (played by Frank Sinatra), Lehman Shaw and other soldiers believed that Lehman saved everyone in the war, and because of this, Lehman was awarded the Medal of Honor after returning home. When Leiman Shaw was mentioned, these soldiers all described Lehman without missing a word: "The most kind, brave, warmest, and most perfect person." However, deep in their minds, they thought Lehman was a cold, pessimistic, and unsocial person, just as Marco said in the film: "Lehman can never be such a person!"

After the war, Marco had been suffering from nightmares. In the nightmares, a group of high-ranking officials from the Soviet Union and China watched Lehman being hypnotized, and Lehman killed two of his subordinates according to the instructions. Because of this nightmare, Marco doubted his memory and tried to solve the mystery. He asked the military for help, but because of lack of evidence, the military could not help him. It was not until Marco discovered that another member of the army was also having the same nightmare, that the military began to assist Marco in investigating the case.

The Communist Party uses Lehman as a "sleeping spy". They use the square Q in the playing cards as a secret code. When Lehman sees the square Q, he will be triggered to enter a hypnotic state, and he will obey other people's orders until he recovers. After that, it will be forgotten. A Manchurian doctor who appeared in Marco Dream said: "Lehman's brain is not washed with water, but dry-cleaned." To test the effectiveness, Manchurian doctors and Soviet officials have separately instructed Lehman to kill him. Of employees and a newspaper dealer.

Lehman's stepfather was a congressman named John Yerkes Iselin (based on the famous U.S. anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy). He was an extreme anti-communist, but everyone only regarded him as a joke. Lehman's mother (played by Angela Lansbury) stood by her husband and supported him behind Lehman's stepfather John. Because of Lehman's mother's domineering personality, Lehman hated his mother and his stepfather. In a section of the film, John rioted in Congress and accused 207 people in the Ministry of National Defense of being Communist spies. This action angered the Minister of National Defense and caused chaos on the scene.

But in fact, even Lehman didn't know that John was a Communist spy, and he planned to get into the White House. John's wife, Lehman's mother, was actually one of the members who manipulated Lehman to help John enter the White House.

Lehman had a good relationship with a girl named Jocelyn Jordan (Jocelyn Jordan). Jaslin was the daughter of Thomas Jordan. Thomas Jordan was also a parliamentarian and one of Iselyn’s opponents. . Although Lehman and Jaslin later married, Thomas still insisted on preventing John from running for the vice president of the United States. Lehman's mother instructed Lehman to assassinate Thomas in order to let her husband into the White House. After Lehman shot Thomas, Jaslin witnessed everything accidentally, so Lehman also killed his wife to kill her.

Lehman's mother then instigated Lehman to assassinate the presidential candidate during the party's nomination conference. In this way, John could take the opportunity to agitate the masses and become the presidential candidate logically. If John is elected president, the Communist Party will be able to control the US government, and the election campaign planned in Manchuria will be successful.

In a touching scene in the film, Lehman’s mother admitted to her son that she had been a Communist spy for several years and that she needed a killer to help her rule the United States, but she did not expect the killer to be her own son. The Soviets and Chinese would choose Lehman to better grasp Lehman's mother, and Lehman's mother secretly planned to avenge her son after the election.

However, Marco broke their plan, and Marco found a way to cancel Lehman's trigger event. Although it seemed that Marco had failed at first, Lehman still hid in the nomination convention with a sniper rifle, but he finally killed his mother and John, and committed suicide wearing the Medal of Honor. Now he got the Medal of Honor. Deserved.

Janet Leigh plays Marco’s lover Eugenie Rose Chaney. The strange conversation between the two of them on the train makes some people wonder if Eugenie is also a Communist spy, and whether she also used code words to trigger a switch in Marco’s brain. In the commentary on the DVD, the director stated that he himself did not know if Eugenie was a spy. The dialogue on the train is directly quoted from Richard Condon's novel, so there should be no meaning behind it.