The Movie: Before watching this movie, I really had no idea what The Manchurian Candidate was about, but it has been a Jeopardy! question on countless occassions, so I figured it would probably be worth watching.

I found this movie to be highly engaging and full of suspense with some really neat dream/nightmare sequences. Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury, it's basically about a guy who while he was off fighting in the Korean war has becomed brainwashed into being a killing machine that could be set off at any time with just one phone call. Some of the guys from his unit (including Frank Sinatra) are beginning to suspect that something went awry while they were fighting in the war and are now trying to stop whatever evil plot that may be brewing.

Although I must admit that the movie started slowing down about 3/4ths of the way through it, overall I was completely drawn in by the suspense, and enjoyed this movie quite thoroughly.

Of course it was kind of frustrating to see a bunch of white guys try to pretend to be Asian, especially since the accents were so poor that I couldn't tell the difference between who was supposed to be Chinese and who was supposed to be Russian. I didn't even realize there was Russian involvement until at one point in the movie they actually said that a particular guy was Russian, I just figured he was supposed to be another Chinese guy with a bad accent. But hey, it was 1962, so what can we really expect, right? And anyway, it was still a great movie that I'd recommend to anyone.

The DVD: This is a dual sided disc with a letterboxed non-anamorphic widescreen transfer on one side, and a pan and scan version on the other. The video is in black and white and is as grainy as you'd expect a film of this age to be, but at the same time, the transfer was remarkably bright, clear, and free of dust and dirt.

The audio was in mono, but a decent transfer. In the extras department you'll find a theatrical trailer, some production notes, a commentary track by director John Frankenheimer, and an interview with John Frankenheimer, Frank Sinatra, and writer George Axelrod who reunited some 26 years later to talk about this movie.