The Golden Age of the Paranoid Political Thriller

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Impeachment. Charges of sedition. A president with a very low approval rating. Treasonous members of Congress. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff leading a movement to oust the president in a coup.

All of those stressful plot points are from director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller “Seven Days in May,” and ably demonstrate why political thrillers are not only well, thrilling, but also sometimes predictive and all too believable.

That film is one of the best films and greatest paranoid political thrillers in movie history. Each of the films I’ll cite here are not only entertaining bangers but also reflective of – or prescient of – the political turmoil of the time.

Witness what is probably the best-known of those thrillers, “The Manchurian Candidate,” released a full year before the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and eerie in its story of a plot to kill the Democratic Party front-runner for the presidency and replace him with a flag-waving, pro-America populist who is secretly an agent for a foreign power.

These paranoid political thrillers have made a couple of generations of Americans wonder about what high-level machinations are happening while we are, figuratively, sleeping.

Dupes, traitors and heroes

Political thrillers have been a part of movies since movies began. One of the best mid-century examples is “Saboteur,” released in 1942 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Robert Cummings plays an aircraft factory worker who chases a saboteur across country, along the way uncovering a plot by neo-Nazis to unleash domestic terrorism in the United States. 

The film is chilling in its depiction of a high-society band of Nazis in their efforts to reach out from their New York mansions and undo America’s efforts in World War II. There’s also a sequence that seems like it was spliced in from another movie when the good guys take refuge with a circus sideshow troupe.

There were plenty of spy thrillers that distinguished themselves in the 1940s and 1950s, but it is the 1960s that remain the golden age of political thrillers and it’s possible to argue that one director, John Frankenheimer, released a one-two punch that’s never been topped in the genre: “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962 and “Seven Days in May” in 1964.

“The Manchurian Candidate” is justly famous for the sweaty and twisting plot following soldiers who come home from the Korean War quite damaged. Frank Sinatra plays Ben Marko, who’s still working for the military, now on Capitol Hill. Laurance Harvey plays Raymond Shaw, regarded as a hero for saving Marko and their fellow soldiers. Shaw’s mother, played in chilling fashion by Angela Lansbury, and his stepfather, played by James Gregory, want him to support their political aspirations. And supporting them means committing murder.

The movie plays with our minds and the minds of the returning soldiers, who are having nightmares about their time in captivity in Korea. In bizarre dream sequences that appear to play out at a meeting of a garden club, we see that Marko and Shaw were brainwashed by Russian and Chinese officials, led by Khigh Dhieg as a specialist in putting their brains in a blender and setting sleeper agents loose on the United States. (Dhieg was familiar to a generation as Wo Fat, the Professor Moriarty figure on “Hawaii Five-O.”)

The story plays out during a presidential campaign and a “witch hunt” for Communists in the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are themselves dupes. No dupe, however, is Lansbury as Eleanor Iselin, Shaw’s mother and duplicitous wife of Gregory’s senator “Big John” Iselin. Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar and she deserved to win for her low-key, chilling performance.

Just two years later, in 1964, director Frankenheimer released “Seven Days in May,” which might be my favorite political thriller of all time. Adapted from a novel, “Seven Days” is a thriller about an attempted coup against American President Jordan Lyman (Frederic March), who is widely criticized as being soft on the Soviet Union. 

One of his chief critics, who seems to be positioning to run for president himself, is General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But Scott isn’t waiting for the next election cycle: He’s conspiring with other high-ranking military officers and members of Congress to oust Lyman under the cover of military exercises, troop movements and a test of a national emergency broadcast.

Standing in the way of the coup is Marine Col. Jiggs Casey, played by Kirk Douglas, who begins to suspect his boss, Scott, is up to something dire. He approaches the president and his skeptical advisors, including Martin Balsam as the White House chief of staff, and Edmund O’Brien as a boozy senator (a role that would earn him an Oscar nomination). The president dispatches his small circle to get evidence of the attempted coup, which puts O’Brien’s senator character in harm’s way as he barges onto a secret base. Meanwhile, Balsam’s character confronts a vice admiral played in a surprising small role by John Houseman, then better known as a producer.

The films were shot in black-and-white, which stamps a date on Frankenheimer’s work but also gives them the aura of a documentary. More than 60 years ago, the writers, casts and director combined to create entertainment that might have seemed far-fetched at the time but seems like a Bizarro world version of events since that era. 

Downbeat endings, glamorous stars

The 1970s were a great time for the political thriller, largely because our federal government seemed ripe for abusing norms, and political assassinations had left the American public shocked and demoralized.

Of course, the Alan J. Pakula adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s book “All the President’s Men,” released in 1976, is in many ways the political thriller to end all political thrillers. I consider the movie not only one of the great films of the decade but also one of the great journalism films of all time. And it’s got more than its share of paranoia, for sure. 

But the most gripping political thrillers of the decade were “The Parallax View,” released in 1974, and “Three Days of the Condor,” released in 1975. 

My friends and I used to tune in every time “The Parallax View” was on cable to watch a trippy sequence of fast-paced images used to brainwash characters. (The 1970s was also a big time for movies with sinister/soothing montages, including “Parallax” and “A Clockwork Orange” and “Soylent Green.”)

But we also enjoyed how “Parallax” made its mark among films of the time with decidedly downbeat endings. 

The always lovable Paula Prentiss plays a Seattle TV journalist who sees the assassination of Sen. Charles Carroll, a leading presidential contender. Prentiss’ character goes to Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) and tells him that several people who were present for the assassination have died in the three years since. It is a classic thriller set-up, as Frady investigates the Parallax Corporation and its designs on the presidential election. 

Tense scenes follow as Frady begins to investigate and his editor, played by Hume Cronyn, begins to worry that his reporter is losing his mind. Frady has narrow brushes with death as he gets closer and closer to Parallax.

The supporting cast, including William Daniels and Kenneth Mars, is excellent, and director Alan J. Pakula – who also directed “All the President’s Men” and “Klute” – punctuates the believable story with hair-raising threats.

For a smoother, more easy-going – as bizarre as that might sound – version of the paranoid political thriller, “Three Days of the Condor” features Robert Redford as lowly CIA officer Joe Turner, an analyst who looks for coded messages in books. In a non-descript office in New York City, Turner’s job is incredibly mundane until one day, when he goes to pick up lunch and returns to find his coworkers have been killed.

Turner starts the process of “coming in” to get the protection of his superiors, namely Cliff Robertson, and avoid an assassin played by Max Von Sydow. Turner quickly learns he has no allies, however, except for a woman (Faye Dunaway) who he initially takes hostage to find a refuge.

Director Sydney Pollack brings the right tone of menace and uncertainty to the film, but Redford – at the height of his powers and acclaim – is too attractive to really worry about: No one this gorgeous, with his shaggy blond hair and peacoat, could ever be in real danger. Add to all that one of the most unexpected climaxes in movies, as Redford and Von Sydow talk over the spy business, and “Three Days of the Condor” will leave you experiencing all the chill and happy feelings that “The Parallax View” did not.

An afterthought: the ‘80s

Political thrillers might have peaked in the 1960s and 1970s but a few others followed, like “Missing” in 1982, with Jack Lemmon as an American businessman looking for his son in Chile, all the more chilling because it told a true story. There’s “Cutter’s Way,” starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichorn as friends caught up in a small-town tale of power and the importance of remembering who your friends are. “Cutter’s Way” has stuck with me since I saw it in a theater in 1981. “The Jigsaw Man” featured Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier in a cross-Atlantic thriller. And of course there’s the “Bourne” series in the past couple of decades.

Two more of note: “The Osterman Weekend” was dogged by a lot of reviewers when it opened in 1983 – not including me: I found it “for the most part, quite fascinating.” It was director Sam Peckinpah’s last real feature film, from the Robert Ludlum novel, and starred Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, Craig T. Nelson, Chris Sarandon, John Hurt and Meg Foster, the woman with the most hypnotizing eyes in cinema.

And “The Formula,” a 1980 thriller directed by John G. Avildsen (“Rocky” and “The Karate Kid”), featuring a dream cast topped by George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, in a modern-day struggle to bring forth – or suppress – a World War II-era synthetic fuel that would replace oil.

It seems like a strange time, an election year that finds the country as deeply divided as it’s been in a hundred years, to recommend political thrillers, but those films might be the only chance we’ll get to indulge in the safe aspects of fractious and dangerous political times.

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