'The Manchurian Candidate'

In John Frankenheimer's thriller, the horrors of the Korean War are transformed into deliriously over-the-top pop paranoia. Frank Sinatra (in one of his finest performances) discovers to his horror that, not only were he and his fellow troops brainwashed by communists, but that war buddy Laurence Harvey was turned into a sleeper assassin, to be triggered into action by his own double-agent mother (a terrifying Angela Lansbury). Silly? Maybe it seemed so, until a year after the film's release, when a former Marine with a Soviet interlude in his past named Lee Harvey Oswald showed off his skill with a rifle.