64 years ago today, on October 24, 1962, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate arrived in American theaters with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury in a political thriller whose fictional nightmare seemed alarmingly compatible with reality.

Two days earlier, President John F. Kennedy had addressed the nation about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and announced a naval “quarantine” that brought the United States and the Soviet Union perilously close to nuclear war. The crisis would continue until October 28. So the film’s release dropped during one of the most dangerous weeks in modern history.

The coincidence was remarkable, although there is no evidence that the filmmakers deliberately scheduled the release to exploit the crisis. Adapted from Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, with a screenplay by George Axelrod, the 126-minute film had been in production months earlier.…