Weirdness in Washington

They don’t make ’em like The Manchurian Candidate of 1962 any more. That weird, creepy, paranoid thriller of the Cold War flopped at first, was given retrospective topicality by the assassination of President Kennedy, and became a cult. Though it is, like Citizen Kane, a brilliant film rather than a profound or serious one, those virtues, too, have been ascribed to it. It dealt with an important topic — the ruthless manipulation of power in America then — but it did not deal with it in a convincing way.

For years Tina Sinatra (her father Frank had the rights) has been trying to launch an updated remake and she was lucky; she failed. Now she has succeeded just when war and elections, though not yet assassinations, are back in the news.

We start with American troops in Kuwait in 1991 playing a jolly game of poker (‘Are you going to play your cards or hatch them?’).