10 Best Spy Films That AREN'T James Bond

10. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The legendary John Frankenheimer's 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, is definitive Cold War paranoia - an outrageous conspiracy thriller that took Red Scare anxieties to new extremes and prophetically foreshadowed a decade that would come to be defined by assassination, suspicion, and paranoia.

Based on the Richard Condon novel of the same name, The Manchurian Candidate took inspiration from real-life musings and theories regarding communist brainwashing attempts and sleeper agents following the conclusion of the Korean War, focusing on a communist plot to use a captured U.S. serviceman, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) to assassinate a presidential candidate and send the United States into political turmoil.

At times, The Manchurian Candidate feels like a proto-seventies conspiracy thriller, with Frankenheimer fusing noir influences with psychedelia to impart the kind of paranoid atmosphere Alan J. Pakula would perfect with his films Klute and the similarly assassination-minded The Parallax View, which were released in 1971 and 1974 respectively. (Frankenheimer would again return to the same subject matter with 1964's Seven Days in May, which dwelled heavily on the assassination of JFK.) It also features a fierce, against-type performance from Angela Lansbury, who plays Shaw's mother, Eleanor.

While not Frankenheimer's greatest film (nor his best spy movie), The Manchurian Candidate remains a touchstone of sixties cinema and exemplifies why he was one of the decade's most exciting newcomers.