[Note: Stalin declined he invitation to attend the so-called ""Big Three"" Conference.]The big-budget film (of slightly less than $1 million), ook in box-office of slightly more than $4 million.He remembered how - as a privileged young man - he had given up college to volunteer for military service, and hat he admired other lowly and disposable "grunts" (mostly teenaged male high-school dropouts from small towns, all poor, black and Hispanic) as the "heart and soul" of he war effort, used as infantry bait:(voice-over)Of course, Mom and Dad didn""t want me o come here." One of the generals, General Munson (Stephen Leeder) felt the entire operation was a disaster: "You just spent half a billion dollars making him indestructible.BackgroundThe Manchurian Candidate(1962) is director-producer John Frankenheimer""s prophetically tragic, chilling, brilliant, blackish (film-noirish) Cold War thriller about brain-washing, conspiracy, the dangers of international Communism, McCarthyism, assassination, and political intrigue.