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TCM Spotlight: Political Thrillers

by Sean Axmaker | November 01, 2025

Articles /Now Playing Newsletter

Wednesdays in November | 20 Movies

"A thriller is very simply a novel about people in danger," explained author Ken Follett in the TCM documentaryA Night at the Movies: The Suspenseful World of Thrillers. "And of course, danger to the principal is a terrific narrative pull. It's the simplest of narrative devices." Where the classic thriller is built around the rescue of a victim or the survival of the hero, the stakes of the political thriller are much, much higher: the course of a war, the fate of a country, the reckoning of a government or simply righting a terrible wrong. 

Over four nights in November, TCM explores the political thriller as it reflected its times through the 20th century, from the rise of fascism and World War II through the Cold War to threats from within.

Wednesday, November 5

The first night offers both real-life stories and fictions inspired by real events.The Day of the Jackal (1973) imagines the details behind the conspiracy to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle in 1963. The Jackal is the code name of the professional assassin hired by a cabal of French dissidents and played by Edward Fox as the least showy of big-screen assassins. Fred Zinnemann directs the adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth novel with the matter-of-fact directness of a police procedural, focused on every detail of the mission. 

Z (1969) opens with the statement, "Any similarity to real persons and events is not coincidental. It is intentional." Based loosely but unmistakably on the murder of Greek liberal politician Grigoris Lambrakis, the defiant political thriller by Costa-Gavras is a provocative exposé of the political coup staged by a right-wing military junta in Greece in 1967. An international hit (except in Greece, where it was inevitably banned) for both its political content and its commercial dynamism, it won two Oscars and a prize at Cannes.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was quite possibly the most politically volatile film of its day, an insidious conspiracy involving brainwashing, assassination and a firebrand politician spewing McCarthy-like rhetoric. George Axelrod's adaptation of Richard Condon's novel was challenging, with flashbacks, dream sequences and dramatic shifts in perspective, and director John Frankenheimer embraced the opportunity to give it a cinematic complexity to match the narrative. Despite positive reviews and a pair of Oscar nominations, the film was a financial disappointment and pulled from theaters soon after its run. It was virtually unseen until a successful rerelease in 1998, over 25 years after its debut. It is now embraced as one of the great political thrillers, a film years ahead of its time.

One of the reasons cited forThe Manchurian Candidate's withdrawal is the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. While any resemblance between the two is purely coincidental, the evening's program ends with two films that are very intentional in their echoes of real events. Brian De Palma'sBlow Out (1981) draws its story of a political scandal turned tragedy from such real-life crimes and incidents as Chappaquiddick, Watergate and the Kennedy assassination, spinning a fictional thriller in which a sound technician (John Travolta) uncovers a deadly conspiracy. "What I wanted to do in the film is to show how haphazard—as opposed to precisely worked out—a conspiracy is," De Palma explained years later.

Almost two decades before Oliver Stone'sJFK (1991),Executive Action (1973) took on perhaps the most persistent conspiracy theory in American politics: the proposition that the Kennedy assassination was the work of a high-level conspiracy. The story was developed by Mark Lane, whose 1966 book "Rush to Judgment" questioned the conclusions of the Warren report, and the film weaves real events and newsreel footage through its dramatic proposition. It's the first Kennedy conspiracy movie, though it hedges itself with a written prologue: "Did the conspiracy we describe actually exist? We do not know. We merely suggest that it could have existed."

Wednesday, November 12

You could call Alfred Hitchcock the godfather of the political thriller, though he emphasized the thriller over the political in his films, as inNorth by Northwest(1959), arguably his breeziest, sexiest, most purely entertaining picture. Ostensibly a Cold War battle over national secrets, that's merely a pretext for a classic "wrong man" thriller with Cary Grant caught in some of the greatest set pieces Hitchcock ever devised.

The Ipcress File (1965), based on the novel by Len Deighton, was one of the many counterpoints to the James Bond spy fantasies. Curiously, this decidedly unglamorous portrait of British Intelligence was brought to the screen by Harry Saltzman, one of the James Bond producers. It made a star of Michael Caine, who plays the working-class operative Harry Palmer as an insubordinate, street-smart hustler behind a pair of glasses, and it replaced the gadgets and spectacle of the Bond spy fantasies with stylized camera angles and striking, dramatic compositions from director Sidney J. Furie that energize the film.

Gorky Park (1983) adds a twist to the Cold War thriller by giving us a Russian hero, a Moscow police detective (played by William Hurt), whose murder investigation sends him on the trail of government corruption. It was the first contemporary American movie to portray life in the Soviet Union, even if Moscow was recreated in Finland after Soviet officials denied requests to shoot on location.

Fail-Safe (1964) imagines the unimaginable: the accidental launch of nuclear weapons upon the Soviet Union. President Henry Fonda’s quandary is how to prevent a nuclear war that could destroy America, if not the world. Sidney Lumet's nightmarish Cold War classic was, ironically, produced at the same time as Stanley Kubrick’sDr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which transformed the same situation into a black comedy.

The 39 Steps (1935), Hitchcock’s first great romantic thriller, tosses out the pre-World War I spy story of John Buchan's novel for what became a veritable blueprint for subsequent Hitchcock films. It could be the blueprint forNorth by Northwest: an innocent civilian caught up in international intrigue, a romance blossoming on the run, ingenious set pieces and inventive use of locations.

Wednesday, November 19

Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party were responsible for unimaginable crimes against humanity, yet Hollywood initially resisted anti-Nazi films, at least directly, until America was plunged into World War II. Curiously, as Cold War tensions eased in the 1970s, the Nazis made a cinematic comeback in movies likeThe Odessa File (1974) andMarathon Man (1976).

The Odessa File, starring Jon Voight as a reporter who infiltrates a secret organization that protects members of Germany's brutal SS, is a fiction inspired by fact. And it draws from real historical figures, notably Nazi war criminal Eduard Roschmann (played by Maximilian Schell) and Simon Wiesenthal (Shmuel Rodensky), the Holocaust survivor who spent his life hunting escaped Nazi officers.

Marathon Man also draws on the legacy of Nazi war criminals hiding in South America. Dustin Hoffman is the innocent man targeted by a former concentration camp commandant (Laurence Olivier), who comes out of hiding to retrieve his stolen fortune in New York. It's a classic wrong man set-up reimagined for the cynical 1970s and became legendary for one of the most insidiously unnerving torture scenes in American cinema. IfJaws (1975) made audiences wary of the water,Marathon Man made visiting the dentist just a little more terrifying.

Fritz Lang'sMan Hunt (1941) was a rare anti-Nazi thriller produced before America entered World War II. Walter Pidgeon stars as an apolitical big game hunter whose ordeal at the hands of the Gestapo (embodied with cultured cruelty by George Sanders) gives him a new purpose. While Joseph Breen of the Production Code Administration objected that "the Nazis are characterized as brutal and inhuman people," Lang (who fled Nazi Germany in 1933) managed to keep that portrait intact.

The lead-up to D-Day, the final assault on Nazi-occupied Europe, is the focus of the two espionage thrillers that conclude this evening's line-up.36 Hours (1964) turns on an elaborate mind game to pry the plans from a captured Allied intelligence officer (James Garner). Based on a Roald Dahl short story, it's an insidious piece of psychological warfare, and Garner relished the opportunity to play the desperate hero who risks his life to protect the invasion plans.

One of the most fascinating World War II operations was the elaborate web of phony intelligence, fake radio transmissions, and bogus forces designed to pull German forces away from the real target. The mission, declassified after more than three decades, inspired novelist Ken Follett to write "the best story idea I had ever had," which was quickly developed into a movie. Donald Sutherland plays the spy inEye of the Needle (1981), a deadly, coldly efficient operative who uncovers the deception but gets stranded on an isolated British island while trying to return to Germany. It was on the strength of this film that George Lucas hired director Richard Marquand to directReturn of the Jedi (1983).

Wednesday, November 26

Where the Cold War defined so many thrillers of the 1960s, 1970s thrillers reflected a growing disillusionment and distrust of American institutions: corporations, the police, American spy agencies and even the government itself. The China Syndrome (1979) takes on fears of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant with a story of a corporate cover-up of an accident that could prove catastrophic. The nuclear industry protested, claiming the film was alarmist and misleading, but less than two weeks after the film opened, a potentially deadly accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant made the film alarmingly timely and prescient.

In a festival of fictional thrillers,All the President's Men (1976) stands out as both a real-life political conspiracy and a realistic portrayal of the journalistic investigation. Robert Redford reached out to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they reported on the Watergate break-in and optioned their book through his own production company. He hired screenwriter William Goldman and director Alan J. Pakula, cast Dustin Hoffman opposite him in the role of Bernstein and even worked uncredited on a script rewrite with Pakula. The two actors spent several weeks with the reporters to prepare for their roles, and Pakula created a riveting drama from the dogged job of reportage by two junior reporters who prove themselves by breaking a story that could blow up in their faces.

No Way Out(1987) takes the clever plot of the 1946 novel "The Big Clock," which involves a romantic triangle, a murder, a cover-up and a man racing to clear himself from being framed, from the publishing world to the culture of military intelligence in contemporary Washington, D.C. The entire political angle was added by screenwriter Robert Garland, including a third-act revelation that gives it a Cold War twist.

Winter Kills (1979), based on the novel by "The Manchurian Candidate" author Richard Condon, spins its own conspiracy theory of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy through a thinly-veiled fiction. Director William Richert landed a powerful cast—including Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Toshiro Mifune and an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor—but struggled to complete the film as money ran out. In a twist right out of a movie thriller, one of the original producers was dead and the other in prison by the time the film hit theaters, which was pulled from release after a couple of weeks. Author Condon was convinced that the Kennedy dynasty pressured the distributor to suppress the film.

The conspiracy at the center ofRollover (1981) is as much financial as political. Jane Fonda had a major hand in the film, developing the original story centered on the modern global economy and the power of the foreign oil industry over the American dollar, and she reunited with filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, who directed her to an Oscar inKlute (1971). Though a financial and critical flop, its reputation has improved over the years.

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