From ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ to ‘The Day of the Jackal’: Why Hollywood Has an Appetite for Assassination Tales

The recent assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan follows two assassination attempts on president elect Donald Trump over the summer. 

In the July attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Penn., the would-be assassin, armed with an AK-47, was killed by a member of Trump’s security detail. The second attempt on Trump’s life, in Florida, produced another high-powered rifle and a living suspect with a record of strange political and commercial activities, including a stint as a volunteer fighter in the current Ukraine-Russian conflict. 

The primary suspect in the Thompson assassination is a young man of great privilege, a tech whiz with a promising future now ended by allegedly brandishing a ghost gun outside a New York hotel and taking Thompson’s life. 

Exactly 50 years ago, Hollywood produced “The Parallax View,” a film that spoke to the anxieties of Americans who had just lived through an entire decade of assassinations of several of America’s most important liberal leaders, including President John Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, who was running for the presidency, and Black rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. From 1963 to 1968, all were gunned down by “lone assassins.” 

On the other side of the political spectrum, presidential candidate Governor George Wallace survived his shooting but lived with crippling wounds that took him out of the 1972 race. 

Another day, another “lone assassin.” 

The Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Giler screenplay from Loren Singer’s thriller novel scored a WGA award nomination, and the film’s cinematography by Oscar-winner Gordon Willis won a National Society of Film Critics best cinematography prize. 

Back then, Americans were confused and/or skeptical of the official versions of events. 

 The Warren Report, supposedly putting the questions around JFK’s murder to rest, only served to create the mother of all conspiracy theories, as well as inspire the Singer novel and a great Oscar-winning film, Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” By 1997, the whole dark subject was mined for laughs in Richard Donner’s comic thriller “Conspiracy Theory.” 

Like the classic John Frankenheimer thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” before it, which scored a Golden Globe for Angela Lansbury and two Oscar noms, “Parallax View” is fueled by American suspicions that our government and our news media might not be telling us everything they know. “View” depicted a contemporary America where a school for assassins was operating with impunity, nefariously recruiting and brainwashing vulnerable young men who were trained to do their deadly, secret bidding. 

Cut to 2024 and you hear the same question you heard then. Are there shadowy forces directing the hands of today’s political assassins?  

Last year, David Fincher made “The Killer” and, this year, assassin yarn “The Day of the Jackal” is a critically acclaimed hit TV series. 

We may not have the answers, but we have the movies and shows.  

Which, if you believe the conspiracy theories, might be the whole point.