`The Manchurian Candidate' runs strong in re-release.

Byline: Michael Wilmington

John Frankenheimer's great 1962 political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" _ now being celebrated with a deluxe 40th-anniversary re-release _ is one of those movies that just keeps growing in stature and impact over the years.

A relative commercial and critical failure on its first release, both commercially and critically, this amazingly prescient and wildly original picture _ from Richard Condon's novel about Cold War politics, brainwashing, assassination plots and Freudian psychology _ became first a cult film embraced by such taste-makers as Pauline Kael and, eventually,, especially since its 1988 re-release, an accepted classic. (67th on the American Film Institute's Top 100 list.)

What changed in the years after its release were our perceptions of what a movie can be and of what America really was in 1962. That was, of course, the Kennedy era and "Candidate" was a Kennedy film _ with a director and a star (Frank Sinatra) who were intimate with the Kennedy family, a story that was congruent with Kennedy's anti-Communist liberalism and even an imprimatur from JFK himself, who expressed such enthusiasm for the project to Sinatra that the money-men were swayed.

But beyond those…