Richard Condon - Career in Films

Career in Films

For many years a Hollywood publicity man for Walt Disney and other studios, Condon took up writing relatively late in life and his first novel, The Oldest Confession, was not published until he was 43. The demands of his career with United Artists—promoting dreadful movies such as The Pride and the Passion and A King and Four Queens—led to a series of bleeding ulcers and a determination to do something else.

His next book, The Manchurian Candidate, which combined all the elements that defined his works for the next 30 years—nefarious conspiracies, satire, black humor, outrage at political and financial corruption in the American scene, breath-taking elements from thrillers and spy fiction, horrific and grotesque violence, and an obsession with the minutiae of food, drink, and fast living—quickly made him, for a few years at least, the center of a cult devoted to his works. As he quickly produced more and more books with the same central themes, however, his cult following fell away and his critical reputation diminished. But over the next three decades Condon continued to pull occasional surprises from his literary hat with books such as Mile High, Winter Kills, and the first of the Prizzi books, Prizzi's Honor, that returned him to favor, both with the critics and the book-buying public.

Of his numerous books that were turned into Hollywood movies, The Manchurian Candidate was filmed twice. The first version, in 1962, which starred Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, followed the book with great fidelity, and is now generally recognized as one of the greatest films of all time. Janet Maslin, writing in 1996 in The New York Times, said that it was "arguably the most chilling piece of cold war paranoia ever committed to film, yet by now it has developed a kind of innocence."