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A political thriller is a thriller that is set against the backdrop of a political power struggle, high stakes and suspense is the core of the story. The genre often forces the audiences to consider and understand the importance of politics. The stakes in these stories are immense, and the fate of a country is often in the hands of one individual. Political corruption, organized crime, terrorism, and warfare are common themes. [1]
Political thrillers can be based on facts such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the Watergate Scandal. There is a strong overlap with the conspiracy thriller.
Some early examples, can be found in the historical novels of Alexandre Dumas (particularly his Three Musketeers novels, which often involve political conspiracies), as well as such literary works as Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent .
Gilles (1936) contains an early example of the political thriller: in one of the book's subplots the protagonist Gilles Gambier finds himself embroiled in an left-wing assassination plot against the Prime Minister. The plot falls apart due to the ineptness of the conspirators, and Gilles ends with the protaganist leaving to fight in the Spanish civil war. [2]
The actual political thriller came to life in the early days of the Cold War. Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) tells about the American involvement in Vietnam during the First Indochina War. Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is set in the aftermath of the Korean War and the days of McCarthyism. In Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal , an assault on Charles de Gaulle has to be prevented.
Other authors of political thrillers include Jeffrey Archer and Daniel Silva. In Bengali literature, Samaresh Majumdar's Aat Kuthuri Noy Dorja (বাংলা: আট কুঠুরি নয় দরজা, meaning: "Eight Rooms and Nine Doors") is one example. A political thriller that happens in the backdrop of Bihar and Indian politics is Fawaz Jaleel's 2021 Nobody Likes an Outsider. [3]
Several Alfred Hitchcock films already contain elements of the political thriller, such as The Man Who Knew Too Much , The 39 Steps , and Foreign Correspondent. In 1962, John Frankenheimer made a film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate .
The late 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of political thrillers that actively reflected the backdrop of the Vietnam and Watergate Scandal eras in US military and political history and presented a largely unvarnished view of the machinations and cynicism of modern-day political leadership, including assertions around the convergence of politicians and the secret services colluding to create a so-called deep state focused on neutralizing the will of the people and actively taking out dissension. Films such as All the President's Men (based on the Watergate Scandal), The Parallax View , whose opening scene actively draws on the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, The Conversation and Three Days of The Condor, took political and conspiracy thrillers to new heights of paranoia, narrative complexity and realism.
Other examples of political thrillers are Seven Days in May , Z , V for Vendetta , Romero , JFK , City Hall , Blow Out , Air Force One , Snowden and The Post . Several post-9/11 political thriller films refer to the September 11 attacks or terrorism in general.
The 1990 British drama serial House of Cards is a political thriller set after the end of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with a Chief Whip Francis Urquhart attempting to rise to Prime Minister. The subsequent Netflix adaptation starring Kevin Spacey is set in the United States and details Congressman Francis Underwood's machinations to become elected president.
Shonda Rhimes' television series Scandal contains many elements of a political thriller in a chronological format.
The former ABC and Netflix series Designated Survivor depicts the political power struggle that follows as a result of a terrorist attack that destroys the United States Capitol during the State of the Union, assassinating the President and all but one of his line of succession.
2015's Okkupert (English: Occupied) quickly became Norway's most expensively produced TV series, depicting Russia and the European Union cooperating to get Norway to restore its gas and oil production. The series had a budget of over 90 million Norwegian Krona (3.8 Million GBP). It was first broadcast on TV2 in Norway, and then broadcast on Sky Arts in the United Kingdom. It was later added to Netflix worldwide.
The 2017 ABS-CBN's Revenge Crime-Political Suspense Epic Wildflower tells of a woman named Ivy Aguas/Lily Cruz (Maja Salvador) plots her vengeance for the loss of her family and is willing to determine to dethrone the exploitative and oppressive Ardiente Political Dynasty.
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is an American action political thriller streaming television series, based on characters from the fictional "Ryanverse" created by Tom Clancy, that premiered on August 31, 2018, on Amazon Prime Video.
In 2018, British political thriller Bodyguard quickly achieved popularity throughout the UK, achieving the BBC's highest viewing figures since 2008. The series depicts PS David Budd, a British Army war veteran suffering from PTSD. He is working for the Metropolitan Police within their Royalty and Specialist Protection Branch. He is assigned to protect the ambitious Home Secretary, Julia Montague, whose politics stand for everything he despises. It was released on Netflix worldwide on 24 October 2018.
A playwright who has embraced the genre is Gary Mitchell, who in the 2000s became "one of the most talked about voices in European theatre ... whose political thrillers have arguably made him Northern Ireland's greatest playwright". [4]
John Michael Frankenheimer was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films. Among his credits were Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), The Train (1964), Seconds (1966), Grand Prix (1966), French Connection II (1975), Black Sunday (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), and Ronin (1998).
The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed and produced by John Frankenheimer. The screenplay is by George Axelrod, based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate. The film's leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, with co-stars Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, and James Gregory.
A techno-thriller or technothriller is a hybrid genre drawing from science fiction, thrillers, spy fiction, action, and war novels. They include a disproportionate amount of technical details on their subject matter ; only hard science fiction tends towards a comparable level of supporting detail on the technical side. The inner workings of technology and the mechanics of various disciplines are thoroughly explored, and the plot often turns on the particulars of that exploration. This genre began to exist and establish itself in the early 20th century with further developments and focus on the genre in the mid 20th century.
Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. This genre is well suited to film and television.
Seven Days in May is a 1964 American political thriller film about a military-political cabal's planned takeover of the United States government in reaction to the president's negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The film, starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, and Ava Gardner, was directed by John Frankenheimer from a screenplay written by Rod Serling and based on the novel of the same name by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, published in September 1962.
Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he was a central figure in U.S. regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration's so-called White House Plumbers, a team of operatives charged with identifying government leaks to outside parties.
Red Rabbit is a spy thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 5, 2002. The plot occurs a few months after the events of Patriot Games (1987), and incorporates the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Main character Jack Ryan, now an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, takes part in the extraction of a Soviet defector who knows of a KGB plot to kill the pontiff. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Richard Thomas Condon was an American political novelist. Though his works were satire, they were generally transformed into thrillers or semi-thrillers in other media, such as cinema. All 26 books were written in distinctive Condon style, which combined a fast pace, outrage, and frequent humor while focusing almost obsessively on monetary greed and political corruption. Condon himself once said: "Every book I've ever written has been about abuse of power. I feel very strongly about that. I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians wrong them." Condon's books were occasionally bestsellers, and a number of his books were made into films; he is primarily remembered for his 1959 The Manchurian Candidate and, many years later, a series of four novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi.
The Manchurian Candidate is a 2004 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed by Jonathan Demme. The film, based on Richard Condon's 1959 novel of the same name and a reworking of the previous 1962 film, stars Denzel Washington as Bennett Marco, a tenacious, virtuous soldier; Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw, a U.S. Representative from New York, manipulated into becoming a vice-presidential candidate; Jon Voight as U.S. Senator Tom Jordan, a challenger for vice president; and Meryl Streep as Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, also a U.S. Senator and Raymond's manipulative ruthless mother.
The conspiracy thriller is a subgenre of thriller fiction. The protagonists of conspiracy thrillers are often journalists or amateur investigators who find themselves pulling on a small thread which unravels a vast conspiracy that ultimately goes "all the way to the top." The complexities of historical fact are recast as a morality play in which bad people cause bad events, and good people identify and defeat them. Conspiracies are often played out as "man-in-peril" stories, or yield quest narratives similar to those found in whodunits and detective stories.
Since the mid-1970s, a variety of allegations have emerged regarding British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who served as the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. These range from Wilson having been a Soviet agent, to Wilson being the victim of treasonous plots by conservative-leaning elements in MI5 and the British military, claims which Wilson himself made.
The Manchurian Candidate is a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy. The novel has twice been adapted into a feature film with the same title: the first was released in 1962 and the second in 2004.
Thriller film, also known as suspense film or suspense thriller, is a broad film genre that evokes excitement and suspense in the audience. The suspense element found in most films' plots is particularly exploited by the filmmaker in this genre. Tension is created by delaying what the audience sees as inevitable, and is built through situations that are menacing or where escape seems impossible.
A romantic thriller is a narrative that combines elements of both the romance and thriller genres. The goal of romantic thrillers is to entertain audiences by evoking discomfort through moments of suspense, along with heightened feelings of anxiety and fear. While the concept of a thriller is more widely recognized, it often transcends the boundaries of a single genre. Thrillers can range from comedy and melodrama to adventure and romance, with all thrillers inherently blending different genres. The suspense that defines thrillers tends to pair more effectively with certain genres, such as crime, sci-fi, and romance, which allow for greater suspense than genres like screwball comedies or musicals.
Family of Secrets is a book by Russ Baker. Published by Bloomsbury Press in 2008, it describes alleged connections between the Bush family and the Central Intelligence Agency. The book asserts that President George H.W. Bush was linked to the Watergate scandal and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Family of Secrets was poorly received by critics.
Occupied is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 October 2017. The third and final season started airing in Scandinavia on 5 December 2019, and was released in many countries via Netflix on 31 December 2019.
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, has inspired or been portrayed in numerous cultural works.
Line of Sight is a techno-thriller novel, written by Mike Maden and released on June 12, 2018. It is his second book in the Jack Ryan Jr. series, which is part of the overall Tom Clancy universe. In the novel, Ryan has to avert a sinister plot by Serb extremists to provoke war between NATO and the Russians in the Balkans. It debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list.