CBS Thursday Night Movie was the network's first venture into the weekly televising of then-recent theatrical films, debuting at the start of the 1965–1966 season, from 9:00 to 11 p.m.. CBS was the last of the three U.S. major television networks to schedule a regular prime-time array of movies. Unlike its two competitors, CBS had delayed running feature films at the behest of the network's hierarchy. Indeed, as far back as 1960, when Paramount Pictures offered a huge backlog of pre-1948 titles for sale to television for $50 million, James T. Aubrey, program director at CBS, negotiated with the studio to buy the package for the network. Aubrey summed up his thinking this way: "I decided that the feature film was the thing for TV. A $250,000 specially-tailored television show just could not compete with a film that cost three or four million dollars." However, the network's chairman, William Paley, who considered the scheduling of old movies "uncreative", vetoed the Paramount transaction.

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.