Neil Young's Film Lounge

The Manchurian Candidate

8/10

USA 1962 : John FRANKENHEIMER : 126 mins

• All comment on the 1962
  Manchurian Candidate must necessarily exist in the
  shadow of Greil Marcus's 2002 BFI monograph: prime
  (ahem) candidate for title of best book ever
  written about a single film.

• Marcus's only real mis-step: to overrate the
  film itself.
• Bold for 1962, somewhat dated in 2004
  - though still much more topical than Jonathan Demme's
  "update" released during that year's US election
  campaign: though based on Joe McCarthy ("Head of 15 different patriotic
  organisations"), Senator Iselin (James Gregory) now an unmistakeably
  Dubya-ish front-man for sinister right-wing machinations; Teresa Heinz
  Kerry's family firm (eerily) provides Iselin with a handy mnemonic ("57
  Varieties") for the arbitrarily made-up number of Communists he
  identifies as supposedly holding government posts. Also: surname of
  Janet Leigh's character is 'Cheyney'.
• Prologue set
  in 1952… Korean War… (voiceover identifies prologue's setting as "A
  dreary spot in Manchuria"). Main action set some time afterwards -
  during an election year. Presumably 1956? No Democrats seen : this is
  purely internecine feud within Republican Party (hence preponderance of
  Lincoln references, visual and verbal – impressive deep-focus
  cinematography by Lionel Lindon).
• TITLE is a
  somewhat odd choice, in this film at least. The candidate
  is Iselin. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), brainwashed in
  the Chinese province of Manchuria, is never a candidate for anything -
  at least, not a candidate for public office.
• Opacity and off-the-wall bizarreness, however,
  seldom far from the surface: most famously in the train exchange
  between Frank Sinatra (nominal lead as implausibly erudite Bennet
  Marco) and Janet Leigh (Rosie Cheyney) – "Are you Arabic?"
  etc.
• Black-and-white proto-trippy off-kilter
  universe familiar from Kubrick of this period: Paths of
  Glory, Dr Strangelove, Lolita. But scenes in which everyone
  shouts over the top of each other recall Preston Sturges – specifically
  (given Shaw's status) Hail the Conquering Hero.
  "Those uniquely American feelings: guilt and fear". (Surely the English
  - among others – can lay claim to such an unforunate
  inheritance…)
• Sinister Orientals and Russkies
  abound – fiendish plot hatched by Soviets. Including (amusingly) the
  Hispanic actor Henry Silva as Chunjin, "an oriental
  gent".
• Lansbury's performance justly remains
  famous, but no less impact made Harvey: perpetual frozen sneer:
  colossally unpleasant "turn" as Shaw: hilariously icy performance, with
  no attempt at an American accent: "One day of Christmas is loathsome
  enough!"
• Prefigured a decade of assassinations:
  Frankenheimer connection: Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles: 5th
  June, 1968.

25th December, 2004
[seen on DVD, Sunderland, 9th
November]

The Manchurian Candidate

3/10

USA 2004 : Jonathan DEMME : 130 mins

What on earth has happened to Jonathan Demme? This dog's-breakfast version
of The Manchurian Candidate is his second duff remake in a row – if anything,
it's even less bearable than The Truth About Charlie as it wastes a better
cast (peerless Jeffrey Wright doesn't make that many films to begin with)
and represents an absolute howler of a missed opportunity.

The 1962 John
Frankenheimer version is still screamingly topical four decades on – this
one goes to enormous lengths to avoid topicality, presuming in the hope
of avoiding giving offence to what are now known as America's (emphatically
non-Communist) "red states".

Thus the emphatically Dubya-ish Senator Iselin is erased from the scene: the
'candidate' this time is none other than the 1962 version's assassin-figure,
Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber in the old Laurence Harvey role), a youthful individual
promoted unexpectedly onto a general election ticket in the vice-presidential
position, a la Dan Quayle. Shaw's mother remains on the scene – though the incest
subtext of the original now feels arbitrarily tacked on. And Instead of the
Machiavellian behind-the-scenes machinator Angela Lansbury, we get Meryl Streep
(gamely rising above the script's limitations much like Glenn Close in the recent
Stepford Wives redo) as a New York Senator who looks and sounds
unmistakeably like current New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

Ah yes, the internecine squabble this time is among Democrats, offering
to protect America with their "Secure Tomorrow" slogan in the wake
of what's passingly referred to as "Black Friday" (i.e. 9/11?) We
also hear tantalising but undeveloped background reports of a global "terror
war" being fought by "beleaguered US troop deployments worldwide"
– which involves dropping bombs on the African state of Guinea. Not all Democrats
are convinced by the Streep-Schreiber position: "We can't clean up the
world with dirty hands" notes Jon Voight, stepping into the voice-of-reason
shoes previously occupied by John McGiver.

The likes of Paul Verhoeven might have given the material a crazily energetic/prophetic
spin, but in these hands none of it makes a great deal of sense: leaving aside
the topical relevance or lack thereof, the film doesn't even work on its own
terms as a paranoid-conspiracy thriller in the mould of The Forgotten.
Demme and his scriptwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Gorgaris clumsily strip away
all the nifty little details that went a long way to making the Frankenheimer
film memorable: they contrive to dispense with the whole solitaire/Queen-of-Diamonds
triggering mechanism in favour of a very dull alternative (saying the brainwashed
person's full name?), and also somehow manage to royally screw up the key brainwashing
flash-backs.

Their alterations to the basic story – with dogged Ben Marco (Denzel Washington)
trying to work out the byzantine plot revolving around his former commanding-officer
Shaw is somehow implicated – are daft in the extreme, plodding pacelessly to
a confusing, incoherent finale that's conspicuously lacking any form of tension.
Instead of Frankenheimer's implausible but giddily entertaining satire, we have
an even more implausible but dourly pointless "thriller" – one which
may lead some to wonder whether Demme and his scriptwriters may themselves have
been under the remote control of nefarious, malevolent schemers.

25th December, 2004
[seen 10th November : Odeon Gate, Newcastle : press show]