Manchurian
I've been wanting to see The Manchurian Candidate for years; I knew the basic premise, and had read numerous stories in various forms that used a similar basic premise (one of my favorites is Spinrad's "The Ersatz Ego," which I first read before I knew what "ersatz" meant, so I was rather confused by the story at first), but I'd never seen the original. (I still haven't read the original Richard Condon novel that the film was apparently based on.) It's been showing at the Stanford Theatre, and I figured that even though this is a very busy week for me at work, and even though I've got editing to do, and even though I've suddenly become very busy in another way (see next entry), I was going to see this movie dammit before it left the theatre, and tonight was the last night to do so. So I went.
The writing was an odd mix of lovely offbeat humor, sharp political sniping, melodrama, and incredibly tedious exposition. The scene in which Janet Leigh meets Frank Sinatra on a train sparkles; Sinatra reminds me of Bogey in that scene, and Leigh of perhaps Hepburn (I'm not sure whether I mean Katharine or Audrey). The politics are perhaps a little too pointed, but surprisingly relevant today—when a character mentioned having donated money to the ACLU, most of the audience applauded. Some bits are totally goofy—the Russian and Chinese villains are practically self-parodies, and the fight scene is almost painfully badly done. (I heard someone in the audience remark that it reminded them of a Peter Sellers movie.) The acting, among the actors playing Americans, is quite good—I liked Sinatra, Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, James Gregory (looking a little like George C. Scott) as Iselin, Douglas Henderson as Col. Milt (Marco's superior), and John McGiver lovely in a smallish part as Senator Tom Jordan. This movie was made in '62, which I somehow thought was after the end of the phenomenon of character actors, but there are a couple of 'em doing nice little turns in this.
The exposition was awful, and the voice-overs were almost as bad. Luckily, both stop by about halfway through the movie.
One thing that surprised me, given that it's a thriller, is that a lot of it was quite predictable. But, y'know, the movie is forty years old; it's quite possible that I've heard spoilers for it over the years and that's why it was fairly obvious where it was going most of the time.
I was surprised to see in the IMDB that Jonathan (Silence of the Lambs) Demme is doing a remake of this, to be released next year—apparently featuring soldiers from the Gulf War instead of the Korean War. The parallels certainly make sense, what with Muslim Terrorists substituting in our national nightmares for Red Chinese these days, but the stereotype is wrong—I don't think the Arab stereotype includes immense subtlety. But maybe I'd better drop that line of thought before it goes much further. Anyway, the casting could make it all worthwhile, or could destroy it, I'm not sure which: Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw (having seen him in Sum of All Fears, I can totally see him doing an excellent job with this role), Meryl Streep as his mother (the Angela Lansbury part), and Denzel Washington as Bennett Marco (the Sinatra role). Fascinating.
