Here is a quickie review that won’t get into as much detail
as some of my other reviews, because the movie at hand shouldn’t need much
discussion. The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) is pretty familiar—at least to the extent that some who seek to
discredit President Obama by outlandish means refer to him in a sort of
metaphorical way as a “Manchurian candidate.” It is also a good example of a
movie that need not have been remade.
It was on its release that I saw the 2004 remake, directed
by Jonathan Demme and featuring Denzel Washington as an updated version
(race-changed, among other things) of Raymond Shaw, and Meryl Streep in the
role made famous by Angela Lansbury, of Raymond’s mother, Eleanor Iselin (for
which Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress). Among
its changes, the 2004 movie made the “evil” force behind manipulating Raymond Shaw
to be a multinational corporation and not the Communists (a partnership of the
Soviet Union and China
More to the point, the original movie is fine as an
exquisite example of a political thriller that not only plays up the paranoid
aspects of Cold War–type international relations, but adds psychological
elements, such as to make a sort of Freudian nightmare out of Raymond’s
relationship with his mother. The story’s darkness, plus the way that various
situations end up being satirical in a way that usually still connects, and
even the skill of its production make it work well today, even if some minor
aspects of it might strike young viewers as dated.
Laurence Harvey, who plays the crucial role of Raymond Shaw,
fills the bill partly, I think, because of his being a sort of ethnic platypus,
while also a trained actor. His accent fits his character’s stuffy, inhibited
nature, but it is apparently South African; Harvey, who died relatively young,
was a Lithuanian Jew who spent part of his life in South Africa
Among the production pluses, note the editing and the
production (art) design, the busy furnishing of scenes that both makes the most
of black-and-white photography and often employs wit that complements the story.
For instance, consider the frequently used busts and portraits of Lincoln
The production designer was Richard Sylbert (1928-2002), who
has worked creditably—employing detail and texture to convey meaning and mood
in a scene as much as the acting and dialogue do—on films as varied as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Chinatown
(1974).
Frank Sinatra, of course, was instrumental to getting this
film, based on a novel by Richard Condon, made, and he stars in the film,
apparently utilizing (as he had little other choice than to do) his usual
persona of the somewhat-jaded-yet-hip man’s man, melded to a sort of exhausted,
haunted quality germane to Major Marco’s character in this story. I’ve heard
more than once (in DVD commentaries) that Sinatra preferred doing only one or two
takes for scenes, and something of an unstudied spontaneity shows in some of
his scenes here. Also, in this film he often gives me the impression of looking
as if he smells like freshly produced sawdust. But I think his performance
works well here; even if he isn’t a highly
skilled actor, his rather artless, somewhat brazen quality here serves a story
that is mainly about men trying to decipher what a mysterious experience in a
war has later made them into, and taking heroic steps to thwart whatever mayhem
this “programming” tries to put in play before it’s too late.
