Retro Reel by Sreepathy, Vol. 9

Retro Reel is a column about movies, but not about the latest box-office releases. There will be aspects of review, but the column is intended more as a recommendation of good movies of different genres, with the sense of a retrospective – hence, the ‘Retro’ in the name. In a day and age when movies are projected digitally, the word “reel” may seem retrograde and outdated. Yet, no other word captures the imagery of a movie as “Reel”…Sreepathy is an unabashed movie buff who loves a well-told onscreen story. He has a list of about 450 must-watch movies, and Retro Reel is an attempt to share with friends of a similar bent of mind, some of the best movie-watching experiences he has had. He lives in Naperville with his wife and two sons.

The Manchurian Candidate

It’s a battle for the cranial cavity.

Gurus and godmen. Cults and communes. Pollsters and politicians. Ideologues and institutions. Marketers and media men. Consultants and corporations. There are many out there, nibbling at some niche in your brain that will get you to think and act to their advantage. What they do may or may not qualify to be called ‘brainwashing’ – but make no mistake, it’s all about power and influence over you…

The Manchurian Candidate (1962 & 2004) reaches into the innermost recesses of the human psyche, ratchets influence-peddling up several notches to the level of brainwashing, and creates a superb and tense “psycho-political thriller”.

Richard Condon

Based on a novel by Richard Condon, the original 1962 version is a B&W classic of its genre and is considered one of the brightest American movies of the last five decades. The 2004 remake slickly updates the original to make it more topical, contemporary, and tech-savvy for the 21st century. Pick either version for a Friday evening and you are guaranteed two hours of engrossing entertainment.

Both movie versions have the same names for the main characters and essentially follow the same storyline, but differ on a few crucial plot details to reflect the times in which they were made. The central idea of the plot is to project a soldier as a hero, brainwash him, and convert him into an unquestioning assassin to install a puppet in the White House. In the original movie of 1962, when the Cold War was at its freezing worst, communism was the egregious enemy. In a chillingly brilliant opening sequence, a motley group of Chinese and Russian generals watch a demonstration by a communist hypnotist, who shows off the results of his brainwashing experiment conducted on a group of captured American soldiers transported to Manchuria during the Korean War. From the captured group, Sergeant Raymond Shaw is chosen to be sent back to the US after being converted into a cold and compliant assassin to control the White House through a communist conspiracy. Telling you anything more about the story’s plot would completely spoil it for you. So, I won’t. With communism becoming irrelevant, the 2004 remake replaces it with the big bad ‘corporation’ as the enemy for the new millennium. Made in the year after the second Gulf War was launched, this one has ‘Manchurian Global’, a mega-corporation with far-reaching tentacles, as the aggressor. Not satisfied with its huge existing political influence, the company wants to plant a made-to-order President in the White House by using the brainwashed Sergeant Raymond Shaw. In this, the story’s action begins in the first Gulf War of the early 1990s, where a group of American soldiers is captured. The new movie cannot boast of an opening scene as brilliant as the old one, but makes up for it in other ways. The brainwashing technique used here has much more tech appeal than the 1962 version. The newer color version is also better in the action sequences. Lastly, the 2004 movie scores most with its contemporary politics being all too palpably familiar and easy to relate with.

As if communism and corporate clout aren’t bad enough, there’s another villain in the piece that gives you the most shudders and shocks – a mother. It’s Eleanor Shaw, Raymond’s mother, whose cold calculus includes the capture of the White House. Playing foil to the protagonist (Raymond Shaw) is the character of Major Ben Marco, who was part of the brainwashed group but is not part of the action initially – rather, he gets involved in a curiously oblique manner. Both are intrinsically good, upright men whose brains have been messed with – and in that cloud of confusion, they’ve lost the anchors to their own selves and are flailing helplessly. Playing contrasting roles, they come into conflict during the story and their only hope is in somehow finding common cause that transcends their damaged minds…

It’s tough to pick the better movie version of the story, for both are compelling in different ways. The older B&W one is gritty, stark, and surreal – like something that numbs you with a bizarre dreamlike quality about it. The new one is glitzy, layered, and seems real – like something that you know almost may have actually happened. Both are essentially political; but where the 1962 version plays out like a distant doomsday scenario, the makers of the newer one are clearly indulging in commentary on contemporary politics. You’ll see distinct shades of not only the familiar fear-mongering that preceded the 2003 Iraq War, but also the nefarious political influence at the highest levels peddled by a certain corporation before, during, and after the war.

Both movies are pivoted by a classy cast of actors. While the older version has Laurence Harvey playing Raymond Shaw, Frank Sinatra playing Ben Marco, and Angela Lansbury playing the mother, the new version has Liev Schreiber, Denzel Washington, and Meryl Streep in the same principal roles. In the original, Harvey plays the Shaw character with scary precision, though it’s more unidimensional – cold and hardened. In the remake, however, it’s presented as a more nuanced and vulnerable character. Watching a vulnerable human being is far more absorbing, and Liev Schreiber does full justice to the role of a troubled man who knows something is wrong with him yet can’t help it. Frank Sinatra was terrific as Ben Marco in the original, and Denzel Washington, as always, brings his A-game to Sinatra’s character in the new one – playing once again a man who is trying to fix his life haunted by a past (a throwback to “Courage Under Fire”, Retro Reel-7). The sheer understated intensity of Denzel’s acting is compelling enough to watch this movie…

…And then, there’s Meryl Streep! Angela Lansbury, playing the mother in the original, clearly gave motherhood a bad name with her startling performance as a hard-boiled woman with mega ambitions, which for the 60s would have been quite a shocker. In the newer version, the writers have juiced up the mother by adding a sardonic sense of humor to her and by modeling her character a bit on a former First Lady. All of which, of course, is manna from heaven for the caliber of Meryl Streep, who simply breezes through the role with a touch of nonchalance that only she can command.

Remaking old classics is always a slippery-slope exercise and most attempts slip badly, but this one is an exception. Jonathan Demme (famous for The Silence of the Lambs) remade Charade, a classic Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn thriller comedy of the 60s. And failed. But his retelling of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate is almost as good, and in some ways better than the original. Except for the ending, which is a compromise, in my opinion, possibly forced by modern Hollywood focus groups that review a movie before its commercial release. The original had a fair, even if somber, conclusion. The remake has an equally taut and Hitchcockian climax, but stumbles in the post-climax scenes. It diminishes the movie, but is no reason not to see it. A great watch, it still is…

PS: Both movie versions are available in the Naperville Public Library.