Many people tend to compare movies as though film were a zero-sum game. Confronted with two movies having some point of reference in common, you can exalt one movie only by disparaging, even wishing for the obliteration of, the other. (Sounds rather like election-year politics.)
This is silly, unnecessary and unprofitable. Especially when you consider that comparatively few films emerge with lapidary perfection through the genius of a single, omnipotent creator. Much more often they're a messy, variously vital and exasperating Mulligan's stew of collaboration, technical evolution, economic/sociopolitical/demographic forces and the accidents of the historical moment(s) in which they were 1) conceived, 2) then made, 3) then seen. Best to remain open to what each has to offer and see what can be made of the dialogue between them. (Just like opposing political candidates.)
Last weekend, hard upon the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, a new version of "The Manchurian Candidate" opened in theaters across the land. It's a terrific movie, and there is no reason to insist, or even to decide, whether it's better than another terrific movie titled "The Manchurian Candidate" that came out 42 years ago. Happily, film culture and the film business have evolved to the point where we are allowed to continue appreciating - or belatedly make the acquaintance of - the older version even as we queue up to see the new one. Used to be that the producers of remakes bought up the rights to the original versions and did their utmost to bury them, sometimes for decades. But the 1962 "Manchurian" is ready to hand on DVD, and locally KCTS Channel 9, God bless 'em, enterprisingly televised it on the very night its successor went into general release.
I saw the first film when it appeared in 1962, and was so jazzed by its powerhouse filmmaking and its audacious pushing of the suspense-thriller form toward a kind of political horror movie that I didn't even notice it failed to become a hit. Recent commentators have pointed out that the fictional Cold War frenzies of the movie - based on a crackerjack novel by the wicked comic surrealist Richard Condon - couldn't compete with the coincidental, wraparound reality of the Cuban missile crisis, and so audiences stayed home glued to their televisions.
Interestingly, "The Manchurian Candidate" was one of the first films to tap into the cathode-ray verismo of television, with politicians staging televideo photo ops and barking at one another across banks of dueling monitors. It also gene-spliced a lot of the ultracloseup, handheld, wide-angle-lens hyperbole of TV drama into the grammar and lexicon of the big screen; after all, it was an early feature effort of the young John Frankenheimer, nearly a household name for his direction of live television (Playhouse 90 et al.) in the late '50s. A year after "Manchurian"'s release, audiences would again be glued to their TVs, shellshocked at the assassination of John F. Kennedy - and the film, however neglected in 1962, had become part of our national consciousness for seeming to have anticipated the culture of presidential assassination and infinitely proliferating conspiracy.
I didn't expect the new "Manchurian Candidate" to match the original's power either to excite or to disturb. There's new and there's new. The premise about brainwashing (a Korean War holdover), an innocent assassin programmed both to kill and to bear no memory of his mission, and an unholy cabal among ostensibly opposed political ideologies had long since become part of our culture and spawned a host of imitators. As for the original's big "Omigod!" surprise twist - well, trying to have that be brand new all over again would be akin to naming a character Norman Bates without raising eyebrows.
Director Jonathan Demme and his team have been pretty shrewd about the ways in which they don't try to compete with the Frankenheimer film. This means, among other things, that although both films begin with a night patrol of American soldiers being captured, narcotized and spirited away from a war zone (Korea then, the orange night of Kuwait 1991 here), they approach the scenes of mass brainwashing and grisly scientific demonstration of its results quite differently. Instead of the Condon fever dream of the patrol lolling bored in the flower-choked lobby of a New England hotel - but really in a Stalinist laboratory filled with Commie grotesques - Demme leaks glimpses of the conditioning and its horrific payoff in flashes throughout the film. The new movie reflects a penchant for - almost a fetish of - fragmentary narrative style that has long since displaced classical set-pieces which respect the integrity of time and space (even as, in the Frankenheimer version, they teased creatively against it). And truth to tell, the new film is a tad problematical about the way, for instance, voiceover narration by our protagonist Maj. Ben Marco (Denzel Washington in for Frank Sinatra) comes and goes without much organic logic. Who's he talking to, and exactly when did he start?
As long as I'm filing demurs, let me mention that the rather absentminded, on-again/off-again role of the stalwart liberal-with-a-capital-L senator (played by Jon Voight here and, much more wittily, by John McGiver in 1962) taps little of the satirical force and still less of the emotional charge felt in the original. The notice taken of the senator's daughter - the love of assassin-to-be Raymond Shaw's youth - is even more perfunctory; and without the tenderness of that relationship, a dimension of the story's horror is markedly diminished.
Those decisions keep the new film on message as a vehicle of suspense and paranoia, and I seem to recall that some 1962 reviewers complained about the young-love flashback as being distracting and cliche. There was something preposterous about Raymond's romance - but preposterous was intrinsic to Condon, Frankenheimer and original screenwriter George Axelrod's mad, black-comedy method. The 2004 film, for all its frontal references to Fox News-like media, an ever-proliferating "war on terror" occasioning incursions here, there and everywhere and the mutation of "Manchurian" from a Communist Chinese reference to the name of a Halliburton-style multinational, is less truly radical in its satire. But it's also often bracingly funny - especially when Meryl Streep, as a formidably ambitious lady senator and political stage mother, is running roughshod over every male power-broker in sight. (As Raymond's mom in 1962, Angela Lansbury played the wife of a lox-headed senator; here the inference is clearly invited that her insufficiently motivated senator-husband had to be eliminated for the sake of her own career opportunity. Call it a postfeminist reinterpretation.)
I seem to be violating my own zero-sum objection. Not really. I can't help feeling four decades' worth of allegiance to the earlier movie, and there are some things in it that are sharper and richer than comparable aspects of the remake. But "Manchurian" 2004 is riveting on its own recognizance, because Demme - back on his game for the first time since "The Silence of the Lambs" - has talent to burn and plenty of ideas about making it reflect its time, its America and its moment in cinema history as provocatively as the original did.
And what a cast. The other night, after my second viewing in two weeks (I don't feel motivated to revisit that many contemporary movies this soon), I heard someone say, "Denzel Washington was good," and her companion replied, "Yeah, well, he's always good." Beg pardon, this is not a he's-always-good - this time he's superb, lighting up every nuance of a guy who's simultaneously getting to the heart of a convoluted mystery and dreading coming face-to-face with perhaps greater horror nesting under his own skin. (Sinatra's Marco was a troubled man in the original; the new version reimagines a more tortuous bond between him and his old comrade-at-arms Shaw that does make the final reel of the remake at least semi-brand new.)
With his creepy eyes and strong, asymmetrical cheekbones, Liev Schreiber seems such a natural as successor to Laurence Harvey that he, too, is easy to underrate. He's more vulnerable than Harvey (cold-fish Raymond was Harvey's best career opportunity, and the only time he compelled audience sympathy), and he gets the most from those moments of terrible, intimate violation that, with cruel irony, find him radiating happiness.
There are many splendidly edgy slivers of behavior and character-voguing by the Demme stock company (cameos as usual for Tracey Walters, Charles Napier and Demme's old boss Roger Corman - "Mr. Secretary"), not to mention the deeply disquieting sight of Jude Ciccolella under a thatch-like toupee, looking like nothing so much as Dick Cheney wearing Don Rumsfeld's scalp. But the one person who must be mentioned is Jeffrey Wright, currently among the three or four best actors in America. His role is small but crucial: Al Melvin, a survivor of the lost patrol whose peacetime life has become a waking nightmare out of "Seven," and whose reappearance in Marco's life tips the major over an edge he has walked alone till now. You want fear in a handful of dust? Wright gives you fear in the flesh. Mortal, sacred flesh. Not enough for an Oscar, I suppose. Shame on Oscar.
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