Intermission: 'Manchurian' remake among few successes

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.

Critics, fans and students of film tend to get uneasy (even annoyed) when it's announced that a classic, era-defining film is about to be remade for "modern times."

Thank goodness no one has embarked on a reworking of "Citizen Kane" or "Casablanca." Maybe Hollywood did learn something from director Sydney Lumet's lame attempt to do an update of "The Wizard of Oz" with "The Wiz" in 1978.

Earlier this summer we had "The Stepford Wives" redux. It was OK, but didn't match the power of the original, which happened to come at a perfect time (1975), when suburbia was burgeoning and the women's movement had finally come into its own. It was a dark satire and a chilling thriller, while the 2004 version was played mostly for laughs.

So, it was with great trepidation that movie buffs had to face a remake of John Frankenheimer's Cold War classic, "The Manchurian Candidate." Based on Richard Condon's novel, the film was the blackest of comedies and satirized both the Western world's fear of Communist domination and America's uneasy disgust with Sen. Joseph McCarthy's then-recent witch-hunt. The Cuban missile crisis was in the news as "The Manchurian Candidate" was released, and a year later, JFK was assassinated.

How could and why would anyone dare to remake this film?

Only a director of Jonathan Demme's caliber would have the nerve to do something like this. Even so, he had to be thinking about another top 10 director Martin Scorsese and his remake of "Cape Fear," which simply did not live up to the original film.

Sometimes great directors with the best of intentions and film savvy should simply leave well enough alone.

But hats off to Demme for having the guts to pursue this project and for the adept way he has redone the story to fit into the geopolitical world of 2004.

The actors he cast had big shoes to fill. Denzel Washington is in the role Frank Sinatra played in the original, Meryl Streep steps in for Angela Lansbury whose performance was a career highlight and Liev Schreiber takes over for Laurence Harvey. All do exceptional work. Streep, in particular, seems to have absorbed the nature of her character without trying to mimic, note for note, Lansbury's steely performance.

Washington as Capt. Ben Marco and Schreiber as Sgt. Raymond Shaw are veterans of the Desert Storm war of 1991. Thirteen years later, Shaw is a congressman. His U.S. senator mother (Streep) manages to get him a slot as the vice presidential candidate in the upcoming election.

Marco is still in the Army. He remembers or thinks he does the night his outfit, on patrol in Kuwait, was attacked. Marco was knocked unconscious and Sgt. Shaw led the squad to victory and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Marco is confronted by another member of the patrol who says he's been having strange dreams. While the captain won't admit it, we see that he, too, is suffering from confused memories and bad feelings. The powers that be write it off as "Gulf War Syndrome."

The plot begins to escalate as Shaw's campaign gathers steam.

Marco, rife with paranoia, finds a small computer chip implanted in his back. He's certain that Shaw has one as well, and while he doesn't know the purpose of these devices, he suspects they are for ill. Confronting Shaw who is now protected by secret service agents doesn't do much for Marco's credibility, and the film gradually unfolds into a thriller of political paranoia that hasn't been seen since, well, the original "Manchurian Candidate."

Frankenheimer (and Condon's novel) had the mind-controlling bad guys be the Chinese communists. Here, Demme updates the evil ones as a thinly disguised Halliburton-like company called Manchurian Global.

One thing both films left out (but hinted at) from the novel was the incestuous nature of the mother-and-son teams of Lansbury/Harvey and Streep/Schreiber. Condon's book was much more explicit than 1962 Hollywood would allow for this sort of thing, and Demme has chosen not to take the easy road offered by today's standards. Streep's skill as an actress conveys the message in one brief kiss.

It's not quite as good as the original, but Jonathan Demme has managed to update a film classic in a way that fits into the bizarre political times that exist in this age, some 45 years after Richard Condon's novel was first published.