This Is, To Date, The Worst Remake Ever Made

SPOILERS for BOTH "Manchurian Candidates":

Probably my favorite movie -- as a matter of personal influence from a young age rather than in direct comparison with modern films -- is Hitchcock's "Psycho" of 1960.

Gus Van Sant made a remake of "Psycho" in 1998 that is reviled by many "Psycho-philes." I consider that movie an "experiment that succeeded by failing." I don't like Van Sant's "Psycho," and his attempt to re-do Hitchocck "shot by shot" failed egregiously.

But at least Van Sant's "Psycho" WAS "Psycho" as best as it could be: same plot, same shots, most of the same lines. Van Sant tried to tell Hitchcock's classic tale (from a Robert Bloch novel) for a new generation.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Demme and his writers went the whole other way when they remade the spectacular and historic "The Manchurian Candidate" from 1962.

The idea seemed to be: let's remake "The Manchurian Candidate" by ignoring absolutely, positively EVERYTHING about the movie -- its plot, its setting, its era, its music, its characters -- that made it such a great movie.

There was a catch: Demme was an Oscar-winning hotshot with "The Silence of the Lambs" on his resume. HIS "Manchurian Candidate" had Oscar-winning star heavyweights Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep in it, and both were quite good here (with Streep earning an Oscar nomination.)

Having two such big stars and such a respected director made the new "Manchurian Candidate" difficult to hate, but not really. Matters got easy when at least one of the stars -- Denzel -- said he'd never even SEEN the original film, and hence didn't care about it.

The original "Manchurian Candidate" was set in the fifties around the time of "the McCarthy era", but released in 1962, at a time when the Cold War was heating up (via the Cuban Missile Crisis) , and US vs. Russian tensions could legitimately have ended the world.

"MC1" was made by liberal filmmakers (director John Frankenheimer, writer George Axelrod, star Frank Sinatra), and made its Joe McCarthy clone ("John Iselin") a right-wing buffoon with a scary right-wing nut wife (Angela Lansbury) but at least posited that the Soviet and Chinese Communists COULD be aggressors.

"MC1" brilliantly worked out the idea of novelist Richard Condon: Joe McCarthy's buffoonish attack on "communists" in the U.S. government could only be the work of a COMMUNIST agent sent to misdirect the U.S. from the REAL Commies looking to take over the nation from within, via brainwashing (a rumored action of the Korean War.)

"MC1" presented its twisted political tale with a classic mix of the sadly tragic (the opening score was almost tearjerking in its suggestion of the sad events about to occur) the funny (the Chinese Commie bad guy chides the Russian Commie bad guy about "making a profit" off of their NYC mental hospital front for brainwashing), and the grandly surreal ("women's garden party speeches" which turned out to be dream memories of Manchurian brainwashing experiments; the brainwash motif of using the Queen of Hearts and the phrase "Why don't you play a nice game of solitare?" as a killer's trigger.)

Demme's "Manchurian Candidate" elected to totally eschew the Joe McCarthy references, Chinese and Russian Communists, the Queen of Hearts motif, the heartrending music, the "garden party" brainwashing sequences -- even the then-new-and-classic furniture-destroying karate fight between Frank Sinatra's hero and Henry Silva's Korean villain in Laurence Harvey's Manhattan apartment.

With all of those classic scenes and motifs gone, Jonathan Demme's "Manchurian Candidate" ends up as a typically unbelievably and insanely overplotted 00's pedestrian thriller, somewhere between "Enemy of the State" and "Deja Vu," more Bruckheimer than Demme. (The Janet Leigh character is really FBI? The Sinatra character is programmed to kill TOO? And what else?)

With the complex Cold War geopolitics of the original gone, the new "MC" substitutes the overused, overdone Faceless Corporation as its villain (hello, Halliburton, which may be true, but still cliche) -- and makes that villain rather toothless and easily overcome. The Commies in the original were terrifyingly efficent.

This new "Manchurian Candidate" is closer to the "faceless conspiracy" thriller "The Parallax View" of 1974, which was a good movie but which, like this one, lacked the heart and cinematic brilliance of "The Manchurian Candidate." There's something gutless and uncommitted about the new "Manchurian Candidate" that makes it very aggravating to me. Same old, same old.

On the star acting: Frank Sinatra gave, arguably, his greatest performance in "MC 1." He knew President Kennedy wanted to see this movie, and helped get it made. In return, Sinatra CONCENTRATED and gave us a fine portrait of a brainwashed solider whose mind is fighting the wash -- he's a sweaty, quivering mass of melancholy and rage, in alternating doses. Denzel, on the other hand, plays SOME of Sinatra's mental state, but feels more compelled to keep up the usual charismatic fast-talking intelligence of the prototype Denzel hero model. It's nice star acting, but Denzel never seems as damaged as Sinatra did.

The Great Streep comes up against Angela Lansbury's simply horrifying vision of an incestuous Monster Mother (both actresses were Oscar-nominated) and for once,Meryl comes out the loser. Lansbury found the bile AND the sexuality in her character, who gave her son a shocking (and hand-blocked) 1962 kiss on the lips. Streep is too "Streepish" -- all technique and authority in a dry-run for her uber-bitch boss in "The Devil Wears Pravda." Moreover, Streep hasn't been given the great line "Why don't you play a nice game of solitare" to trigger her son's murderous side --instead its a flatfooted and strident "Corporal Raymond K. Shaw!" or something like that (honestly, I can't even remember it anymore.)

Raymond Shaw was Laurence Harvey's greatest role -- he was born to play it: cold, haughty, unfeeling, and yet always sad and victimized. Raymond Shaw as played by Harvey was Frankenstein's Monster with a cold heart grown warm. Nothing was sadder than to see Harvey's Raymond -- already destroyed by his mad mother long before the Koreans got him -- finally find love and then have to kill the same woman who saved him. Liev Schreiber, a fine actor elsewhere, isn't as well cast and isn't given as great a murder scene of his beloved to perform.

To compare Sinatra, Harvey, and Lansbury to Washington, Screiber, and Streep is create the wrong comparison between the two "Manchurian Candidates." All six were/are good actors. There are always many good actors in Hollywood.

No, the atrocity that is the new "Manchurian Candidate" stems from the modern-day filmmakers' complete and utter disregard for everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- that made the first movie one of the greatest movies ever made. (And not just in 1962; "MC1" was rereleased to theaters and video after 25 years out of circulation and deemed "the best movie of 1988" by some critics

The outcome was very weird: though it wasn't, the new "Manchurian Candidate" looked like it was made by dummies.

And Jonathan Demme may have made a fatal misstep. Coming after his even more disastrous flop remake of the less-classic but still fine "Charade" ("The Truth About Charlie"), this once-respected indiefilm maker and Oscar-winner is now known as "the man who made two clueless remakes of two classic thrillers."

We'll see if Demme ever gets his reputation back.