They don’t make ’em like The Manchurian Candidate of 1962 any more. That weird, creepy, paranoid thriller of the Cold War flopped at first, was given retrospective topicality by the assassination of President Kennedy, and became a cult. Though it is, like Citizen Kane, a brilliant film rather than a profound or serious one, those virtues, too, have been ascribed to it. It dealt with an important topic — the ruthless manipulation of power in America then — but it did not deal with it in a convincing way.
For years Tina Sinatra (her father Frank had the rights) has been trying to launch an updated remake and she was lucky; she failed. Now she has succeeded just when war and elections, though not yet assassinations, are back in the news.
We start with American troops in Kuwait in 1991 playing a jolly game of poker (‘Are you going to play your cards or hatch them?’). Suddenly, there is a flurry of action, cars upturned, helicopters, machine-guns; I sensed that it was best to concentrate hard here as exactly what happened was going to be important later.
Then it is years later and our hero Captain Marco (Denzel Washington) is lecturing Boy Scouts on the incident. An intruder asks a question from the back. Now this sort of tightly plotted American film is — as long as things did not go wrong in production — very efficient. He must be there to give us information. Similarly, we meet Jon Voight for a moment but then he disappears for ages. Even now Voight is too big a star to have only a few lines, so he must be going to return. This is efficient, too: when he does, we must remember him, and this would be less certain with an unknown face.
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