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Post by lowtacks86 on Jan 27, 2021 21:52:39 GMT
I watched this films years ago in film class and remember thinking it was pretty good, may give it a rewatch to see how it holds uo. Your thoughts.
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Post by vegalyra on Jan 27, 2021 22:11:29 GMT
Great film, much better than the remake. Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in particular do very well in their roles. Still an edge of your seat thriller in my opinion.
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Post by janntosh on Jan 27, 2021 22:13:43 GMT
It started off good but honestly it kind of meandered in the second half until the climax. Might prefer the remake
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Post by OldAussie on Jan 27, 2021 22:32:19 GMT
Even Laurence Harvey was great.
and
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Post by bravomailer on Jan 27, 2021 22:37:05 GMT
Saw it when it was re-released in the 80s. The folklore was that Sinatra kept it from the public because it brought back memories of the JFK assassination. Truth was there was conflict between the owners. I found it interesting and quirky but not great.
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Post by wmcclain on Jan 28, 2021 0:59:16 GMT
The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer. After being out of contact for three days, a squad returns from the Korean War and the men begin having nightmares about brainwashing and murder. One of their members is an unconscious sleeper agent, an assassin who will be triggered to kill as part of conspiracy to take over the country. It's a great cold war fantasy that manages to satirize both the communists and phoney anti-communist politicians. It has quite a lot of humor, but turns progressively darker and tragic as Sgt Shaw is forced to commit vile acts. The climax is exceedingly tense, during a fine evocation of the hot, sweaty, boisterous political conventions of the past. Fine cast. Laurence Harvey is tremendous as the aristocratically prissy and unloveable Raymond Shaw. As a weapon he is like a relaxed attack dog, ready for a command at any time. But in a painful sequence, he starts to break down because of what he has been made to do, and is eventually freed to seek revenge. The timeless Angela Lansbury is his monstrous mother, actually only three years older than Harvey. You hear about Oedipus, Hamlet and Gertrude, but this is the only time I remember Orestes and Clytemnestra being mentioned in a movie. Frank Sinatra is more troubled than usual and it's a good role for him. I hear he didn't like to work and the camera focus is not right on several scenes because he wouldn't do another take. Janet Leigh was fortunate in her projects: Touch of Evil (1958), Psycho (1960). Here she is something like a tender screwball love interest for Sinatra, just what he needs to bring him back from a breakdown. But her quirky approach and odd dialogue make us wonder if something else isn't going on: is there another level to the conspiracy and is she Sinatra's controller? The director said he was just using what was in the book, which has nothing about that. There are some clunky bits: using Henry Silva as a Korean seems odd now, and the big karate fight is not that special. The David Amram score has the great Copland-like sound popular during the period. I should try to collect them all. I remember nothing about the 2004 remake except that it was poor. Available on Blu-ray, and pretty good looking. ![](http://watershade.net/public/manchurian-candidate.jpg)
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Post by politicidal on Jan 28, 2021 1:08:46 GMT
It’s awesome. 9/10.
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Post by Archelaus on Jan 28, 2021 6:14:51 GMT
It's one of the best political thrillers out there. Angela Lansbury made for a great villainess. I also thought Frank Sinatra and especially Laurence Harvey did really well in their roles. 8/10.
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Post by moviemouth on Jan 28, 2021 6:16:37 GMT
Very good thriller.
The Jonathan Demme remake is one of the better remakes out there too.
Funny enough, he also directed one of the worst remakes a couple years before that - The Truth About Charlie (Charade remake), with a laughably miscast Mark Wahlberg.
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Post by TheOriginalPinky on Jan 28, 2021 19:18:50 GMT
Superb! Lansbury was chilling - what a great performance!! Very tense thriller.
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Post by politicidal on Jan 28, 2021 19:26:43 GMT
Very good thriller. The Jonathan Demme remake is one of the better remakes out there too. Funny enough, he also directed one of the worst remakes a couple years before that - The Truth About Charlie (Charade remake), with a laughably miscast Mark Wahlberg. Saw that last year. It looks like a TV movie and it has some of the worst editing I’ve seen in years.
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Post by mikef6 on Jan 28, 2021 19:57:35 GMT
Others have already ably expressed my own thought about the 1962 masterpiece, one of the great films the United States film industry, so I will mainly discuss the Demme remake which I hate.
It is one of the more depressing of the rash of 21st century remakes that have come down the line. It is totally unnecessary as there is nothing about the original that needs “updating.” Critics praised the various modern riffs on the 1962 masterpiece. My own paper at the time, the Dallas Morning News, gave it an A- grade while praising it oxymoronically as “a popcorn movie that gives you something to think about.” Yeah, it made me think about Frank Sinatra and John Frankenheimer.
Rather than the tightly controlled original, Demme’s remake is a meandering, slow moving mystery about a corporate attempt to control the U.S. government, full of “paranoid thriller” clichés. Denzel Washington does OK. Liev Schreiber is an interesting actor who can enliven even dreary comedies like “Kate And Leopold,” but he is colorless in this screenplay. Meryl Streep (in most movies, flawless) takes the Angela Lansbury role but only succeeds in reinforcing how great Lansbury was. Streep is at her most actorly. Almost every attempt at “updating” and “reimagining” is a failure. The brainwashing scenes have the same kind of fragmented editing that we have seen a gazillion times to express a movie character’s disorientation. When Raymond is sent to assassinate Senator Jordan, the result is a staging so lame that I suspect Demme must have intentionally drawn back so as to not invite comparisons to Frankenheimer’s achievement of one of the saddest and most shocking and memorable images ever filmed. Demme’s “Manchurian” is a truly bad movie in so many ways. Taken on its own merits, it is just a second or third tier summer time waster. But it even made it over this low bar on the basis of being a remake of a much, much greater film whose sandals it is not fit to untie.
If you are one who liked it, good luck to you. I’m glad you enjoyed it. We just really and irreconcilably disagree.
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Post by mikef6 on Jan 28, 2021 20:00:07 GMT
Even Laurence Harvey was great. and Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
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Post by mortsahlfan on Jan 29, 2021 14:29:09 GMT
It's a good movie.
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