Two versions of “The Manchurian Candidate” offer us the opportunity
to look at two directors applying two different director’s ideas
to essentially the same story. Both versions are based on George
Axelrod’s screenplay of the Richard Condon novel, and both focus
on the plot of creating an assassin via brainwashing—an assassin
who is trained to kill a presidential candidate at a political convention.
The killing would allow the antagonists and their backers (the
Communists in the 1962 version, a transnational corporation in the
2004 version) to control the presidency and consequently to exploit
the most powerful country in the world for its own purposes. In this
sense, both versions are “paranoid” political thrillers.
The 1962 version, directed by John Frankenheimer, focuses on
Raymond Shaw, who is the assassin brainwashed in Manchuria. His
mother, a conservative political powerhouse, is the American agent
who controls him on behalf of the Communists. Her husband is a
U.S. senator who, as the vice presidential candidate, would become
the presidential candidate when the assassination takes place.
Bennett Marco, Raymond’s commanding officer in Korea, is a man
with bad dreams. He keeps dreaming that Raymond killed members
of their patrol in Korea rather than saving the platoon, as Raymond’s
Medal of Honor commendation reads. These dreams drive Marco
to discover the truth about Raymond Shaw and to try to stop him.
In this version of “The Manchurian Candidate,” Raymond is the
main character, and the Cold War context gives this 1962 film a
frighteningly believable quality. The Axelrod script bristles with
irony about Cold War politics as well as the domestic divide on
race—a black soldier dreams of the Communists as black church
ladies and Marco, a white man, dreams of the Communists as white
church ladies (pillars of their community). The Frankenheimer version
also has humor—the newspaper columnist who sleeps in his
dead wife’s nightgown; the costume party where Senator Jordan’s
daughter, the lost love of Raymond Shaw, appears wearing a Queen
of Hearts costume. The Queen of Hearts is the visual cue to put
Raymond into a hypnotic state. This time instant obedience is to a
good purpose—to advance his relationship with the woman he loves.
The Frankenheimer version also has daring scenes, such as the
seductive train conversation between Marco, in the midst of a panic
attack, and Rosie, the woman who becomes his love interest.
Another such scene is the Raymond Shaw confessional scene
(“I know I’m not loveable”), where Raymond recounts his relationship
with Jocelyn Jordan at a time when he was loveable. The scene ends
with his mother stepping in to destroy the relationship.
The irony, the humor, and the audacious scenes are characteristic
of the first version of the film but are absent in the later version.
Frankenheimer’s director’s idea was to focus on power and powerlessness:
political power and powerlessness, personal power and
powerlessness. This idea arises from a less conscious substrata of the
plot, the creation of an assassin for political purposes. To articulate
how the director’s idea works, we must look first at the characterizations.
Raymond is powerless with regard to his relationship with his
mother and his Communist handlers. Bennett Marco is also powerless
and is a victim of his dreams. He is powerless as a military man
subjected to political authority, and he is even more powerless as a
troubled military man within the structure of the military. Power,
on the other hand, is embedded in the Communists’ scientific ruthlessness
(evaluating the brainwashing apparatus by carrying out a
murder at each stage of testing), in Raymond Shaw’s mother’s political
power, and in Communist influence via Raymond’s mother
over her Senator husband and through his nomination as vice president
and candidate for his party.
Visually, the theme of power and powerlessness is created by
Frankenheimer’s camera choices. He often used a moving camera
and wide-angle or deep-focus images to create a sense of power.
When we see Raymond in his mother’s home, the depth of focus of
the images of her home conveys her power. Her dominance in the
foreground of those images tells us who is at the top of this pyramid
of power. Rarely has a matriarch been as evocatively captured visually.
Powerlessness, on the other hand, is presented in the middle or
background of the frame, where Raymond Shaw and Bennett
Marco are so often found, as are Raymond’s victims, his newspaper
employer, Senator Jordan, and Jocelyn Jordan. And, by using a
moving camera to approach the victims, the ultimate outcome of
powerlessness, death, is all the more vividly presented.
If the original “The Manchurian Candidate” is about externalized
power and powerlessness, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 version is about
something far more internal. Whether he is portraying a descent into
madness or madness run amok in the political–industrial complex,
Demme’s concerns are all the more personalized. In this version,
Bennett Marco is the main character, and Raymond Shaw occupies
the plot position the Marco character occupied in the first version.
In this version, both Shaw and Marco have been implanted with devices
to make them compliant to the wishes of the corporation—to assassinate
the President. In this version, Vice President Raymond Shaw will
become the corporation’s President rather than the President of all the
people. The Jordans, who played such personal roles in the first version,
are now relegated to being political adversaries. Rosie, the love
interest for the Marco character in the first version, is now an FBI
agent investigating Marco’s allegations. She pretends to be interested
in Marco romantically and, although she echoes Janet Leigh’s dialogue
from the first version, plays a far more central role in this version.
Demme’s director’s idea was that paranoia when it is real is not
madness, but he works with an inner sense of madness and paranoia,
particularly for Marco. Although Shaw and Al Melvin (Jeffrey
Wright) are both played off center (troubled, disturbed), in fact the
majority of the inner madness is left to Marco to portray.
To deepen
this idea, Demme used many more close-up and medium-range
shots than is typical. Long shots and wide-angle shots tend to contextualize,
and Demme was trying to take away rather than create
context. He also used a camera placement that crowds the Marco
character, again creating a sense of disturbance and that all is not
right. The pace of shots and scenes, particularly early in the film,
also suggests disruption, that the circuits are not all working.
What works less well here are the actors’ performances feeding
this sense of madness and paranoia. The performances tend to be
too realistic. Perhaps an example from a director’s idea keyed to performance
will illustrate my point here. Elia Kazan, in his direction
of performances in “Splendor in the Grass,” perfectly captured his
director’s idea. “Splendor in the Grass,” set in 1928 Kansas, tells the
story of two teenagers in love. Deenie is beautiful and poor. Bud is
handsome and rich. Both are overflowing with sexual desire and
both are mindful of their parents’ admonitions. Her mother tells her
that boys don’t respect girls who go all the way. His father tells him
that he has plans for him (to go to Yale and take over the business),
and if he gets Deenie pregnant he will have to marry her (and ruin
his life).
Kazan begins the film in mid shot. The two main characters,
Deenie and Bud, are kissing passionately in his convertible, parked
adjacent to a waterfall. The sensuality at the core of the scene is
powerful, but the scene ends with Bud frustrated at Deenie’s resistance
to go any further than petting. The next scene is between
Deenie and her mother after Bud has dropped her at home. The
scene that follows is Bud’s return home and his encounter with his
father. Both Deenie and Bud try to articulate their feelings but neither
parent allows those feelings to be acknowledged. Deenie and
Bud are clearly overwhelmed by their desire, and the parents warn
their children about the consequences of that desire.
Here is the
point where Kazan’s brilliance with actors deepens the director’s
idea. Kazan’s director’s idea is that sexuality is tactile and good but
to censor it is destructive.
In the scene between Deenie and her mother, the mother states
her position. Deenie asks about whether she, the mother, ever felt
(as Deenie does about Bud) desire for Deenie’s father, her husband.
Deenie at this point embraces and holds on to the mother, as the
mother tells her that women do not like sex and they give in to their
husbands’ sexual desires only after they are married. When the
mother is not being held by her daughter she is munching away at
a sandwich. The tactile quality, the physical need of each character
is pronounced and central here; it overrides what is being said. For
Kazan the need to touch is more important than the words spoken.
We find a parallel in the scene between Bud and his father.
pummels Bud verbally with his ambitions for his son. All the while
the father also physically pummels Bud, punching him with a mix
of pride and aggression. As he punches Bud’s shoulders, again we
are aware of how much each of these characters needs a physical
connection. Again, Kazan used his direction of the performances
to illustrate the primacy of the physical. Indeed, for Kazan, desire
and physicality are life itself, while control and censorship imply a
life half lived and worse, as the tragedy that befalls these two
lovers suggests.
Returning to Jonathan Demme’s treatment of the performances
in “The Manchurian Candidate,” I have suggested that overall they
were too realistic. Although Raymond Shaw and his mother are presented
as narcissistic and political, we do not sense any madness
here nor is there madness to be found in the Marco character.
Because Rosie is there not as a bystander drawn to Marco in the
midst of a panic attack (as in the first version) but rather as an FBI
plant, she gives credibility to Marco’s eccentric behavior.
Consequently, only Wright’s portrayal of Al Melvin’s character suggests
the madness that is necessary to make the director’s idea work
as effectively as does his early camera placements. The realism of
the performances suggests that the political–industrial complex has
an agenda that is credible and feasible And, in good thriller fashion,
the audience is saved when Marco kills Shaw and his mother, preventing
them from highjacking the presidency. Were the performances
keyed to the director’s idea as they were in Kazan’s
“Splendor in the Grass,” this remake of “The Manchurian
Candidate” would have been as unnerving as the original.
Having looked at how a director’s idea shapes choices for the
director and how those choices either deepen the outcome or, in
the case of “The Manchurian Candidate,” differentiate two treatments
of the same story, we should now return to our central topic
of the good director.
I hope that I have not suggested that there is a single approach
to being a good director. On the contrary, how good a director will
be depends upon how far the director goes in his realization of the
director’s idea. Before providing a case study of the good director,
I would like to address the diversity among good directors.
First not all directors are exceptional in every area. Essentially,
the areas of opportunity are performance, visualization, and text
interpretation. As I mentioned earlier, Elia Kazan’s strength lies in
his direction of the performances of his actors. I would add that he
is also a powerful interpreter of text. His film “America America”
(1962) offers a good example. The director’s idea in “America
America,” an epic journey of a young man from Turkey to
America, is that in life everyone is either master or slave; consequently,
in every scene—whether involving a father and son, husband
and wife, employer and employee, or simply fellow
travelers—the director’s idea determines the shape and outcome
and the level of the performance within the scene. The visualization
in “America America” is strong but secondary to the director’s
text interpretation.
Visualization on the other hand, goes to the core of Ridley
Scott’s work. His director’s idea in “Gladiator” is “What is a man?”
Scott is interested in all aspects of manhood—son, father, friend,
lover, leader. His visualization of the main character, Maximus, is
Scott’s idealization of what it is to be a man—assertive, aggressive,
yet tender and moral. The antagonist, Commodus, on the other
hand, is less than a man. He becomes Caesar by killing his father.
He is cowardly, a man in need of constant attention and jealous of
rivals, a man who needs his sister’s comfort to have a night’s sleep.
Scott’s visualization of manhood is always powerful. Maximus is
foregrounded and photographed in movement.
Low angles suggest
his heroism. Commodus, on the other hand, appears mid-frame or
toward the back. Mid shots instead of close-ups make him appear
less of a man. Ridley Scott relied on visualization to articulate his
director’s idea.
The Coen brothers had a very different director’s idea in
“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Their idea is that the American
odyssey is less noble than the original. It is all about self-interest
and religion, sin and repentance. This fable-like idea requires
exaggerated performances, exaggerated text readings, and a
visual style that connotes the opposite of realism—let’s call it the
fabulous.
What I am suggesting is that to be a good director, the director
must have a director’s idea that he executes using the tools of directing—
text interpretation, performance, visualization in balance with
the director’s interests and skills. Now, let’s turn to a case study of
good directing.