#The manchurian candidate cast full#
Time jumps ahead and Marco, now a major in US Army public relations, recounts his squad’s exploits and Shaw’s heroism before a classroom full of Boy Scouts. The men’s testimony earns Shaw the Congressional Medal of Honor. The remaining members of the squad recount their harrowing experience and each survivor lauds staff sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) as the hero who saved their lives by single-handedly taking on an entire company of Iraqi soldiers. The men are returned safely but two of their number lay dead. Their civilian guide, Laurent Tokar (Robyn Hitchcock), leads them away from the normal reconnaissance route due to landmines when the squad, nine men in a HUMV and Bradley fighting vehicle, are ambushed and overcome. Captain Bennet Marco (Denzel Washington) and his advance recon squad are crossing Iraqi-controlled Kuwait just prior to the onslaught of Desert Storm in 1991. The main difference between the ’62 film and Demme’s oeuvre is the switch from the all-pervasive fear of Communist domination and subterfuge with the new millennium cynical realization (and tacit acceptance) of global, corporate control of the world citizenry – the new age’s terrorism. Jonathan Demme, whose remake of one of my favorite films, “Charade,” as “The Truth About Charlie,” fell short of the original, has turned it around with the retelling of Condon’s Cold War elegy. These dream sequences are what make the earlier work a classic, making a good film better.
This sequence, told from several points of view depending on whose dream it is, is an ingenious combination of brilliant production design, masterly camerawork, great costume, scary dialogue and visually shocking images. Frankenheimer’s film, a good political thriller, is made better by the depiction of the nightmares experienced by the brainwashed American soldiers at the hands of their Chinese Communist captors.