Manchurian Candidate Comparison

The transition of Hollywood movies from their birth to date has been tremendous, not only from black and white to color, from physical film stock to digital format, from the silent era to the use of 3D surround sound systems but even the portrayal of emotions has been altered to satisfy the demands of the present generation. The curiosity of film makers has now been diverted to fulfill the demands of the current audience rather than to express their own imagination. The best technique to ‘measure’ the impact of social variables on movies would be to compare a classic version of a movie to its modern remake. In my essay I will contrast the 60’s version of the movie the Manchurian Candidate to its’04 version. The alterations of the latter version
The basic outline kept by both versions of the film is the return of a group of American Soldiers from a war and the desperate search of Ben Marco for truth as he questions his dreams and eventually his sanity. The film perfectly reveals the power of human to control minds and bend them to darker wills, it exposes how man can be turned into a mere puppet and be controlled at command. A film such as the Manchurian Candidate, which starts of as a war drama and then turns into an exhibition of naked political ambitions would be difficult to digest without the use of comic relief. Resort to comic relief is much more noticeable in the earlier version of the film as compared to its latter remake; nearly all of the suspenseful scenes in the movie are interrupted by some weird moment of comic relief. Such as the scene at the climax of the movie where Ben Marco and an associate are looking for Raymond Shaw at the Republican Convention but they pause to salute during the “Star-Spangled Banner” before Marco actually spots a light and presumes that it is Raymond