Manchurians are missing in 'Manchurian' remake

Hollywood doesn't want racial minority villains, a professor said.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Don't look for any Manchurians in "The Manchurian Candidate" remake. The only Manchurian is in the name of the villain -- an evil multinational conglomerate.
Don't look for Manchuria, either -- the action stems from the first Gulf War.
But you won't find any wacky Iraqis. The mad scientist/brainwasher is a white South African.
In John Frankenheimer's revered original, Chinese Communists were the heavies. In Jonathan Demme's update, the Manchurian Global corporation is the scheming enemy -- which inevitably will resonate in some people's minds with the real-life role of Halliburton (Vice President Cheney's old company) in Iraq.
Tina Sinatra, co-producer of the remake, concedes there are "certain parallels that one could draw to our current political setting. But it didn't necessarily start out that way. We were writing (the script) a long time ago. We kind of predated this Bush administration, and we certainly predated the second Gulf War.
"We set it in the reality of the war, but from there it was all made up."
Coincidence?
She says she didn't have Halliburton in mind, and neither did co-screenwriter Daniel Pyne. And the movie "just happened to step over a line or two because life caught up with the art," says the daughter of the original movie's star, Frank Sinatra.
Coincidence or not, corporate executives can serve as all-purpose villains, says John J. Pitney, Jr., a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. "Three-quarters of voters may own stock, but they're worried that the guys in the suits are Enron-izing the value of their shares," he says.
It's certainly an old theme for Hollywood, too. Going back to 1941, Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe" was full of paranoia about business influence, Pitney points out.
Even early James Bond movies such as "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger" focus on "freewheeling capitalists" as bad guys, notes Jeffrey Hart, professor of political science at Indiana University.
And who can forget the rapacious Gordon Gekko -- Michael Douglas' Academy Award-winning star turn -- of Oliver Stone's "Wall Street"?
Concern about stereotypes has emptied the Hollywood storehouse of stock villains, Pitney says, which helps explain why no Arabs are depicted as the prime evildoers in "The Manchurian Candidate."
"Hollywood wants to find villains that won't get them heat from racial/ethnic advocacy groups and who will still 'work' with audiences. White South Africans are a safe bet because they are not racial minorities and they can be presented as racist," says Stephanie Larson, a political science professor at Dickinson College.
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