Meryl Streep to play the Red Queen in remake of MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE...

Hey folks, Harry here... I know I've gone on about what a bad idea a remake of MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was... But unfortunately, merely griping about it isn't gonna do a damn bit of good.

Especially when you're bringing in A-level talent like Scott Rudin is to the project. First off, Jonathan Demme and Denzel Washington plopped on. Demme has it in him to direct a great movie... We've seen that from him before, but it's been a while since the last one. In fact, not since the last time he directed Denzel. Denzel taking on the role of Frank Sinatra's character... well, he'd definitely add another layer to the character. The film is set after the Korean War, but in that time period prior to the Civil Rights movement, so having Denzel Washington playing a Captain in that era... well, there could be an extra layer of problems thrown at him, given the racism of the era. It could be interesting to see how they play with this, if they deal with it.

Now the interesting thing is from as far as I can tell, Black Officers during the Korean War were limited to the 24th Infantry regiment in Korea. A regiment that a great deal of controversy surrounded. So I'm not entirely sure how Denzel's Captain would've been a commanding officer of the Raymond Shaw character - especially given that Raymond Shaw's character's mother... the Red Queen, will be played by Meryl Streep.

Now out of curiousity I did a bit research tonight to see if it was even possible that a black officer could be in charge of a unit that was mixed or that had a white man in it. This took me to www.KoreanWar.Com/BlackSoldierWhiteArmy. I went, curious about the history - and if that level of integration had occurred. Because I knew that in 1954, my grandfather, Jay W Knowles was the first Coach in United States Military History to place a black man on a white baseball team. And he often told me about the abject racism that his team faced trying to do simple things like - eat together at a restaurant. I remember him telling me about a trick he used to pull. If the team walked into a restaurant and the owners made the black players eat in the kitchen, he'd have all his players sit down, order their meal, then when it came out, they'd get up... and in unison walk out and load up on the bus, just to show the racist bastards the economic consequences of their actions. But that was in 1954, well after the Korean War. At the site above, they have the history of Black Soldiers in the Korean War conflict (in summary) and from the look of it, there were reports of rampant racism, bigotry and out and out lying about records and what not to keep whites and blacks as separate as possible during that war... PLUS - there were cases of men refusing to go into conflict with a black unit and... well... it just wasn't very pretty back then, because racism was pretty severe. If they don't deal with this in the film, then we're rewriting history quite a bit, moving up the integration of the U.S. military before it had actually happened.

Of course, I suppose the most reasonable way of covering this sort of thing would be to have Bennett and Raymond be soldiers from different units with Bennett happening to be the highest ranking officer being held - in which case, in addition to the brainwashing going on - Bennett would be facing the racism of the other soldiers being held captive by the North Koreans.

I just hope they deal with the history and the struggle that a Black officer like Denzel would be portraying, because it was such a struggle at that time for a black man in that war, or just generally in the United States. And the additional problems he would be having in attempting to keep Raymond Shaw from assassinating the President of the United States... well, it'd be a tough task. In thinking about this tonight... there's some great material to use in re-telling MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, but on the surface - a simple race change of a character, becomes a lot of social hurdles to overcome - if you want to try to stay true to the history of the time. Because I mean, at this time... A black man would have had a shitload of problems doing the basic things Sinatra did in the original. I mean, just going into a bar or hanging out in a hotel lobby... In this era, that wasn't something the average black man could do, without a great deal of additional problems. I mean it wasn't till the mid-1960's - a full ten years later, that MLK and the Civil Rights movement even got started, much less finished. Now, if you want to just ignore history... Well, hell... None of this means a damn thing then.

And can you imagine how big the news would've been if a Black Officer had prevented the assassination of President Eisenhower? That would've been huge - well... unless the racist bastards in charge of the headlines and history - decided to just bury it. Hmmm... Maybe they're gonna be real smart about this project. Sure wish I had a script so I could see.