The Razor's Edge & The Manchurian Candidate

The Razor's Edge was two hours of Bill Murray wandering around the world being disenchanted with his life and the world after going through World War I. Having never read novel, but having read Of Human Bondage, I have this feeling that W. Somerset Maugham must have been a profoundly cynical man. Being a gay author in England in the early 20th century may have had something to do with that. The movie is just about a guy trying to find himself. It just doesn't work. Sorry, Bill Murray, but at least we got Ghostbusters out of it.

The Manchurian Candidate is a trash novel, made into a classic movie by getting rid of most of the trash and putting an immense amount of talent behind and in front of the camera. The 2004 remake was completely unnecessary, ruining the climax. The 1962 version actually kept a lot of the bizarre dialogue from the novel, including the famous Eugenie Rose Chaney train conversation that makes little sense, unless we are to assume that either they're two completely bizarre people, the scene is showing that Marco is insane, or Eugenie is a Commie agent. If so, why the hell would she make Marco healthy? Weird. There's also a lot more about incest and sex (an added bonus of the brainwashing of Shaw was making him non-frigid). The incest is made explicit, the plot uses the 1960 convention rather than an unknown one, but suggested 1956 in the movie, and there were just more little subplots, more characters, and just more of a lot of things able to be explained in the time a novel has compared to a two-hour movie. The ending of the novel made Marco responsible for the assassination, rather than Shaw trying to make up for his murder-y ways.