We’ve got the jitters again

This year, Paramount unveils remakes of two classic expressions of paranoid dread within about six weeks of each other. Originals of “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Stepford Wives,” released 13 years apart, were as jittery and unsettling as any two American movies ever made. With this summer promising to be as jittery and unsettling as any in recent memory, the timing makes perfect sense.

Aside from some cast and crew details and whatever threads of story I was able to glean from previews, I don’t know much about the new versions. I tried to extract more information about the remakes from Paramount (the Kremlin of the 1950s has nothing on the public relations department) but wound up going back to the original films. It came as somewhat of a shock that the proto-feminist ‘70s of “The Stepford Wives” felt much more distant than the xenophobic, double-speaking ‘50s of “The Manchurian Candidate,” which actually felt cozily familiar.

“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer and based on a 1959 novel by Richard Condon, was a surreal distillation of pure Cold War paranoia. “The Stepford Wives” (1975), directed by Bryan Forbes and based on a book by Ira Levin, was an unselfconsciously camp reflection of the queasy social unease of the 1970s.

Like recurring nightmare versions of the American dream, both seemed caught, when they first appeared, between concomitant terrors: the alien or unknown and the simplistic paternalism that passes off repression as protection. Each movie became so iconic that its title passed into the lexicon as a widely misused cliche.

In Jonathan Demme’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” which opens July 30, Denzel Washington stars as Capt. Ben Marco (the Frank Sinatra role), a member of a captured Desert Storm unit who, upon returning home from Kuwait, is tormented by recurring nightmares. Eventually, he looks up Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey in the original, Liev Schreiber in the remake), a fellow member of his unit for whom he hadn’t cared much but for whom he developed inexplicably fond feelings. Raymond was reconditioned in captivity as a remote-control assassin -- not, as in the original, by godless communists but by the managers of a private capital group with a whimsical “Manchurian” in the name. (“The Saudi Candidate” probably lacked the ring of the original. Or made somebody nervous.)

In the original, Ben discovers that Raymond has been programmed to assassinate a presidential candidate whose running mate -- Raymond’s stepfather, a redbaiter modeled on Joseph McCarthy -- will then become the Republican nominee. Once that happens, Raymond’s mother, Eleanor (Angela Lansbury), a communist operative in America, takes over.

In the upcoming version, Eleanor (Meryl Streep) is a senator, and erstwhile sleepwalking cold fish Raymond is a political firebrand familiar (judging by the trailer, anyway) with the ways of Bill O’Reilly. (Are you now, or have you ever been, a guest on CNN?)

Take away its stylistic anachronisms, as Demme surely has -- the black-and-white photography, the hat-wearing, cigarette-smoking cast -- and “The Manchurian Candidate” could be as contemporary a political thriller as any other released this year. Which is something, when you think about it.

This is especially surprising in light of what it apparently took to make “The Stepford Wives” contemporary again. The original movie expressed the queasy boredom of the affluent female suburb-dweller circa 1975. At one point, new-to-Stepford Joanna confesses to her friend Bobbie (Paula Prentiss then, Bette Midler now) that she “dabbled a little in women’s lib back in New York.” It’s as though she were confessing to eating a pint of ice cream in front of the TV. “Didn’t we all!” Bobbie says. But the film is actually lampooning the husbands, men so threatened by their wives’ hobbies (photography, tennis, not cleaning the kitchen) that they had them strangled with nylons by buxom, libidinous, compulsively neat android replicas of themselves.

In the version coming out June 11, directed by Frank Oz and written by Paul Rudnick, Nicole Kidman plays Joanna as a formerly high-powered TV executive (the only working women in the original were a real estate agent and a maid) whose husband (Matthew Broderick, sublime schlub of the American screen) is only a vice president.

Levin and Forbes can’t have imagined a near future in which marriage-rescue fantasies dominate books and movies aimed at women, in which shelter magazines dominate newsstand sales or in which men no longer need to threaten women with pantyhose to get them to swap real body parts for plastic ones.

Watching Kidman as homemaker-Barbie in the trailer, which looks like a commercial for a fancy cellphone, a precision watch, a luxury car and her, it appears that the new Stepford wives aren’t the only ones who were body-snatched. Those paunchy providers, who were willing to kill for an endless supply of fresh baked goods, have been replaced by a far more common sight -- metrosexuals with gadget fetishes.

Now, that’s what they call relatable.