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When the time comes, in 30 years or so, for the American director Jonathan Demme to receive his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the show- reel of clips from his movies will be hard to match for sheer eclecticism. There will be his 1990 Hollywood breakthrough, The Silence of the Lambs, not to mention the kooky confections that he had been knocking out for years before the world began reciting Hannibal Lecter's recipe for human liver and fava beans with a nice chianti.
There was Demme's screwball adventure Something Wild (1986) and his Mafia farce Married to the Mob (1988), as well as documentaries like The Agronomist (2003) and Cousin Bobby (1992) that took him off the beaten track; the witty blue-collar comedy Melvin and Howard (1980), and David Byrne in an outsized suit in Stop Making Sense (1984). It's pleasing to report that the director's latest picture, a dark but playful updating of John Frankenheimer's 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate (with the action transferred to the first Gulf War), is as idiosyncratic as anything he has done. There are star names above the title - Denzel Washington gives a nervy performance as a US sergeant struggling with nightmares, while Meryl Streep is the domineering senator who may be implicated in them - but you'll have to look elsewhere for your Hollywood gloss, your happy endings.
One film that will be missing from that far-off Oscar night, just as it is absent from Demme's CV and from the press-notes for The Manchurian Candidate, is the first project on which he yelled "Action!", in a tatty London studio way back in 1973. Yes, from the director who brought you Philadelphia (1994), the first Hollywood movie to confront Aids, and Beloved (1998), a tasteful adaptation of Toni Morrison's cherished novel, it's... Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman.
"That film was part of a time-honoured genre," says Demme. "Or maybe that should be time-warped." Despite flecks of grey in his spiky hair and stubble, he looks a good decade shy of his 60 years; his black-and- red pullover would allow him to fit in nicely on the USS Enterprise. If he is feeling any embarrassment about discussing his less-than-illustrious debut as a director, he isn't showing it.
"I was living...