For the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door:
Someone is trying to kill Dr. Sidney Shaefer (James Coburn). Hell, it seems like just about everybody is trying to kill him -- or spy on him or abduct him or drug him or interrogate him or brainwash him or flip him or something. And it's no wonder. He knows too much. He's the president's analyst in Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 "The President's Analyst," one of the great unheralded movies of the '60s and one of the great paranoid political comedies ever -- part "Strangelove," part "Parallax View," part "Our Man Flint," part "Little Murders."
Poor Sidney -- or Sid, as his former patient and CEA (Central Enquiry Agency) agent Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) calls him. Even the President of the United States now has someone he can talk to. But Sidney can't trust anybody. So, for now, he has managed to slip away in the station wagon of the Typical American suburban Quantrill family of Seaside Heights, New Jersey: Wynn (William Daniels), Jeff (Joan Darling) and their son Bing (Sheldon Collins), tourists he picks up while they are taking a White House tour.
"Gee whiz, Dad. Why can't we take the FBR tour?" Bing whines. "I want to see the files."
"Sorry Bing," Dad replies. "We've got to get back to New Jersey as soon as we finish the White House.
"Now be a good boy and enjoy your heritage," says Mom.
The Quantrills are liberals. Not left-wingers or anything like that, but they're for civil rights. They've done some weekend picketing. As a matter of fact, they even sponsored the "Nigro doctor and his wife" when they moved into the development. Their next-door neighbors are fascists, though.
Stepping into the Quantrill's split-level home, Wynn flicks a switch on the living room wall and groovy Bacharach-esque Muzak begins to play. "Total sound," he explains with evident satisfaction.
"Want a draft beah?"
Dr. Sidney Schaefer slides off his sunglasses and beams ingratiatingly. "Yes."
I defy you to watch Coburn flash his killer pearly-whites here (can you tell Sid is maybe beginning to go a little off his rocker?) and not find yourself grinning, too. This is megawatt star-power, so bright you gotta wear shades.
To bring Dylan into every conversation: "Even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked."
This might be the last great movie that I remember stumbling on, totally by accident, on late-night TV in the mid-80s. I read enough to feel I know at least a little bit about most older American films worth watching but this one I had never heard of, plus I was never really a fan of Coburn and had been lukewarm on whichever Flint movie I had seen. So I was only going to give it a few minutes to work on me. But wow! I think my chief comparison was The Manchurian Candidate, but wackier and laid-back. And very contemporary seeming(Despite the ancient hippy stuff, which is still worth seeing because that's James Coburn in that drummer get-up.) Severn Darden, Godfrey Cambridge, and William Daniels were all great in support--I would even say that Cambridge's role was kind of ground-breaking for the time--and it just pulled me along. When I looked up the career of Theodore J. Flicker, though, I had to wonder if they just put his name on this as a front for some still-blacklisted genius director. Or is "Soggy Bottom U.S.A." actually another unheralded masterpiece?
I love THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST. In a perfect world, this would be the true cinematic touchstone of 1960s paranoia and DR STRANGELOVE would just be some forgotten obscurity.
Coburn's pretty much the poster boy for 1960s-'70s heterosexual stud entitlement, and man, does that come through in his grin. What a strutting devil he was! I am convinced that the slight soft-focus effect in many of his Nixon-Ford era movies isn't the result of a filter on the lens, but his sheer testosterone warping the celluloid.
If memory serves, he was, for quite some time, the highest paid actor in the history of acting, on a per-word basis, for his 1970s ad for Schlitz Light. He only said the name of the product and took home half a million bucks. That's $250,000 per syllable.
Dane: "Manchurian Candidate," for sure!
Matt: What makes this particular shot so funny is that Coburn is flashing that smile at William Daniels, of all people.
Did you see James Coburn in Charade? He was able to grin like that and still remain eerily menacing.
And in a few short years, William Daniels would become a paranoid man (unsuccessfully) running for his life in The Parallax View (1974).
President's Analyst: giddy, funny, psychedelic paranoia.
Parallax View: grim, nasty, dreadful paranoia.
It sort of charts the sea-change in attitudes from 1967 to 1974.