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Movie reviews by Gerald Panio

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The President’s Analyst (1967)

[Author’s Note:  This is the second half of my January 1998 column, which covered three films.  The first film was The Scent of Green Papaya.  The second and third are included here, although my follow-up focus only covers the second film.]

What would life be without a couple of good paranoid fantasies to liven it up?  Would the Sixties have been complete without Dr. Strangelove?  For that matter, would the Sixties have been complete without The President’s Analyst?  Say what?  You’ve never heard of The President’s Analyst, one of the most off-the-wall, paranoid comedies of that off-the-wall decade?  Welcome to the club.  This was one of the many lesser-known gems recommended in an excellent “Movie-A-Day” calendar put out by Joel Heller Productions in 1993.

If you enjoyed the recent Mike Meyer’s Sixties spoof, Austin Powers: Secret Agent,The President’s Analyst will blow your mind.  At least I think that’s the lingo.  Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker (who?), and starring James Coburn, The President’s Analyst holds up remarkably well after 30-odd years.  Why not?  Do we have less to be paranoid about nowadays? The real joy of Flicker’s flick is its utter unpredictability.  The picaresque plot hinges around a psychiatrist (Coburn) who is hired to serve as a relief valve for an over-stressed American president.  Coburn initially plays his role with the same sardonic grin, the savoir-faire, and the bulletproof sense of cool he displayed in another fine set of Sixties farces, the In Like Flint James Bond takeoffs.  Soon the President’s doing much better, thank you, but Coburn’s character (Dr. Sidney Shaefer) gets saddled with all the President’s sloughed-off neuroses, anxieties, and global paranoid fantasies.  Perfect patient-doctor transference.  Shaefer has a nervous breakdown, and so does the movie.  To tell you much more would be to spoil the sheer joy of the unexpected.  But can you afford not to watch a film in which the Canadian Secret Service, disguised as a rock band called the Puddlians, kidnaps a foreign agent in the middle of a psychedelic rock festival attended by Snow White?  Or in which a Soviet agent named Kropotkin has his loyalties turned through impromptu psychoanalysis, middle class families are your best defense against assassination, and the F.B.I. has been replaced by a federal organization of very short psychopaths in zoot suits? Besides, you want to know who the real enemy is, don’t you?

Last, and silliest, of this month’s triumvirate, is Robert Zemeckis’s 1978 slapstick comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand, about six teenagers trying to get tickets for the 1964 appearance of the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan show.  This is the director who gave us Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future series.  Like most slapstick I Wanna Hold Your Hand has its hits and misses, but the Beatles scene really was this hysterical and the movie’s a healthier choice for a grey January day than, say, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.  In one of my favorite scenes, a lightning bolt demonstrates that the Beatles had fans in very high places.  Particularly recommended for teenagers, who will undoubtedly refuse to believe their parents could ever have been a part of this scene.

 

Sidebar #75e:  Looking Back & Second Thoughts

“Logic is on our side: this isn’t a case of a world struggle between two divergent ideologies, of different economic systems. Every day your country becomes more socialistic and mine becomes more capitalistic. Pretty soon we will meet in the middle and join hands.”  –V.I. Kydor Kropotkin

James Coburn, you sly dog, you!  With Our Man Flint and In Like Flint, you gave us the only James Bond parodies worth remembering.  With The President’s Analyst, you gave us one of the few worthy successors to Dr. Stangelove’s paranoid black humor.  This time around the villain isn’t the military, it’s an organization even closer to home now that we’re at the end of the second decade of the 21st century.  I’m not going to tell you who that villain is; the reveal is too much fun.  Also too much fun is dipping back into the Sixties via some period music (courtesy of 6-time Oscar nominee & Mission Impossible theme music creator Lalo Shifrin), LSD trips, free love, hippies, mod clothing, and Cold War skulduggery.

James, you had one of the best smiles in the business, one that the Cheshire Cat might have envied.  Mike Myers’ Austin Powers had to work pretty hard to get the groove going that just came natural to you.  As for your effect on women, you were the cinematic equivalent of catnip.  Your co-stars also had a chance to shine in this picture: Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Joan Delaney, Pat Harrington Jr., Will Geer, William Daniels.  All of these actors, with the exception of Delaney, had long careers as character actors.  Everyone looked they were having a good time as Coburn, with the same go-for-broke gusto that characterized the first Ghostbusters and the first Men in Black.

The President’s Analyst has some clever camerawork by veteran Director of Photography William A. Fraker (6 Oscar nominations), with shot compositions that match the off-kilter plotline.  Speaking of the latter, the film earned its only award nomination from the Writer’s Guild of America for Best Written Original American Screenplay, for director/writer Theodore J. Flicker.  Can’t say I’d ever heard of the guy.  He had 28 credits as a director and 14 as a writer—mainly for work on TV series.  His first show was in 1960, his last in 1981.

The film takes some good digs at the “average” American family, the CIA & FBI, gun mania, and pseudo-Liberalism.  Early on, Godfrey Cambridge’s character tells a potent story about a childhood encounter with racism that could stand on its own as an object lesson.  Finally, I still can’t resist a film that tosses the Canadian Secret Service into the wicked Spy vs. Spy brouhaha.

Movie Information

Genre: Comedy | Satire
Director: Theodore J. Flicker
Actors: James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Joan Delaney, Pat Harrington Jr., Will Geer, William Daniels
Year: 1967
Country:
Original Review: January 1998, Part 2

Cyberspace:

R’ha

https://vimeo.com/57148705

A cool little 6 1/2-minute science fiction film written, directed, and animated by Kaleb Lechowski.  R’ha does not restore your faith in AI.  Think tiny Battlestar Galactica.

 

Horror Film Composer Shows How He Creates Bone-Chilling Sounds

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/04/27/horror-film-composer_n_16299062.html

The title says it all.  This short 5-minute film shows Toronto-based composer Mark Korven in action.  Korven currently has 76 composing credits listed on Imdb, including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Witch (2015).

 

Mubi

https://mubi.com/

An average-priced (currently $9.99 a month) streaming service that features “cult, classic, independent and award-winning features from around the world.”  The site also includes festival news, features, interviews, and columns.

 

Brown Sugar – Badass Cinema

https://www.brownsugar.com/

A low-cost (currently $3.99 a month or $42 a year) streaming service for classic black cinema.  As the site says, “Stream the Biggest Collection of the Baddest Movies.”

Films Worth Talking About:

A Countess From Hong Kong, Le Voleur (The Thief of Paris), Mudar de Vida (A New Life), Cool Hand Luke, You Only Live Twice, The Graduate, Far From Vietnam, Camelot, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, La Collectionneuse, Le vieil homme et l’enfant (The Two of Us), Chimes at Midnight, Elvira Madigan, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Terro em Transe (Land in Anguish), In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Belle de jour, Barbarella, Weekend, Made in USA, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise, Two for the Road, Casino Royale, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Mouchette, Point Blank, To Sir With Love, Bedazzled, The Fox

The Bigger Picture

Films:  Bedazzled (1967), Our Man Flint (1966). In Like Flint (1967)

Music:  anything by Lalo Shifrin

Books

The Word on the Street

Too many films want it both ways, but this is that rare example of a film that actually gets it. It genuinely is of its age – all swinging Sixties and cultural revolution – but it also sends all that up.   [Woodby]

When James Coburn passed away in 2002, it was sad to see how little fanfare was generated by this event. Coburn’s resume is as strong as any actor of the Sixties and Seventies. For almost a decade, Coburn played in some of the strangest and most unorthodox films of the era. Everyone knows that he capably spoofed the popular spy genre with his “Flint” films. But it wasn’t until he became the President’s analyst that he really hit his stride.   [copper1963]

The movie is hysterically funny, cynical, black, and most ironically,
hopeful, and a must-see for any film lover. The script is terrific, but
the direction stands out in the inspired camerawork. This
obviously was a labor of love by the director/writer, and
interestingly, one of only two or three non-t.v. films he ever directed.
If you see it, you may be bored by today’s sex and gore standards.
But if you remember the 60s, keep them in mind when you see
this film. You’ll wonder how it ever got made.
Ten out of ten stars, because there isn’t anything I can find wrong
with this film; it’s brilliant in every aspect.   [mercuryix]

There’s subtle humor, whacky humor and very strange humor here. The FBI probably started dossiers on everybody involved.   [SquirePM]

“The President’s Analyst” is the sort of movie they wouldn’t make today; it’s a scatter-shot spoof without a mean-spirited bone in its body. It wouldn’t even have been made a couple of years later. Richard M. Nixon, elected president in 1968 and at the top of Hollywood’s “Enemy’s List” would never have been treated as reverently and indulgently as this unnamed President (obviously LBJ, who was president when this movie was made).   [vox-sane]

The chief of the “FBR” is named Lux, a brand of vacuum cleaner, just like Hoover. Hoover had what amounted to a fetish for tall, impressive agents, so Lux is about five and a half feet tall, and all of his agents are even shorter than he is.

That height business is typical of the jokes. You have to (1) notice it, then (2) interpret it.   [rmax304823]

The film has that giddy air of laid-back sophistication that suggests that it was created by smart people, all of whom were just a little bit high on some sort of illegal substance. Rather than having the martini-sipping, Playboy magazine-style of cool detachment of Bond, the film goes for the trippy, brownies-munching cool disenchantment of Sgt. Pepper. With a bit of MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” tossed in. The result is as amusing as it is thought provoking. And it is a sensational solution to the hostility problem — assuming, of course, you don’t already have a license to kill.   [majikstl]

It is one of the early works to come out of Paramount under the leadership of the legendary Robert Evans, one of the most improbable and incredibly lucky guys to head a movie studio. But he had the touch and knew how to make decisions and take risks.The beauty of Evans’ movies like The President’s Analyst is that they definitely were not created by a committee or even the marketing department, unlike so many unctuous movies today. There was a freedom to explore an artistic, unconventional vision. And that vision was a warped melding of The Prisoner and Get Smart, with a touch of Casino Royale and Blow Up thrown in. Sure, it gets a little strange toward the end, but by that point the blue ice cubes would have done their job on much of the audience.   [dimplet]