Hollywood Goes To Washington - American Politics On Screen

Hollywood Goes
to Washington
American Politics on Screen
Michael Coyne
Hollywood Goes to Washington
Hollywood Goes to Washington
American Politics on Screen
Michael Coyne
ar+k+ro uooks
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Great Sutton Street
London rc+v onx
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published :oo8
Copyright Michael Coyne :oo8
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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Printed and bound in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Coyne, Michael
Hollywood goes to Washington : American politics on screen
+. Motion pictures - United States - History
:. Politics in motion pictures
I. Title
y+.j8oy
rsu-+: y8 + 8+8 8 o
Contents
Introduction Once Upon a Nation: The Ideology of American
Political Films y
Chapter + American Politics, American Movies: Movie
America, Movie History +
Chapter : Hail to the Chiefs: White House and Silver
Screen +
Chapter Modern Presidential Parables: John Kennedy,
Richard Nixon and Beyond
Chapter Country Boys and City Slickers +
Chapter j The Brief, Shining Moment: Political Movies
in the American Camelot +:
Chapter Enemies Within: White Hoods, Red Scares,
Black Lists +j
Chapter y Conspiracy Central +8
Conclusion Twilights Last Gleaming? +o
References :oo
Select Bibliography :oy
Filmography :+
Acknowledgements ::+
Photo Acknowledgements :::
Index ::
I believe in America . . .
Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) in The Godfather
(directed by Francis Ford Coppola, +y:)
The American Dream is quite possibly most significant of all
for the people who never actually go there.
Owen Dudley Edwards
For Owen Dudley Edwards
In June :ooj a poll sponsored by America Online and broadcast by
the Discovery Channel asked US citizens to cast their votes for the
greatest American of all time. The nal Top Twenty-ve included eight
presidents: John Kennedy was ranked sixteenth; Thomas Jeerson,
twelfth; Franklin Roosevelt, tenth; Bill Clinton, seventh; George W.
Bush, sixth; George Washington, fourth; and, just narrowly edged into
second place, the perennial favourite in such polls Abraham Lincoln.
+
The greatest American, according to this poll, was none other than
Ronald Reagan president and movie star. Reagans life is, perhaps, the
greatest American Success Story of all time. Like Lincoln, Reagan was
the rags-to-riches embodiment of the American Dream the boy of
humble origins who grew up to be president. Future generations may
come to regard him as the twentieth-century exemplar of the Dream,
just as Lincoln was for the nineteenth century but Ronald Reagans
symbolic resonance goes far beyond that.
Reagan was uniquely qualied to appeal to the aspirations of
American voters. Prior to his political career, he had been prominent
in the industry that has done most to shape those aspirations and to
dene, for US citizens and the world beyond, the essence and the
meaning of America its destiny, its democracy and its dreams. In the
American Century, running parallel to global economic and military
supremacy, the most successful example of US popular cultures
seductive soft power has been, undoubtedly, the American lm
industry. Hollywood has, in eect, functioned as a two-way mirror,
through which the world views America while Americans see only
y
Introduction
Once Upon A Nation: The Ideology
of American Political Films
Little by little, the look of the country changes because of the men
we admire.
Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas) in Hud (directed by Martin Ritt, +)
Edited by Foxit Reader
Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010
For Evaluation Only.
themselves. Film-makers have consequently used the movies to con -
solidate powerful national myths that are instructive to citizens,
reective of individual and societal aspirations, and not insignicantly
exported as a glamorized ideology of America for consumption by the
rest of the world.
Diverse strands of that ideology have manifested themselves in
hundreds of celluloid morality tales over the past eighty-plus years.
Westerners on horseback and the lone man of conscience are monu-
ments to self-reliance and inner resolve. The multi-ethnic platoons so
beloved of World War II movies are hymns to the harmony of the melt-
ing pot. The impoverished, driven youngster who rises to riches is a
testament to the virtue of hard work and the ease of social mobility.
The happy ending of the Hollywood musical is a paean to the promise
of America in essence, the guaranteed pay-o in this most wonderful
of all possible worlds: Hollywoods America is the land of happy
endings. In American movies, ideology is everywhere.
While underlying political messages are virtually all-pervasive in
American movies, however, there has been relatively little sustained
critical attention paid to that corpus of narratives dealing primarily with
US politics per se. Hopefully, Hollywood Goes to Washington will be a
step towards redressing that imbalance. The principal focus of this
volume, therefore, concerns lms set centrally and specically in the
milieu of American politics foregrounding political gures (whether
historical or ctional), and depicting expressly political melodramas
and crises on screen, ranging from bio-pics to movies about election
campaigns and, of course, conspiracy thrillers. While a number of key
issues in American life (e.g., feminism, gay rights, environmentalism)
undoubtedly have a pronounced political dimension and often impact
upon the arena of US politics, these are tangential to the genre as such,
and therefore largely beyond the remit of this book.
Over the decades, lms as disparate as Mr Smith Goes to Washington
(+), All the Kings Men (+), The Manchurian Candidate (+:),
All the Presidents Men (+y), JFK (++) and Good Night, and Good
Luck (:ooj) have attracted plaudits, controversy and occasionally noto-
riety; but despite the enduring social and cultural signicance of many
political lms, there are merely a few books devoted to this topic.
:
The
genre has not yet been subject to that sustained academic attention
aorded to, for example, the Western. Ample scope remains for further
writing on the American political movie.
8
One reason for the comparative dearth of book-length studies on
lms foregrounding themes, issues and protagonists specically rooted
in the milieu of US politics may be that these narratives are seldom
accorded attention by lm scholars as a discrete genre in the manner of,
for example, the Western, the war lm or the gangster movie. Many
classic American lms are expressly political in content without being
chiey set in the realm of US politics. Think of I Am a Fugitive From
a Chain Gang, The Grapes of Wrath, Casablanca, The Best Years of Our
Lives, A Place in the Sun, High Noon, Angry Men, The Apartment,
Elmer Gantry, Hud, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, The God -
father, The Day of the Locust and Forrest Gump. Each, in its own way, is
endowed with a distinctly political message yet none is primarily about
the world of American politics. So the huge body of lms with political
subtexts relating to life in America is also of only tangential pertinence
in this present context. Hollywood Goes to Washington is centrally con-
cerned with lm narratives chiey about American politics.
Yet the American political lm is a genre by virtue of content rather
than form. Like the thriller, which might disparately contain elements
of police procedure, detective story, robbery, murder, gangster saga,
lm noir, whodunnit or any one of a dozen crime movie scenarios,
the political lm is essentially uid. The genre is keenly attuned to the
temper of the times, eortlessly absorbing contemporary political
themes and issues, but, crucially, it is also trans-generic, and it crosses the
borders of various Hollywood genres.
Take, as an illustration, the classic political lms made in the early
+os. Otto Premingers Advise and Consent (+:) is a weighty melo-
drama, and John Frankenheimers The Manchurian Candidate (+:)
and his Seven Days in May (+) are conspiracy thrillers. Franklin
Schaners The Best Man (+) is a comedy-drama, rmly in ironic
mode. Stanley Kubricks Dr Strangelove (+) is a scathingly satirical
black comedy while its straight-faced twin, Sidney Lumets Fail-Safe
(+), is as taut a thriller as the two classics directed by Frankenheimer.
Advise and Consent and The Best Man are parables of pragmatism,
as bets narratives concerned with the compromises that constitute
political horse-trading. The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in
May are fantasies steeped in paranoia about the hidden agendas of dema -
gogic, self-styled super-patriots. The nihilistic cynicism of Dr Strange love
and the solemn good intentions of Fail-Safe are both manifestations of
impotence in the face of nuclear annihilation. So, even in that short
period (+:), a succession of intelligent, prestigious political lms

exhibited markedly diverse psychological approaches and spilled over
into several other genres. Thus content (characters, issues, plot details)
rather than specic narrative form (melodrama, thriller, satire, morality
play) establishes a movie as an American political lm.
American political lms have featured as part of Hollywoods out-
put since the early +os. The political lm has never been a high -
volume, mass-market staple, but its qualitative contribution to movie
history and twentieth-century US popular and political culture has been
considerable. Despite the trite assertion that political lms mean the
kiss of death at the box oce, the genre has proved both protean and
durable, reecting and addressing major issues and tensions at the heart
of American life. Through the emergency of the Depression era, pre-
Pearl Harbor paeans to democracy, the potential threat of domestic
fascism, the Kennedyesque pragmatism and conspiracy paradigms of
the early +os, the disillusionment and full-blown paranoia of the post-
Vietnam, post-Watergate +yos and the thrillers, satires and bio-pics
of the Clinton years to the uneasy new dawn of post-/++ America
the political lm has kept pace with, chronicled and even helped con-
gure the ever-changing American political landscape.
In this rst decade of the twenty-first century, political narratives are
very much in vogue among American film-makers. The genre has
certainly changed stylistically since the early +os, but the themes of
fairness, equality and devotion to the American ideal of democracy have
consistently remained integral to the vast majority of these films with
crucial identifiable ber-narrative components featuring prominently
and regularly.
Since the arrival of the first English colonists, mythology has played
a vital role in forging popular concepts of America, especially pertain-
ing to American ideals, history and heroism.
From Plymouth Rock to

Parson Weems and George Washington, from Lincoln lore to legends
of the West, Americas sense of nationhood was founded as much on
mythology as on republican philosophy, military victories or self-help
manuals. In the twentieth century, the most potent agent of American
mythology was Hollywood cinema. Movies were crucial in propagating
and consolidating modern American national identity (dened herein
as characteristic of, or related to, the history, culture, political phil -
osophy, social experience, myths, traditions and common origin of
citizens of the United States).
+o
Prior to the societal tumult of the +os, the overall thrust of
national identity in American cinema was celebratory, though not
always self-congratulatory. Criticism of social injustice or racial inequal-
ity was usually contained within an overall framework of consensus,
the implications being that any abuses were localized, and that charla-
tans and demagogues would inevitably be exposed and routed by men
of goodwill. This was an America of Manichaean absolutes and crystal-
lized moral parameters. On the side of the angels were Lincoln and
other uncommon common men of the people, for the people.
Meanwhile, throughout the history of the genre, the nether side of
the moral divide has been populated by an unlovely array of star -
spangled monsters: corrupt politicos (in Mr Smith), corporate bullies
(Frank Capras Meet John Doe, ++), overweening megalomaniacs
(Orson Welless Citizen Kane, ++; Robert Rossens All the Kings
Men), rabble-rousers (Elia Kazans A Face in the Crowd, +jy), racists
(Roger Cormans The Intruder, ++), strident ideologues (The
Manchurian Candidate), sabre-rattlers (Seven Days in May) and gutter-
ghters (The Best Man).
It is important to realize from the outset that the great majority of
American political lms are concerned with threats to American
++
Over half a century before Forrest Gump, Orson Welles inserted his ctional protago-
nist into newsreel footage with US presidents in his masterpiece Citizen Kane (++).
Here Kane (Welles) is seen with Theodore Roosevelt.
liberties and democracy from within. American exceptionalism, the
notion that the United States is dierent from (and, by implication,
superior to) all other societies, is discernible beneath the surface of
many American political lms, just as it constitutes part of the discourse
of several other Hollywood genres (most notably, the Western). If
America is indeed exceptional, and implicitly superior, then only
Americans may truly harm the United States. President Dwight Eisen-
hower once observed: Only Americans can hurt America, and this
sense of secur ity against foreign foes in eect lasted up until the
psychic trauma of /++. The dominant mythology of the American
political lm has held that the greatest threat to liberty and domestic
tranquillity comes from rogue citizens who, in pursuit of their own
debased agendas, reject the archetypal American values of Washing-
ton, Jeerson and Lincoln.
The supreme myth of Movie America is of a perfectible society an
Eden from which all serpents can be expelled and where good-hearted
folks of all creeds and races can live in peaceful brotherhood from sea
to shining sea. This is an America governed primarily by mature white
males, like Washington and Hollywood themselves. Since the late +os,
however, new ideological realities gender politics, heightened aware-
ness of multiculturalism have changed the essence of modern Ameri -
can national identity, the demographics of movie audiences and the
expectations of women and racial minorities traditionally excluded
from power in American society. In terms of contemporary issues,
therefore, there is certainly a world of dierence between the milieu of
Frank Capras Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+) and that of Rod
Luries The Contender (:ooo). Yet, as regards idealistic faith in the
promise of America, there is little to distinguish between the morality
and aspirations of pre-World War II Movie America and those decent
souls ghting the good ght sixty years later. The United States of
America remains Earths last, best hope.
A generation ago, at the dawn of the Reagan era, the historian
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, delineated a series of paradoxes at the heart
of American history, society and culture:
+. Experiment versus Ideology
:. Equality versus Tolerance of Inequality
. Order versus Violence
. Conformity versus Diversity
+:
j. Materialism versus Idealism
. America as Redeemer Nation versus America as One Nation
Among Many.
One or more of these paradoxes can be found at the crux of many

American lm narratives, and they have frequently been integral, and
even central, to the political genre.
First. American political movies consistently privilege experiment
(recast as pragmatism of a broadly centrist stripe) over rigid ideology,
and this applies even to the most morally complex dramas. For exam-
ple, in Advise and Consent, hard-line ideological agendas must even -
tually be subordinated indeed, discarded for the greater good of
both the smooth operation of the Senate and, most importantly, the
national interest. Nonetheless, the genre has long endorsed a dominant
(if loosely dened) ideology: most American political lms are broadly
progressive, for example, in sympathy with the little guy and down-
trodden racial minorities. The lm historian Thomas Cripps referred
to this vague aliation as conscience-liberalism, and it was vague for
a reason.
j
The Hollywood studios stood to lose at the box oce if their
lms came out in explicit support of controversial issues likely to
alienate a sizeable portion of the moviegoing public. It was precisely
this consideration, albeit vis--vis the potential loss of foreign markets,
which in +j had derailed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers plan to lm
Sinclair Lewiss novel It Cant Happen Here, depicting America under
fascist rule.
Nevertheless, it is true that most politically themed lms

are liberal in principle and orientation, especially when dealing with
Civil Rights.
Second. Issues of equality in political lms, as throughout American
culture, inevitably come down to issues of race. Apart from The Birth
of a Nation (++j), D. W. Griths epic valentine to the Ku Klux
Klan, American lms have not been inclined towards unabashed
celebrations of white supremacy. Most are in harmony with the Dec-
laration of Independences central assertion that all men are created
equal. Still, though not overtly prone to white supremacy, Hollywoods
output is often refracted through a prism of white primacy, and cer-
tainly white centrality. Most American lms feature white heroes, and
they frequently depict racial issues as problems for white society to
solve; for example, the notorious real-life racist killings at the heart
of Alan Parkers Mississippi Burning (+88) and Rob Reiners Ghosts of
+
Mississippi (+) are viewed primarily from the perspectives of white
FBI agents and a white prosecuting attorney respectively.
Yet most American political lms tend not to address racism or race
relations as principal narrative or thematic issues. Signicantly, apart
from a few tongue-in-cheek references to Southern segregation in The
Best Man, racial themes were all but ignored in the political classics
of +: and +, when the Civil Rights struggle was at its height.
Moreover, very rarely have American lms focused on rabid racists as
central characters. Such gures are usually represented as dysfunctional
personalities (Richard Widmarks psychotic hoodlum in Joseph L.
Mankiewiczs No Way Out from +jo, William Shatners smoothly
demonic Adam Cramer in The Intruder).
By contrast, Black protagonists are usually shown in a sympathetic
light, whether as noble victims (Howard Rollins in Milos Formans
Ragtime, +8+) or loyal defenders of democracy (Denzel Washington in
Alan J. Pakulas The Pelican Brief, +; Edward Zwicks The Siege,
+8; and in Jonathan Demmes :oo remake of The Manchurian Can-
didate). This representation of Black heroes as occasional saviours of
the Republic rearms the African-American role as participant and
believer in the American way of life. Still, Black characters in political
lms can be ercely critical of US society. The most striking example
is Denzel Washington in Spike Lees Malcolm X (+:). He pulls no
punches in his indictment of white America, but he still emerges as a
charismatic hero. It is, of course, impossible to conceive of a similarly
adulatory bio-pic of a comparably abrasive gure from the ultra-right,
such as General Edwin Walker (darling of Dallass far-right fringe in the
early +os) or the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
Third. Violence is an essential condiment of Hollywood fare, but the
triumph of order over violence is arguably the archetypal American
+
A superb perform-
ance from Denzel
Washington in the
title role of Spike
Lees Malcolm X
(+:).
cinema narrative (Westerns, war movies, police thrillers, gangster sagas
and horror lms are all ultimately concerned with precisely this dyna -
mic). The plot structures of political lms demand that order must be
restored by fade-out. This applies even in the most idiosyncratic
movies. In The Intruder, a racist tries to stir a Southern town into a
lynching frenzy, but he is rejected by citizens who once admired him.
In The Manchurian Candidate, the conspiracy to install a Communist
stooge in the White House through assassination is derailed. Even in
paranoid thrillers such as Alan J. Pakulas The Parallax View (+y),
Robert Aldrichs Twilights Last Gleaming (+yy) and Mark Pellingtons
Arlington Road (+), in which violence puts paid to the heroes quests
for truth, order (of an intrinsically immoral, undemocratic and dis -
honest stripe) is re-established and no doubt vigorously enforced.
Fourth. Conict between conformity and diversity in American
political lms is habitually resolved in favour of diversity, albeit within
a consensual framework. Fundamentally, this can often be reduced to a
scenario of an honourable individual versus the majority who are tem-
porarily in the wrong. Jeerson Smith ( James Stewart) in Mr Smith
Goes to Washington, Katrin Holstrom (Loretta Young) in The Farmers
Daughter (+y), Brigham Anderson (Don Murray) in Advise and
Consent, Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) in The Manchurian Candidate,
Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas) in Seven Days in May and William Russell
(Henry Fonda) in The Best Man all revolt against corruption, com -
placency or conventional wisdom. They are more concerned with
following the dictates of their consciences than with accommodating
congressional, presidential or military demands. A common under -
lying message of these lms is that there is nothing wrong with the
American system of government, as long as power rests with indi -
viduals of intelligence, integrity and goodwill. In later political lms,
however, the system per se has become an impersonal, intractable
villain. Thus the power structure prevails brutally at the end of The
Parallax View and Twilights Last Gleaming, crushing their ill-fated
heroes, who represent the last lonely voices of diversity.
Fifth. In the context of political movies, the most clear-cut resolu-
tion of all those paradoxes listed above is in that tension between
materialism and idealism. Hollywood is certainly very much a dollars-
and-cents business but, on screen, idealism wins hands down. Amer-
ican lms do not make heroes of politicians who sell out for material
gain or career advancement. Undoubtedly, the superlative idealists of
+j
the genre are Henry Fondas Lincoln and James Stewarts Jeerson
Smith. By the +yos, however, the emphasis had shifted from heroes of
unalloyed probity to innately decent men whose small ethical compro-
mises on the election trail mark the beginning of their moral downfall.
Bill McKay (Robert Redford) in The Candidate (+y:) and Alan Aldas
eponymous senator in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (+y) remain attrac -
tive, likable gures, but the entire point of these lms is their implicit
condemnation of those processes by which electoral politics inevitably
erode personal integrity. In the Manichaean world-view of American
political lms, idealism is a non-negotiable demand.
The rst ve paradoxes that Schlesinger identied as central to
American history and culture are usually resolved within the American
political lm in favour of pragmatic and democratic experiment, equal-
ity, order, diversity and idealism. Signicantly, the great ogres of the
genre Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) in All the Kings Men,
Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury) in The Manchurian Candidate,
Joe Cantwell (Cli Robertson) in The Best Man and Tim Robbins as the
eponymous demagogue of Bob Roberts (+:), for instance are openly
contemptuous of a combination of those tenets. The genre, unlike these
antagonistic characters, customarily rejects chauvinistic resolutions.
Sixth. Yet, within both Hollywood cinema and US political culture,
Schlesingers sixth and nal paradox is predominantly resolved in
favour of the concept of America as a Redeemer Nation, rather than
the less-vaunted notion that the United States is merely one nation
among many. This particular brand of American Exceptionalism is by
no means restricted to the realms of movies and politics. The most
celebrated songs to extol the glories of America are in eect secular
hymns, testifying to most-favoured nation status with the Almighty.
America the Beautiful asserts that God shed His grace on the United
States. Francis Scott Key, in the nal verse of The Star-Spangled
Banner, wrote: may the heavn rescued land / Praise the Powr that hath
made and preserved us a nation! American Exceptionalism has often
been popularly perceived in the United States not as a conuence of
geographical, historical, social, economic and political circumstances,
but rather as a God-given bequest. It is worth reecting that any
presidential candidate who dared to declare that America is just
another country and not blessed with an extraordinary national destiny,
would surely see his campaign spiral into oblivion. Such a heresy would
undermine the central tenet of that secular faith of US popular and
+
political culture: America is dierent, better, greater, than any other
nation in the history of the world. This cherished belief is, in fact, the
grand national mythology. It is an ideology in itself.
The American political movie has, likewise, subtly but surely repre-
sented the United States as a nation of extraordinary destiny. This is
explicit in the idealistic rhetoric and imagery of Mr Smith Goes to
Washington, but it is also implicit even in those relentlessly pessimistic
conspiracy narratives from the +yos onwards. The underlying
message of such lms is that if liberty and democracy can be betrayed
or subverted in America, then they can be destroyed anywhere. This
still advances the proposition of America as an innately special nation,
though their grim scenarios eschew the pitfalls of hyper-patriotic
posturing.
The world-view that pervades American political lms enjoys broad
currency in US culture. Several recurring thematic and narrative
components (faith in America as the last great hope of humanity; self-
reliant, commonsensical citizens as their own best saviours; power -
hungry, rogue patriots as the greatest threats to the Republic) amount
to a movie-buttressed ideology that can be summed up in one word:
Americanism.
Over the past three generations, the American political movie has
been a resilient, frequently neglected but quietly tenacious mirror and
shaper, barometer and vessel of US popular culture and national iden-
tity. Several of my chapters will examine representations of major
themes or issues through the lifespan of the genre; others will focus on
+y
Jeerson Smith
( James Stewart)
plans to restore
idealism to
American politics
in Frank Capras
Mr Smith Goes to
Washington (+).
dominant trends and the intriguing interrelationship between specic
lms, the era in which they were produced and the ethos they espoused.
Yet my next logical point of departure must be a chronological outline
of the contours of the genre, relating this to contemporaneous politi-
cal developments in US society, before I scrutinize individual lms in
greater detail.
I began this book by quoting the opening line from the lm of The
Godfather: I believe in America. I, too, believe in America. I was not
born in the United States, and I do not live there. According to current
neo-conservative thinking, that may be enough to disqualify me from
venturing an opinion, and to suggest that any view I may hold on US
history or politics is consequently invalid. I must emphatically disagree.
I have believed in fundamentally American ideals republicanism,
libertarianism, individualism all my life, not through any geographi-
cal fortuity of birth, but through personal conviction. And it is not as
a liberal but as a libertarian that I must confess to a certain pessimism
for the fate of the Republic unless certain present political trends go
unchecked. As this book goes to press in summer :oo8, American
society stands at a crucial juncture. Overseas, bloody conict still rages
in Afghanistan and Iraq. Certainly, at no time since Vietnam has the
United States been so divided. The American political lm is presently
part of the great debate on the direction of US national destiny. Its
vitality and continuing relevance are clearly evident in post-/++
America indeed, as old-time politicos used to say: now, more than ever.
+8
Since the early +os, the American political lm has constituted an
important part of Hollywoods output. The genre has been quali tatively
signicant rather than quantitatively substantial, but it has served as a
persistent and subtly pervasive mirror for twentieth- and now early
twenty-rst century American society, reecting those ideals, aspira-
tions, crises, turmoils and disillusions of the wealthiest, most powerful
and most technologically sophisticated nation in world history. The
supremacy of American lm from the dawn of the sound era has
unerringly paralleled Americas assumption of global dominance.
Six key phases in the genre mirror political events and anxieties in
contemporary US society and each one corresponds to a period of
considerable drama in American political, social and cultural history:
I. The Mythic / Idealistic Phase: FDR, Celebrations of Democracy,
Threats of Fascism
II. The Pragmatic Phase: Tough Liberalism in the Camelot Era,
Kennedy and Johnson
III. The Paranoiac Phase: Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and its Aftermath
IV. The Nostalgic Phase: Reagan, Bush I and the Early Clinton Years
V. The Schizophrenic Phase: Movies in the Age of Oklahoma City
and Whitewater
VI. The Apocalyptic Phase: Bush II, ++, Iraq and the Patriot Act
+
cn+r+ra +
American Politics, American Movies:
Movie America, Movie History
Libertys too precious a thing to be buried in books.
Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) in Mr Smith Goes to Washington
(directed by Frank Capra, +)
The Mythic / Idealistic Phase: FDR, Celebrations of
Democracy, Threats of Fascism
The rst political lms of the sound era emerged from Hollywood
while America was still in the throes of the Great Depression. D. W.
Griths Abraham Lincoln (+o) was a hagiographic treatment of
the life of Americas sixteenth president starring Walter Huston.
Grith, master of the sprawling epic in the silent era (The Birth of
a Nation, ++j; Intolerance, ++), crammed too much into this, his rst
sound lm, which ran for only minutes. The result was an ambitious
albeit rather plodding chronicle ranging from Lincolns birth in a log
cabin to his tragic appointment with destiny at Fords Theater. The
nal shot of the lm depicted the Lincoln Memorial bathed in rays of
heavenly light. Yet most lm-makers in the Depression era preferred a
more contemporary focus and, certainly, a less reverential approach. The
year +: witnessed a cycle of political narratives, both melodramas
(Washington Masquerade and Washington Merry-Go-Round) and come-
dies (The Dark Horse and the George M. Cohan vehicle The Phantom
President, in which the chosen candidate of political bigwigs is an
uninspiring lackey named Blair). All these lms caught the mood of a
nation which sensed that its political as well as its economic system was
in the grip of serious malfunction. A common theme was that political
solutions and national salvation lay in the leadership of decent, honest,
plain-speaking citizens guided by horse sense, genuine patriotism and
an abiding concern for the little guy in the face of special interests.
Indeed, it is possible to interpret the political lms of +: as senti-
mentally prescient (if ideologically incoherent) votes for Franklin D.
Roosevelt in the presidential election that coming autumn.
The most remarkable, most controversial political movie released at
the dawn of the New Deal, however, was Gabriel Over the White House
(+), directed by Gregory La Cava, who specialized in sparkling
comedies but produced by the enthusiastically pro-FDR Walter
Wanger, and co-scripted by the newspaper magnate William Randolph
Hearst (later the prototype for Orson Welless most celebrated creation,
Citizen Kane). Again, the president in Gabriel was portrayed by Walter
Huston; but this Chief Executive is (initially) as far removed from
Lincoln as one can imagine. Hustons Judd Hammond is a party hack
akin to those cronies who had looted Warren Hardings administration
a decade earlier. He owes his position to the party bosses, and his rst
:o
loyalty as president is to their agenda until a road accident in the
country leaves him near death.
At this juncture, the angel Gabriel intervenes, infusing the corrupt
president with his spirit (and, it seems, a substantial part of Lincolns).
It is the most explicit example of a deus ex machina in the entire genre.
This celestial visitation transforms Hammond into a fearless champion
of social justice and international harmony with the downside (clearly
unlamented within the lm) that he is just a wee bit careless about Con-
stitutional niceties. He suspends Congress, feeds the hungry, combats
unemployment, proclaims martial law, summarily executes the gang-
sters who perpetrate and prot from Americas ills and, nally, intimi-
dates all the other world powers into disarmament before destroying
the US eet, thus proving good faith and guaranteeing equality in a
peaceful new global order.
Hammond (and, by implication, the lm itself ) embraces the con-
cept of America as a redeemer nation to usher in a new era of world
peace and then retreats to the less vaunted stance of one nation
among many to ensure it is, indeed, a peace of, by and for the world
rather than a militarily enforced pax Americana. Moreover, the lm ends
:+
Apotheosis: the end of D. W. Griths Abraham Lincoln (+o).
with Hammond like Lincoln dying at the moment of his greatest
triumph, so that now the mythic, heroic (even godlike) saviour belongs
not so much to the ages as to the angels.
Gabriel Over the White House premiered four weeks after Franklin D.
Roosevelts Inauguration. The lm was a hyper-dramatized template
for presidential response to dire national emergency. Although FDRs
New Deal reforms were principally concerned with Americas eco-
nomic infrastructure rather than with law and order or global security,
both Hammond in Gabriel and Roosevelt in actuality provided +
America with the reassurance of swift, decisive, bold indeed, radical
national leadership. The reformed Hammond also fulls the mythic
ethos and expectation cardinal to both Hollywood movies and Ameri-
can presidential campaigns that one man, the right man, truly can
make all the dierence and ensure the triumph of virtue.
This faith in one good man was central to two classic lms of +, by
which time the United States had weathered the worst of the Depression
but stood poised on the brink of World War II. These two lms are, in
eect, the mythic cornerstones of the genre and its innate faith in democ-
racy. They were as fundamental to the evolution of the American politi-
cal lm as the same years Stagecoach was for the Western. These lms
were career milestones for their directors, and crucial in dening the screen
images and cementing the star iconography of their leading actors, who
were best friends in real life: James Stewart in Frank Capras Mr Smith
Goes to Washington and Henry Fonda in John Fords Young Mr Lincoln. Mr
Smith evokes both the Founding Fathers and Lincoln to demonstrate its
::
The lone hero
battling injustice:
Jeerson Smith
( James Stewart)
persists in his
libuster despite
the indierence
of his colleagues
in Frank Capras
Mr Smith Goes to
Washington (+).
young heros idealism and his determination to combat the special -
interest corruption he nds in the US Senate (a ctional representation,
but one that aroused the fury of many real-life senators). The heros very
name is an ingenious stroke: Jeerson Smith is suggestive of both
extraordinary qualities and simple honesty. Smith thus functions as both
political sage and Everyman, steeped in the classic American philosophies
of liberty and democracy, reinforced by down-home virtues of personal
honour, plain speaking and common sense (akin to the protagonists of the
political lms of +:).
In convincing Henry Fonda to take the role of Lincoln, John Ford
stressed that his lm would be centred not on Lincoln as the Great
Emancipator but rather as a youthful, idealistic small-town lawyer
and that is exactly how the narrative unfolds. Fondas Lincoln is an
amiable, self-deprecating country boy with a air for homespun wit,
yet Ford cannot help but present him as virtually a secular saint on the
brink of great destiny.
A markedly dierent portrayal appeared in +o, with the release
of Abe Lincoln in Illinois (a.k.a. Spirit of the People), directed by John
Cromwell, from the play by Robert Emmet Sherwood, and featuring
Raymond Massey as an extremely melancholy Lincoln. (Later that
same year Massey would be cast as that most contentious of Northern
icons, John Brown, in Michael Curtizs Santa Fe Trail, co-starring one
Ronald Reagan.)
Hollywood lms of the +os were just as committed to the ideals of
freedom and democracy, but they were a good deal less optimistic about
:
Man of destiny:
Henry Fonda shot
to stardom as
Young Mr Lincoln
(dir. John Ford,
+).
their inevitable triumph over tyranny. Both during and after the war to
conquer fascism in Europe, several movies warned that a domestic strain
of the same virus could slip in, unnoticed, by the back door. The threat
of home-grown fascism was one of many undercurrents running through
Orson Welless masterpiece Citizen Kane (++), widely considered to be
a thinly disguised bio-pic of the press baron William Randolph Hearst.
It was also central to the narratives of Capras Meet John Doe (++),
George Cukors Keeper of the Flame (+:) and H. C. Potters The Farm -
ers Daughter (+y). Yet the archetypal saga about domestic fascism was
Robert Rossens Oscar-winning All the Kings Men (+).
Based on Robert Penn Warrens Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All
the Kings Men reworked the life and career of Huey Long, the dema-
gogic Louisianan governor-cum-senator who was assassinated in +j.
Broderick Crawford won an Oscar for his role as Willie Stark, who
begins as an honest backwoods idealist but is corrupted and ultimately
destroyed by his ego and his insatiable lust for power. Crawfords jowly
demagogue was uncomfortably prescient of a real-life opportunist who
was just about to burst upon the national political scene.
:
Broderick Crawford won an Oscar for his performance as the demagogic Willie Stark
in Robert Rossens All the Kings Men (+).
It is worth bearing in mind that explicitly political lms have tended
to be made in eras dominated either by presidents who projected liberal
activism, and whose agendas many lm-makers have supported
(Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton), or by conserva-
tives whom many movie-makers have distrusted, perceiving civil lib-
erties to be under threat (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush). Yet during
one extremely rich but tumultuous era in Hollywood history, political
lms seemed to be largely in abeyance; and the dominant gure on the
political stage in the early +jos was not the incumbent president.
If the +jos now seem bathed in the warm glow of Dwight Eisen-
howers grin, that is nostalgia at work. At the time, the rst half of the
decade was overshadowed by a much less congenial gure. Republican
Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin ruined countless careers and lives
with his reckless bullying, wanton headline-grabbing and vicious char-
acter assassinations. Film-makers encoded criticism of McCarthyism
and the witch-hunts in Westerns (High Noon, Johnny Guitar), war lms
(From Here to Eternity, Stalag ) and Biblical epics (Quo Vadis?, The
Robe), rather than in movies focusing on contemporary politics. Films
of the +jos were bolder in certain respects, e.g., tackling institutional
corruption in Fred Zinnemanns From Here to Eternity (+j) and Elia
Kazans On the Waterfront (+j). Still, like Mr Smith, these lms ulti-
mately depended on a systemic guarantee. As long as one man stands
up to be counted, other good men in the Establishment will ensure jus-
tice prevails. Beneath sensationalized plots drawn from a best-selling
novel (Eternity) or the headlines (Waterfront), these were, in essence,
safely conservative lms.
There was a batch of explicitly anti-Communist lms, mostly long
on ideological intensity but short on overall quality. The most memo-
rable were two from +j:: Edward Ludwigs Big Jim McLain, in which
HUAC agent John Wayne duked it out with Commies in Hawaii; and
Leo McCareys My Son John, in which an All-American family (named
Jeerson, no less) is shocked to nd that son Robert Walker is a Red.
The later +jos saw a couple of aectionate portrayals of lovable but
devious old-style politicos, with Bob Hope as New York Mayor Jimmy
Walker in Beau James (+jy) and Spencer Tracys grand James Michael
Curley-type mayor (of Boston in all but name) in John Fords The
Last Hurrah (+j8). Yet during the +jos, the rst amoebae of paranoia
infected the genre politic. James Cagney as another Huey Long-type
demagogue in Raoul Walshs A Lion Is In the Streets (+j), Frank
:j
Sinatras chilling assassin in Lewis Allens Suddenly (+j), Andy
Griths media-created monster Lonesome Rhodes (blood-brother to
Willie Stark and, later, Bob Roberts) in Elia Kazans A Face in the Crowd
(+jy) and nuclear holocaust in Stanley Kramers On the Beach (+j)
all pregured ogres and nightmare scenarios that would blight the genre
and political culture over the ensuing generation.
The Pragmatic Phase: Tough Liberalism in the Camelot
Era, Kennedy and Johnson
The rst American political movie of the +os was Vincent J. Donehues
Sunrise at Campobello (+o), a roseate valentine to Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, in which Ralph Bellamy repeated his stage triumph as
FDR, with Greer Garson portraying Eleanor Roosevelt. The lm
focused on the pre-presidential FDRs battle with polio and climaxed
with Roosevelt nominating Al Smith for president at the Democratic
Convention of +:. The subtext and contemporary signicance of this
scene would certainly not have been lost on American audiences in
+o. Smith had been the very rst Catholic to secure a major partys
presidential nomination (unsuccessfully, in +:8). Sunrise at Campo-
bello was released only sixteen days after the second such nominee,
John Kennedy, had assured a gathering of Protestant ministers in
Houston that he was not the Catholic candidate for president, but the
Democratic candidate for president, who happens to be a Catholic.
+
:
Frank Sinatra as a gunman hired to assassinate the ts President in Lewis Allens chilling
Suddenly (+j).
Kennedys election ushered in the all-too-brief Golden Age of the
American political lm, which was partly a cultural response to the
Kennedy mystique. Kennedy infused the profession of politics with a
glamour, liberal toughness and sex appeal which had not been evident
in the eras of Truman and Eisenhower.
Some of the classic political movies of the early +os were essen-
tially procedural melodramas sophisticated morality fables examin-
ing the inner workings of American politics. Otto Premingers +:
screen version of Advise and Consent toned down the right-wing good,
left-wing bad posturing from Allen Drurys Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel, but the senatorial conict over a controversial nominee for Sec-
retary of State (Henry Fonda) was fundamentally a saga of honourable
against dishonourable men. Similarly, Franklin Schaners The Best
Man (+), based on Gore Vidals play of +o, pitted Stevensonesque
intellectual liberal Henry Fonda vying for the presidential nomination
against unscrupulous right-wing gutter-ghter Cli Robertson. The
political morality of these lms matched that of Mr Smith: there was
really nothing wrong with the system, and all that was required was that
good men prevail. Compared to other political lms of the +os, Advise
and Consent and The Best Man resembled +jos narratives, updated to
the +os by the incorporation of a sensational subplot (in each case,
homosexual blackmail) before nally resorting to reassuring resolutions.
Other political movies of that decade were, by contrast, less con -
dent about the systems inherent ability to protect America from
various doomsday scenarios. The emphasis in these lms was not on
political procedures, but on paranoia. At this juncture, one director
distinguished himself as the American cinemas foremost purveyor of
paranoia. Between +: and + John Frankenheimer directed a
remarkable trilogy of paranoia. Although Frankenheimers Seconds
:y
A liberal hero for
the early +os:
Henry Fonda in
Otto Premingers
Advise and Consent
(+:).
(+) is not overtly concerned with political events, it is perhaps the
most searing indictment of corporate fascism ever lmed. Yet the other
two in that trilogy are the twin cornerstones of the conspiracy genre
the lms which, more than any other, poured the paranoia into Ameri -
can political movies.
The Manchurian Candidate (+:) was an ingenious, cinematically
dazzling, half-serious, half-satirical nightmare about a US military hero
unknowingly programmed as an assassin. The lms assassination plot-
line was eerily prophetic, given its release so soon before the murders of
John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Frankenheimers next exercise in political paranoia, Seven Days in
May (+), depicted another threat to democracy from power-hungry
individuals in high positions of trust. When a liberal president (Fredric
March) signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, the ambi-
tious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Burt Lancaster) plans to thwart its
implementation by staging a military coup. The plot is foiled by the
President and a few trusted aides working against the clock, including
the Marine Colonel (Kirk Douglas), who uncovers the cabal and stands
by the Constitution. In these lms, Frankenheimer sounded warning-
bells about self-styled saviours cloaked in the Stars and Stripes.
Paranoia in political movies of the +os manifested itself in
Frankenheimers conspiracy strain, but also, in the wake of On the
Beach, in a gnawing preoccupation with Armageddon. Nuclear holo-
caust was played for laughs in Stanley Kubricks iconoclastic Dr
Strangelove (+), which concluded with the end of the world and
killed o the box-oce potential of Sidney Lumets Fail-Safe (also
+), a serious reworking of essentially the same plot. In the latter, the
US military try frantically to prevent a squadron of their planes from
:8
General Scott
(Burt Lancaster)
in demagogic
mode in John
Frankenheimers
Seven Days in May
(+).
ying over Moscow and accidentally triggering an all-out nuclear war.
The situation is only defused at terrible cost when the President (Henry
Fonda) sacrices New York in return for the accidental bombing of
Moscow. Both lms were released by Columbia, which returned yet
again to the scenario of nuclear catastropher in James B. Harriss
The Bedford Incident (+j), as Richard Widmarks obsessive, Ahab-
like Captain Finlander pursued a Soviet submarine all the way to a
mutually fatal encounter.
Widmark later revealed that he had modelled his character in The
Bedford Incident on Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presiden-
tial nominee in +.
:
Barry Goldwater was a man of absolute personal
integrity, but he was prone to ill-considered, amboyant utterances (Id
like to lob [a bomb] into the mens room of the Kremlin) that unnerved
many Americans. The + crop of liberal and anti-militaristic politi-
cal lms were, in part, unquestionably a negative response to his
candidacy. Goldwater was nothing like Cli Robertsons nasty right-
winger in The Best Man, or Walter Matthaus evil intellectual Groete -
schele in Fail-Safe, or Burt Lancasters Boulanger-in-waiting in
Seven Days in May; but all of these lms resoundingly repudiated his
decidedly right-wing ideology and each was, in eect, a cinematic vote
for Lyndon Johnson. Hence, prior to :oo, the year + saw the most
pronounced example of entertainment lms trying to aect the
outcome of a presidential election.
The Paranoiac Phase: Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and
its Aftermath
By the end of the +os the American political landscape had changed
beyond all recognition. That change was reected in the new style of
lms, which appealed to the alienated younger generation. The
America of Barry Shears Wild in the Streets (+8) and Dennis Hoppers
Easy Rider (+) bore little resemblance to the nation of Abraham
Lincoln, Jeerson Smith or even Willie Stark. The moviegoing con -
stituency that idolized Peter Fonda as Captain America in Hoppers
lm was, culturally and ideologically, light years away from his
fathers portrayal of Honest Abe and those earnest Stevensonesque-
Kennedyesque liberals he had played in Advise and Consent, The Best
Man and Fail-Safe.
:
Yet it was only in the +yos that paranoia nally became the domi-
nant trend within the political genre. By that time, the Kennedy and
King assassinations, the unwinnable, interminable and increasingly un-
justiable war in Vietnam, and the corrosive Watergate scandal which
culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon had all contributed to
a pervasive loss of faith in Americas leaders and institutions. This wide-
spread disillusion was a major factor in the election in +y of Jimmy
Carter, who had successfully presented himself as a Mr Smith-style out-
sider when he vowed that he would never lie to the American people.
On screen, this dissatisfaction manifested itself in lms which, for the
rst time, openly and overwhelmingly indicted powerful, persistent and
often faceless institutionalized menaces to US democracy. It was no use
depending on wise presidents such as Henry Fonda in Fail-Safe or
Fredric March in Seven Days in May to head up the power structure and
hence deliver unfailingly wise and just resolutions. In political lms
of the +yos, the equation had changed. Thereafter, the power struc-
ture itself was the threat.
Thus sinister motives lurked behind grass-roots populism in Stuart
Rosenbergs WUSA (+yo) and Robert Altmans Nashville (+yj), and
corporate chicanery prevailed in Roman Polanskis Chinatown (+y),
Sidney Lumets Network (+y) and James Bridgess The China Syn-
drome (+y). Yet it was natural, given recent American history, that
most of the +yos classics of paranoia dealt explicitly with assassina-
tions, Vietnam or Watergate.
David Millers Executive Action (+y), scripted by former black -
listee Dalton Trumbo, was a tenth-anniversary, left-wing take on JFKs
assassination, which suggested that this murder had been the work of a
right-wing Texan cabal. The lm ends with a voice-over, declaring that
eighteen material witnesses perished, most of them by violent means,
within three and a half years of Kennedys death. The elimination of
witnesses to an assassination was also the theme of Alan J. Pakulas The
Parallax View (+y), which featured Warren Beatty as a rogue reporter
who attempts to inltrate a shadowy corporation that he suspects is
responsible for politically motivated murders. Executive Action and The
Parallax View were awed but fascinating. However, William Richerts
Winter Kills (+y), based on a novel by Richard Condon (of Man -
churian Candidate fame), was a poorly plotted farrago which implied
that the mastermind behind the assassination of a Kennedyesque
president was, in fact, his own father.
o
The paranoid political movie addressed the Vietnam War superbly
in Robert Aldrichs Twilights Last Gleaming (+yy). As in Seven Days
in May, Burt Lancaster portrayed a renegade Air Force general at odds
with the US Government, but this time as a thorn in the Pentagons
side. Lancaster captures a missile base and threatens to launch World
War III unless the President (Charles Durning) discloses a secret
National Security Council memorandum which will reveal the brutal
realpolitik behind Americas role in Vietnam. The result was a cruelly
underrated lm, and it was Aldrichs last masterpiece.
Watergates cultural impact was evident in the decades paranoid
thrillers, particularly in Francis Ford Coppolas eerie The Conversation
(+y) and Sydney Pollacks Three Days of the Condor (+yj). Yet the
political lm that had the greatest impact in the +yos dealt with Water -
gate directly. Alan J. Pakulas All the Presidents Men (+y) framed the
scandal that wrecked Richard Nixons presidency as a detective tale,
with Robert Redford and Dustin Homan as the reporters who tire-
lessly pursue the story of a break-in all the way to the Oval Oce. Clan-
destine meetings in darkened garages and the palpable fear of campaign
workers endowed the lm with a strong sense of paranoia, but the true-
to-life ending of little guys on track to topple a corrupt president
reinforced the cosy Mr Smith/movie world-view of good men making
+
Newspapermen against Nixon: Dustin Homan, Robert Redford, Martin Balsam and
Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in Alan J. Pakulas All the Presidents Men (+y) (note
the caricature of JFK on the shelf behind Robards/Bradlee).
a dierence. Furthermore, in that years election, with Nixons hand-
picked successor Gerald Ford as the GOP candidate, All the Presidents
Men was as potent a vote for the Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter
as Seven Days in May, The Best Man and Fail-Safe had been for
Lyndon Johnson in +.
Yet All the Presidents Men was the exception to the rule of +yos
paranoid political movies. The heroes won; but in most others they
lost frequently crushed by the imperious, impenetrable and invin cible
power structure. The bleak, fatalistic resolutions of The Parallax View
and Twilights Last Gleaming attested to a wide popular distrust of the
Establishment, which was now increasingly considered to be inimical to
the interests of ordinary US citizens.
One other lm made in +y was hailed as a searing indictment of
the urban netherworld, a veritable paranoid nightmare certainly with
its own ideological undertow, though not centrally concerned with the
world of American politics. It did, however, have a subplot in which
the lms protagonist, having been rejected by a beautiful campaign
worker, decides to assassinate the senator whom she is trying to get
elected to the presidency. When this fails, he channels his violent
impulses into a blood-drenched rescue of a child prostitute, played by
Jodie Foster, from her pimp. Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver (+y), one
of the most powerful lms ever made, is a classic in its own right. Yet
it will forever have an additional resonance in American culture because,
ve years after its release, John Warnock Hinckley, Jr, a disaected
youth from a wealthy family, conated the lms assassination attempt
with the Jodie Foster plot-line and sought to impress that young
actress by attempting to kill a former lm actor who, only ten weeks
earlier, had been sworn in as president of the United States.
The Nostalgic Phase: Reagan, Bush I and the Early
Clinton Years
With the defeat in Vietnam and the disgrace of Watergate still linger-
ing in the political atmosphere, with Jimmy Carters era of energy
crisis and malaise and, above all, with j: Americans held hostage in
Iran all through the election of +8o Americans responded to a star-
spangled secular saviour who assured them that the United States
remained the last, best hope of Man, that they could still build their
:
shining city on a hill, and that Americans had the capacity to remake the
world. Ronald Reagan was a consummate super-salesman, peddling
feelgood wares to a nation eager for reassurance and renewal. He was a
Harold Hill for the +8os, with the Strategic Defense Initiative as his
equivalent of y trombones. During the campaign of +8 Reagan appro-
priated well-loved Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry
Truman and John Kennedy in his quest for re-election, posturing as a
Roosevelt of the Right while trimming the achievements of FDRs New
Deal and LBJs Great Society. Reagans campaign was drenched in folksy
populist platitudes, proclaiming morning again in America and you
aint seen nothin yet, culminating in the GOP Conventions atrociously
saccharine Ronnie n Nancy featurettes. Reagan became the Pollyanna
President from Pacic Palisades, the Popcorn Messiah for Americas
Second Gilded Age the best of all possible rich, white, developed worlds.
Yet part of Reagans political genius was his ability to evoke the feel-
good factor. This, combined with his engaging personality, nullied
much of the potential cultural opposition to Reagans brand of conser-
vatism. There were still liberal-message movies being made in the
+8os, but in many instances these condemned societal ills and injustices
past or present without any indictment of Reagan. His nickname, the
Teon President, certainly held good in consideration of the cinematic
output of the +8os. There was no sense of liberal outrage directed to-
wards Reagan, as there had been against Nixon in the paranoiac lms
of the +yos, and as there would later be against George W. Bush in a
cluster of lms from :oo onwards.
There were, however, hard-hitting, ambitious lms criticizing the
US historical record on class politics (Warren Beattys Reds, +8+); labour
relations (John Sayless Matewan, +8y); foreign policy, notably in Cen-
tral and South America (Costa-Gavrass Missing, +8:; Roger Spottis-
woodes Under Fire, +8; Oliver Stones Salvador, +8; and Alex Coxs
Walker, +8y); and racial prejudice (Milos Formans Ragtime, +8+; Costa-
Gavrass Betrayed, +88; and Alan Parkers Mississippi Burning, +88).
Signicantly, many of the lm-makers directing movies critical of
US history, politics and society during the Reagan era were not them-
selves American (Forman, Costa-Gavras, Spottiswoode, Parker, Cox).
This might suggest that most cinematic criticism of American conser-
vatism during the Reagan era was not home-grown. Yet it was also
in the +8os that one American lm-maker established himself as Holly-
woods foremost liberal critic of national hubris in both domestic and

foreign aairs. Oliver Stone chronicled the horror and tragedy of the
US involvement in Vietnam in Platoon (+8), and later in Born on the
Fourth of July (+8) and Heaven and Earth (+); he excoriated the era
of Greed is good in Wall Street (+8y), whose monstrous central
character Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) uttered that notorious
phrase; and he helmed those two monumental and controversial polit-
ical epics of the +os, JFK (++) and Nixon (+j).
Stones panoramic visions of +os US society unfolded through
the late Reagan, Bush I and early Clinton years. In the Reagan era
itself (and beyond), the most popular and populist American director
was Steven Spielberg, whose roseate, Norman Rockwell-style imagery
of Middle America chimed perfectly with the incumbent presidents
own vision. The sunny side of Main Street, USA, was a world of white
picket fences, auence and self-satisfaction (the downbeat farm trilo-
gy of +8, Places in the Heart, Country and The River, notwithstand-
ing). At its core, however, was a heart of darkness obsessed with the
defeat in Vietnam and the subsequent humiliation in Iran, when j:
Americans from the US Embassy in Tehran were held hostage for
days, eclipsing the last year of Jimmy Carters presidency. This angst
was reected in a series of lms rewriting the outcome of Vietnam
(Rambo (+8j), complete with famous question, Do we get to win this
time?; Uncommon Valor (+8); Missing in Action (+8j)) or right-wing
fantasies of ghting terrorists and Communists on home ground
(Invasion USA(+8j) and John Miliuss superior but ultimately incon -
clusive paean to an American resistance, Red Dawn (+8)).
Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stones Nixon (+j).

Despite critical volleys from Costa-Gavras and Stone on the Left
and the revanchist revisionism of Rambo and Red Dawn on the Right,
ironically, while a former Hollywood star was president, there were
comparatively few outstanding big-screen movies made about US poli-
tics per se. By the +8os, traditional-style political bio-pics had instead
become a staple of television and especially of the TV mini-series for-
mat rst launched in the mid-+yos. Among the most impressive of
the +yos crop had been two sagas of Nixonian shenanigans, Washing-
ton: Behind Closed Doors (+yy) and Blind Ambition (+y), and King
(+y8), with Paul Wineld as Martin Luther King. Backstairs at the
White House (+y) featured top Black stars Leslie Uggams, Olivia Cole
and Louis Gossett, Jr (all alumni of the epic Roots) as servants at +oo
Pennsylvania Avenue from the era of William Howard Taft through to
the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Its portrayal of the various
First Families was invariably warm, aectionate and anecdotal rather
than incisive or particularly revealing; and, in this respect, Backstairs
pregured the Consensus History-style, often cosy, representations of
several presidents in the mini-series of the Reaganite +8os.
Several +8os mini-series featured prominent portrayals of presi-
dents, including: Kennedy (+8), actually a British production (from
Central TV), with an impressive performance by Martin Sheen as
JFK; Barry Bostwick as George Washington (+8) and reprising his
role for George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (+8); Gregory
Peck was excellent as Lincoln in the otherwise embarrassingly bad The
Blue and the Gray (+8:); Hal Holbrook as Lincoln in North and South
(+8j) and North and South, Book II (+8); and Ralph Bellamy as
Franklin D. Roosevelt in The Winds of War (+8) and War and Remem-
brance (+88). In addition to these, there was a deluge of similarly
themed one-o TV lms, including a large number of who-really-
killed-JFK movies. Many of these were undistinguished and vacuous,
or prettied and trivialized, but they were all part of the essentially
complacent retro fascination of the Reagan era. Very few of the TV
movies (as opposed to the mini-series) aspired to the scope or achieved
the epic stature of Lincoln (+88), based on the novel by Gore Vidal,
directed by Lamont Johnson and starring Sam Waterston and Mary
Tyler Moore. Still, all these mini-series and TV movies were indica-
tive of a nostalgic longing for tales from American history and themes
which big-screen features had paradoxically neglected during the
Reagan era.
j
American political lms returned to cinema screens during George
H. W. Bushs term in oce. Irwin Winklers Guilty by Suspicion (++)
was an intelligent examination of the witch-hunts of the early +jos, an
issue frequently allegorized on screen but rarely chronicled directly.
Richard Attenboroughs Chaplin (+:) also harked back to the witch-
hunts, recalling Chaplins clash with J. Edgar Hoover (Kevin Dunn).
Tim Robbins directed and starred as Bob Roberts (+:), a smooth
operator who could give the populist monsters of All the Kings Men
and A Face in the Crowd a run for their money.
Yet probably the most signicant political lm of the Bush I era was
the one that helped usher him out of oce. Oliver Stones JFK(++)
was not a bio-pic of John F. Kennedy, but rather a hyperbolized chron-
icle of the eorts of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison
(Kevin Costner) to prosecute businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee
Jones) for the murder of the slain President. Stones lm not only cre-
ated a clamour for the reopening of the investigation into Kennedys
death, but it also nurtured nostalgia for a Kennedyesque hero a signi -
cant factor in the election of Bill Clinton in +:. Clintons dress
sense, posture, hairstyle and his gestures while speechifying were all
evocative of JFK and that grainy black-and-white footage of a sixteen-
year-old Clinton shaking hands with Kennedy in the Rose Garden in
+: was a neat historical coincidence and a visualization, in Kennedys
own famous phrase, of the torch being passed to a new generation.
Above all, it was brilliantly suggestive that Texas might still be voting
for George Bush, but heaven would be declaring for Bill Clinton.
Nostalgia for John Kennedy was high at the dawn of Clintons
presidency. Jonathan Kaplans Love Field, released late in +: (after
Clintons election), focused on a Texan woman (Michelle Pfeier)
whose adoration of Jacqueline Kennedy prompts her pilgrimage to
Arlington for JFKs funeral. Wolfgang Petersens In the Line of Fire (+)
starred Clint Eastwood as a grizzled Secret Service agent haunted by his
failure to prevent Kennedys assassination. Eastwoods own A Perfect
World (+), co-starring Kevin Costner (hero of JFK), was set in Texas
in + shortly before that fateful trip to Dallas the last time, according
to +os movie mythology, that a perfect world was pos sible. Nostalgia
reigned supreme in the genre around this time, as Clintons rst term
saw the release of several political comedies: Ivan Reitmans Dave (+,
feelgood Clinton), Rob Reiners The American President (+j, romantic
Clinton) and Peter Segals My Fellow Americans (+), a Grumpy Old

Ex-Presidents originally intended as a Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau
vehicle, but with James Garner stepping into the Matthau role.
Yet it was also a time for epics about controversial gures from
Americas recent past. In late +: Denzel Washington turned in an
electrifying performance in Spike Lees Malcolm X, and Jack Nichol-
son surpassed himself in Danny DeVitos Hoa, as the infamous Team-
sters leader. Oliver Stones Nixon (+j) was, surprisingly, sporadically
sympathetic towards its subject, while Milos Forman lionized Amer-
icas patron saint of pornography in The People vs. Larry Flynt (+).
Political movie narratives of light and darkness thus coexisted uneasily
during the rst half of the +os but the genre would become
seriously schizophrenic in Clintons second term.
The Schizophrenic Phase: Movies in the Age of Oklahoma
City and Whitewater
The Oklahoma City bombing on + April +j was a seismic event.
The worst terrorist atrocity perpetrated on US soil prior to /++, this
was a shocking reminder of ultra-Right extremists so far outside any
national consensus that they were prepared to assert their patriotism
by killing fellow Americans. Yet this ugliness had no resonance in the
presidential election of +. In a fairly congenial if lacklustre cam-
paign, Clinton won decisively against the Republican stalwart Bob Dole.
Dole was a gracious loser, but many GOP partisans were not inclined
to accept four more years of the man they called Slick Willie so
readily. The consequence, a further two years down the line, would be
the Whitewater hearings and the Lewinsky scandal the latter attrib-
utable primarily to Clintons own misconduct.
The transitional movie, in this respect, was Clint Eastwoods
Absolute Power (+y), in which a US presidents philandering leads to
the death of his mistress and a subsequent cover-up of this scandal by
White House sta. The President, as portrayed by Gene Hackman in
this lm, is a sexually voracious brute, with no resemblance whatsoever
to Michael Douglass gentle widower in The American President a
couple of years earlier. Yet the themes of unrestrained sexuality and
hubris were curiously prophetic of the scandal that would engulf and
derail Clintons presidency in his second term. Nonetheless, Hackmans
extremely negative character was oset by a couple of he-man chief
y
executives. Ex-ghter pilot President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) took to
the skies against Martian invaders in Roland Emmerichs Independence
Day (+), while former military hero-turned-statesman Harrison
Ford was a Die Hard-style president laying waste to terrestrial terror-
ists on board Wolfgang Petersens Air Force One (+y). Fords charac-
ter, this lm seemed to imply, was the all-action president that Bill
Clinton surely would have been if he had bothered to serve in Vietnam.
What a guy!
The year of the Lewinsky scandal, +8, was also the year that three
corrosively cynical lms about US politics went on general release.
Barry Levinsons Wag the Dog had premiered in December +y, but
was given its general release in America on January +8. Wag the Dog
oated the deliciously witty scenario of a US president who is rescued
from sexual scandal by deecting media attention towards a manu -
factured war. Only a few days later, the Monica Lewinsky scandal
broke; and, at precisely that time, Clinton was suddenly making noises
about the imminent need for renewed military action in the Persian
Gulf. Next, Warren Beatty directed and starred as Bulworth, a com -
placent, multi-millionaire Democratic senator from California who is,
in eect, owned by wealthy special-interest groups. In despair, he
decides to arrange his own assassination but then, liberated by the
prospect of impending death, Bulworth starts to tell the electorate the
truth, connecting especially with Black voters through his ingenious
use of rap. Finally, in Mike Nicholss Primary Colors (+8), John
Travolta and Emma Thompson played Bill and Hillary Clinton in all
but name in an incisive, enlightening, and none too complimentary
chronicle of the campaign of +: which had catapulted them into the
White House.
Yet political movies of the late +os were still governed by a broadly
liberal ideology. The crop of +8 warned Americans to beware insur-
ance companies and corporations (Bulworth), media-crafted illusion
(Wag the Dog) and military megalomania, Seven Days in May-style, in
Edward Zwicks The Siege. There was also another spectre hovering
over the body politic. Home-grown right-wing terrorism had reared its
ugly head in Oklahoma City in +j, and James Foleys The Chamber
(+), based on the John Grisham novel, starred Gene Hackman as a
Mississippi racist on death row for bombing a building and killing a
Jewish lawyer and his two daughters. In terms of star iconography,
this undercut Hackmans earlier heroic role as a pragmatic Southern
8
FBI agent in Mississippi Burning; but, in broader cultural terms, The
Chamber could not fail to stir memories of the Oklahoma City tragedy
the previous year. The most impressive lm about domestic terrorism,
however, was Mark Pellingtons Arlington Road (+), with Je
Bridgess historical expert on ultra-Right groups becoming increasingly
suspicious of his too-good-to-be-true neighbours Tim Robbins and
Joan Cusack. In its gnawing paranoia, Arlington Road might be deemed
a Parallax View for the Millennium.
Je Bridges, Arlington Roads tragic hero, was resurrected as the US
President in the last ctional political narrative of the Clinton years,
Rod Luries The Contender (:ooo). Joan Allen (rst-rate as Pat Nixon in
Oliver Stones bio-pic of +j) played a gifted Senator whose nomina-
tion as Vice-President was threatened by Congressional right-wingers
(led by Gary Oldman); the lm ended with Allens conrmation and the
caption For Our Daughters. Yet the very last Clinton-era political lm
was Roger Donaldsons Thirteen Days (:ooo), another slab of JFK hagio -
graphy starring Kevin Costner, this time focusing on the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Considering the fact that Stones JFK, starring Costner, may
well have helped Clinton to win the White House in the rst place, the
Clinton-era political movie had come full circle.
The Apocalyptic Phase: Bush II, /++, Iraq and the
Patriot Act
Since Americans went to the polls on y November :ooo, the last few
years have witnessed real-life political developments which purveyors
of the most fantastic ction would have been hard pushed to concoct.
The means by which the White House was attained in :ooo; the terror-
ist attacks that rocked the world nine months later; the circumstances
that led the United States and the Coalition of the Willing to attack
Iraq in :oo; the fact that, at present, almost ve years since George W.
Bush proclaimed Mission Accomplished, there is still no sign of a
cohesive exit strategy; and the USA Patriot Act of :oo+, which, under
the guise of national security, threatens to erode the hard-won liberties
of American citizens any of these might form the basis of a superior
conspiracy thriller or an epic political tragedy. Each one, if proposed in
isolation as a potential movie scenario, might seem incredible. Yet all of
them, together, are true.
American lm-makers have been particularly active in exploring the

ramications of these new political realities. The documentary lm-
maker Michael Moore has been outspoken against Americas gun cul-
ture and George W. Bushs presidency in Bowling for Columbine (:oo:)
and Fahrenheit / (:oo) respectively. There have also been several
high-quality features which, unlike those made in the days of FDR,
JFK and Clinton, are not instinctively inclined to give the incumbent
President the benet of the doubt. Niels Muellers The Assassination
of Richard Nixon (:oo), John Sayless Silver City (:oo), George
Clooneys Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj), Stephen Gaghans
Syriana (:ooj) and the remakes of two great classics, The Manchurian
Candidate (directed by Jonathan Demme, :oo) and All the Kings Men
(directed by Steven Zaillian, :oo), are markedly wary of various con-
servative, corporate and demagogic agendas, past and present.
Cultural conservatives like Michael Medved may argue that these
lms are made by Hollywood liberals who are nurturing personal
ideological agendas and are out of step with ag-waving, God-fearing
Middle America. Film-makers like Clooney, Demme, Sean Penn and
Tim Robbins might reply that they are determined not to let the Con-
stitution go down without a ght. Clearly, at this juncture in US history,
the political movie has become one of the crucial battleelds on which
the new cultural war for the soul of America must be fought.
o
The US presidency symbolizes the pinnacle of promise in American
life. Every four years, the people of the United States demand a new
vision to accompany a new (or rearmed) saviour; and that democratic
process is infused with essentially the same mythic hope that lies at the
heart of many classic American movies: the conviction that one good
man truly can make a dierence.
The presidency itself and the entire presidential election process are
part of Americas popular, as well as political, culture. Presidents, espe-
cially in our telegenic, telecentric age, are as much purveyors as they
are consumers of US popular culture. Little wonder that the presidency,
Americas greatest gift to any citizen, has enjoyed a symbiotic relation-
ship with Hollywood movies Americas greatest gift to the world.
In +8oo John Adams, second President of the United States, and the
rst one to live in the White House, uttered the heartfelt hope: May
none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof. Prior to the
turbulent +os, lms depicted presidents as wise, honest, incorrupt-
ible fatherly gures to whom lesser mortals could take their troubles.
They were family men who gave the downtrodden and the aggrieved a
fair hearing. They never lied, and they could always be relied upon to
keep their word and right all wrongs. One thing more: this mythic pres-
idential archetype was usually called Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln: The American Christ
Lincolns life was replete with the trappings of myth, much of which
was to be grist for the Hollywood mill. From an impoverished back-
+
cn+r+ra :
Hail to the Chiefs: White House
and Silver Screen
Must be the lonesomest job in the world.
Andrew Johnson (Van Hein) in Tennessee Johnson (directed by William Dieterle, +)
ground, he rose through law practice and one term in Congress to the
presidency at the time of Americas greatest crisis. He preserved the
Union by presiding over the Norths victory in the Civil War. He exem-
plied magnanimity, aiming to restore the South to the Union without
vindictiveness. He emancipated the slaves, thereby redressing the most
shameful blemish on American democracy. Finally, as though himself
atoning for all the blood shed in the four years of the Civil War, he died
at the moment of victory. Poor boy made good. Ultimate American
success story. Saviour. Emancipator. Deliverer. Unier. Lincoln is
Americas own Christ-like hero, actually assassinated on Good Friday.
It is all the stu of myth, enshrined on screen as early as ++j in D. W.
Griths The Birth of a Nation.
Grith was a Southerner with a romantic emotional attachment to
the Lost Cause, and The Birth of a Nation is, of course, notorious as
the epic lm that gloried the Ku Klux Klan. Yet its representation of
Abraham Lincoln is of a wise, restrained, sympathetic and virtually
saintly gure. Indeed, after Lincoln (Joseph Henabery) is murdered by
John Wilkes Booth (Raoul Walsh), one Southerner declares: Our best
friend is gone. What is to become of us now!
+
Albeit historically
grounded, this is emblematic of the same mythic wishful thinking
which, three generations later, was to colour Oliver Stones take on
another assassination: if Abraham Lincoln / John Kennedy had lived,
then the tragedy of Reconstruction / Vietnam would surely have been
averted.
:
Lincoln was venerated in two silent epics of +:: Phil Rosens The
Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln and John Fords The Iron Horse. Ford,
especially, would pay tribute to Lincoln and his memory in several lms
throughout his long directorial career. Apart from The Iron Horse,
Lincoln was represented in Fords The Prisoner of Shark Island (+),
Young Mr Lincoln (+) and his Civil War segment of How the West
Was Won (+:). Ford also referenced Lincoln in two revisionist West-
erns of the early +os, Sergeant Rutledge (+o) and Cheyenne Autumn
(+); and Lincolns portrait looms in the background as the Black
actor Woody Strode rises in James Stewarts makeshift schoolroom to
recite We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . in Fords The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (+:). The Iron Horse was thus only Fords
rst lmic valentine to Lincoln, but his brief physical appearance in
the story is underscored by his heavyweight spiritual signicance.
Lincoln (played here by Charles Edward Bull) is a guardian angel to
:
the young lovers in their childhood; he is a visionary, applauding the
heros fathers dream of a transcontinental railroad (one inter-title card
proclaims: He feels the momentum of a great nation pushing west-
ward he sees the inevitable); and his spirit functions as the symbol of
continental unication (linking the railways) and national unity (bind-
ing the wounds of the Civil War) at pictures end. The nal shot of The
Iron Horse is of a bust of Lincoln, accompanied by the caption His
Truth is marching on and on the soundtrack we hear the Battle
Hymn of the Republic, whose words reinforce the popular conception
of Honest Abe as an American Christ gure. The same theme con-
cludes D. W. Griths Abraham Lincoln (+o), Young Mr Lincoln and
Abe Lincoln in Illinois (+o). Lincoln is the only president in American
history with his own recurring on-screen signature tune.
Lincolns cinematic stock was especially high in the +os, begin-
ning with Griths bio-pic of +o, Abraham Lincoln, starring Walter
Huston. Other Lincoln bio-pics have excelled by focusing on one period
or another of that richly resonant American life. Young Mr Lincoln
concentrates on his days as an idealistic but canny country lawyer,
before his life was consumed by politics; Abe Lincoln in Illinois details
his political career before entering the White House; and Lamont
Joseph Henabery as Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griths controversial epic The Birth

of a Nation (++j).
Johnsons superior television lm Lincoln (+88), based on the novel by
Gore Vidal, centres on his presidency and the blood-soaked tragedy of
the Civil War. The trouble with Griths lm is that it attempts to cover
all these stages and in only minutes. Consequently, there is little
depth to the lm, so that it represents history as one damn thing after
another. The eect is akin to icking through a comic book, with few
chances to digest scenes or appreciate historically momentous events
before moving on to the next tableau.
Lincoln was a regular xture of +os period dramas. The actor
Frank McGlynn, Sr, virtually made a career of playing Lincoln (e.g.,
David Butlers The Littlest Rebel, +j; Cecil B. DeMilles The Plains-
man, +; and Fords The Prisoner of Shark Island). John Carradine,
often a shady character in Fords lms (ideal for, but never cast as, John
Wilkes Booth), played Lincoln for Clarence Browns Of Human Hearts
(+8). Lincoln was also regularly invoked to symbolize the frontier
spirit in pre-war epic Westerns (DeMilles The Plainsman, +; his
Union Pacic, +; and Michael Curtizs Virginia City, +o).
Walter Huston in D. W. Griths Abraham Lincoln (+o). The portrait in the back-
ground underscores the spiritual connection between George Washington as Founding
Father and Lincoln as Americas Saviour.
The year + was an annus mirabilis for Lincoln lore: his face was
currently being carved on Mount Rushmore; Carl Sandburg published
his four-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years; and movie-makers were embarked on two major lms which
celebrated and sanctied the Lincoln legend.
Young Mr Lincoln is one of John Fords best-loved lms. Henry
Fonda became a star of the rst rank following his portrayal of Lincoln
as a humorous but shrewd young lawyer defending two brothers falsely
accused of murder. Fords Lincoln is a paean to all the classic grass-roots
American virtues: motherhood (in the simple goodness of Alice Bradys
Mrs Clay), patriotism (reverence for the veterans of the Revolution),
sincere devotion to morality over legality (Lincolns spirited defence of
the Clay brothers), and honestly even a homage to apple pie (in the
charming but inconclusive pie-judging contest). Several scenes would
not have been out of place in one of Fords movies featuring Will
Rogers. Fondas Lincoln is a genial fellow given to kindness and cracker-
barrel wisdom, but there is already a sense of loneliness and dark
brooding about him, of the heavy shadows of responsibility and
legend gathering around. Underlying (and ultimately overriding) all
j
The fatal visit to Fords Theater: Kay Hammond and Walter Huston in Griths
Abraham Lincoln.
Fords folksy warmth is the inescapable sense of Lincolns destiny. It is
there in his early meetings with his future wife Mary Todd (Marjorie
Weaver) and future presidential opponent Stephen Douglas (Milburn
Stone), thus telegraphing their historical signicance beyond the remit
of the movies narrative. Most telling, of course, is the climactic scene
in which Lincoln chooses to go on apiece maybe to the top of that
hill (clearly the very pinnacle of human achievement). Although a
storm is brewing (the Civil War), Lincoln holds on to his stovepipe hat
and presses forward decisively, walking out of the rain-drizzled frame
into history and legend as the lm dissolves to the Lincoln Memorial
and the Battle Hymn of the Republic soars on the soundtrack. Lincoln,
ambitious, unafraid and mindful of his destiny, is thus idealized,
mythologized and immortalized. And the contemporary subtext of
the gathering storm was self-evident in +, with war brewing in
Europe.
The second bio-pic, released in the United States on +: February
+o Lincolns birthday was Abe Lincoln in Illinois (also known as
Spirit of the People), directed by John Cromwell, based on the play by
the New Dealer Robert Emmet Sherwood and starring Raymond
Massey as Lincoln. Viewed more than six decades later, this lm pos-
sesses an eerie quality not readily apparent in Young Mr Lincoln. Fords
lm is essentially bathed in light, whereas Cromwells is shrouded in
encroaching darkness. Masseys Lincoln is good-humoured but deeply
tortured. Like Griths bio-pic, but unlike Fords, Cromwell does not
shrink from those emotional torments which drove Lincoln to jilt Mary
Todd (Ruth Gordon) on their rst arranged wedding day. In another
Storm clouds
gathering: Henry
Fonda in John
Fords Young Mr
Lincoln (+).
scene, a kitchen-maid says: If they get him back there into Washing-
ton, he wont never come out alive!, provoking a startled reaction
from Lincolns wife. Abe Lincoln in Illinois is more concerned with the
cut and thrust of political campaigning than Fords lm; rightly so,
centring as it does on the more mature Lincoln. Massey, in nest
stentorian fashion, invests his characterization with wisdom, wit and
melancholy and, watching him now, he seems almost hauntingly life-
like. Possibly because Fonda went on to project a recognizably iconic
star persona in his own right, throughout Young Mr Lincoln we are
conscious that we are watching Henry Fonda, playing one of his best-
loved roles. Raymond Massey, by contrast, remained a giant of the
theatre and one of the most distinguished supporting actors of the
screen, but he never became a lm star. Thus, with no distinctive star
iconography to colour our perception, it is rather easy to forget that we
are watching an actor. Particularly in the nal scene, when President-
elect Lincoln bids his supporters farewell as he boards the train to
Washington, it is as if Massey had submerged his personality into
Abraham Lincolns. So powerful was Masseys association with the role
that, :: years later, Young Mr Lincolns director John Ford cast him in
the wordless cameo of Lincoln for his Civil War episode of How the
West Was Won (whereas Henry Fonda, by then a rst-rank Western star,
appeared in the more substantial role of a frontier scout). In any case,
Abe Lincoln in Illinois has suered rather unfair neglect in comparison
with Fords lm, and it surely merits revival and reappraisal.
Young Mr Lincoln is certainly more optimistic, warm and suused
with a nostalgic glow, whereas Abe Lincoln in Illinois seems cold and
stark by comparison. Signicantly, the most ominous scene scripted for
Young Mr Lincoln never made it into the nal print, as Ford informed
Peter Bogdanovich during an interview in +:
They cut some nice things out of it. For example, I had a lovely
scene in which Lincoln rode into town on a mule, passed by a
theatre and stopped to see what was playing, and it was the Booth
Family doing Hamlet; we had a typical old-fashioned poster up.
Here was this poor shabby country lawyer wishing he had enough
money to go see Hamlet when a very handsome young boy with
dark hair you knew he was a member of the Booth Family
fresh, snobbish kid, all beautifully dressed just walked out to
the edge of the plank walk and looked at Lincoln. He looked at
y
this funny, incongruous man in a tall hat riding a mule, and
you knew there was some connection there. They cut it out
too bad.
Instead, perhaps the most melancholy (if not actually downbeat)

scene in Young Mr Lincoln is the scene in which Lincoln visits the Clay
women while the brothers are in jail. The way he talks about his own
mother, his sister and his lost love, Ann Rutledge, all dead, makes clear
that he is projecting cherished memories onto the mother, the daughter-
in-law and the betrothed girl of this impoverished frontier family. But
that is really about as melancholy as Young Mr Lincoln gets. By
contrast, the prevalently bleak mood of Abe Lincoln in Illinois is evident
in this early exchange between Lincoln and Mentor Graham (Louis
Jean Heydt), as the latter helps the future president to improve his
education:
GRAHAM: Well, Abe, there are always two occupations open to
those whove failed at everything else. Theres school-teaching
and politics.
LINCOLN: Ill take school-teaching. You go into politics and you
may get elected, then you gotta go to the city, and I dont want
none o that . . .
GRAHAM: Whats your objection to cities, Abe? Yever seen one?
LINCOLN: Sure. I been down river to New Orleans. Dyou know,
every minute o the time I was there, I was scared? I was scared of
people.
GRAHAM: Did you imagine that theyd rob you of all your gold
and your jewels?
LINCOLN: No. I was scared theyd kill me.
Fondas Lincoln, the courtroom crusader for justice, is conceivably
an idealistic and iconic progenitor of Atticus Finch, the heroic small-
town lawyer of Harper Lees classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird
(published in +o); Masseys Lincoln, by contrast, is more akin to
Mockingbirds reclusive Boo Radley. The hero of Abe Lincoln in Illinois
is at heart a quiet, tortured soul who desires only to be left alone by
the world. His tragedy is that the world, variously represented by the
demands of a pushy wife, democracy, political necessity, the onslaught
of history and national destiny, will not simply leave him alone.
8
The most remarkable use of the spirit of Lincoln in a +os lm was
in Gregory La Cavas Gabriel Over the White House (+). The ini-
tially corrupt President Hammond is played by Walter Huston, who
had essayed Lincoln three years previously.
Following a road accident,

Hammond is imbued with the spirit of the angel Gabriel and some of
Lincolns, for good measure. He opts to use the powers of his oce as
a positive force for good. His dream is of a safer world, but he employs
fascistic methods to achieve this new order (executing leading gang-
sters without due legal process, imposing world disarmament by threat-
ening other nations with US military retribution if they fail to comply).
Hammond collapses and dies just as he signs the global disarmament
treaty (similar to Lincoln dying at the moment of ultimate victory), and
the implication is that Lincolns spirit leaves Hammond at that very
instant. Gabriel Over the White House managed the unique feat of appear-
ing to be both an endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a call for
fascist leadership. The press baron William Randolph Hearst had a
hand in the screenplay, but the MGMstudio chief Louis B. Mayer con-
demned the movie as insulting to the outgoing President, Herbert
Hoover. So among conservatives alone, Gabriel Over the White House
had both keen supporters and vehement detractors. Ten years later, al-
beit far less controversially, Lincolns spirit hung over his suc cessor in
William Dieterles Tennessee Johnson (+). Van Heins Andrew John-
son was another honest, homespun individual thrust into the White
House but with the burden of living up to his legendary predecessor.
Just as the message behind Gabriel could be interpreted in funda-
mentally divergent ways, Lincoln himself has subsequently been used
on screen to evoke all symbols to all men. In John Frankenheimers The
Manchurian Candidate (+:), the McCarthyite Senator Iselin ( James
Gregory) constantly utilizes Lincolnesque iconography. In one scene
Iselin is glimpsed studying himself in the reection of a portrait of Lin-
coln; at a fancy-dress party which a liberal senatorial opponent refers to
as a fascist rally, Iselin comes dressed as Lincoln; similarly, his sup-
porters at the Convention cavort in stovepipe hats and fake beards; and
in Iselins study there is a bust of Lincoln and even a lampshade shaped
like Abes stovepipe hat. However, American audiences had to wait an-
other generation for the most sinister on-screen perversion of Lincoln-
ian iconography. The television mini-series Amerika (+8y), directed by
Donald Wrye, conceptualized a Soviet takeover of the United States.
And perhaps the most chilling scene in the entire production was the
parade in which pro-Communist collaborators marched with red ban-

ners bearing Lincolns portrait next to Lenins.
j
By the +8os celluloid representations of Americas political past
had shifted largely to television. At rst blush this seems curiously
ironic, given that the president through most of that decade was a
former actor with both professional experience and a long-standing per-
sonal anity for recasting American history through the roseate prism
of Hollywood. So, with a former movie star as president, why werent
there more movies about presidents? The predominant demographic of
US cinema audiences in that era was (and still is) young males (esti-
mated to be in the +:: age range), most of whom were not interested
in lms about either politics or history, let alone political history. Audi-
ences in pursuit of that type of dramatic entertainment or popularized
education were thus served by the small screen. This televisual fascina-
tion with political dramas was partially a cathartic corollary of the post-
Watergate era, in which, from the mid-+yos onward, politically
themed lms and mini-series owed from the networks. Several of these
productions featured Abraham Lincoln.
Gregory Pecks cameo as Lincoln was virtually the sole redeeming
feature of the atrociously inept The Blue and the Gray (+8:). Hal Hol-
jo
The ostensibly patriotic but secretly treacherous Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury)
and her husband are surrounded by Lincolnian iconography in John Frankenheimers
+: classic The Manchurian Candidate.
brook had portrayed Sandburgs Lincoln (+yj), and he often played US
presidents during the +8os (ctional characters in The Kidnapping of
the President, +8o, and Under Siege, +8, and as John Adams in George
Washington, +8). Holbrook featured prominently as Lincoln in North
and South (+8j) and North and South, Book II (+8). Yet the empha-
sis therein was as much on bodice-ripping melodrama as on political
intricacies. In +88, however, a three-hour TV lm yielded the nest
dramatic portrait of the sixteenth President since the pre-Pearl Harbor
paeans of Young Mr Lincoln and Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
Lamont Johnsons Lincoln, based on the novel by Gore Vidal, might
conceivably be considered the most accomplished lmic portrayal of
the Great Emancipator, since Young Mr Lincoln is concerned with his
life prior to his political career and Abe Lincoln in Illinois ends with the
new President-elect bound for Washington. Lincoln is concerned solely
with his years in the White House, beginning with his surreptitious
arrival in Washington before his Inauguration, and concluding with
another train carrying his body homeward after his assassination (to the
strains of This Train is Bound for Glory; it is possibly the only major
Lincoln bio-pic to depart from the hitherto de rigeur Battle Hymn of
the Republic).
Lincoln is not another hagiography of the noblest, most honest soul
who ever drew breath, but a warts-and-all portrait of a pragmatic politi-
cian charged with the awesome responsibility of piloting the Republic
through its greatest crisis. Sam Waterston portrays Lincoln as a man
beset by incompetents, petty megalomaniacs and potentially treacherous
j+
Sam Waterston
and Mary Tyler
Moore in the
TV adaptation
of Gore Vidals
novel Lincoln (dir.
Lamont Johnson,
+88).
rivals and that is in addition to those Southern States in rebellion.
Lincoln is exceptionally good in charting the new Presidents intricate
and frequently thorny working relationships with ambitious Cabinet
members (Richard Mulligan as Secretary of State William H. Seward,
John McMartin as Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase) and mili -
tary leaders (John Houseman as General Wineld Scott, David Leary
as General George B. McClellan), with James Gammons dependable
General (and future President) Ulysses S. Grant a welcome relief from
the self-serving inactivity which blighted McClellans command of the
Union troops. Yet one of President Lincolns biggest problems is
domestic and Mary Tyler Moore turns in a superb performance as
Mary Todd Lincoln: haughty, shrewish, abrasive and ultimately
plagued by her own psychological demons. Still, Lincoln is not without
humour. When former law partner Billy Herndon ( Jerey DeMunn)
goes to the White House to ask a favour of Lincoln, his old friend is
greatly amused to be addressed as Your Majesty. Mary Lincoln is
apprehensive about her husbands agreement to Herndons request, but
Lincoln replies: If you caint commit nepotism for an old law partner,
whats the use of bein president? Another funny scene features Lin-
coln discovering Mary in session with a medium, and this would have
contemporary resonance for Americans in the late +8os, after being
regaled with tales of the Reagans consulting an astrologer. But it is
ultimately the tragedy of a good man tortured by his sense of duty, per-
sonal destiny and the interminable carnage of the Civil War (Think
how I must watch while this blood lls up this room, and now its near
to drowning me!). However, even this impressive TV lm is unlikely to
be the last word on Lincoln. Steven Spielberg is planning a big-screen
bio-pic starring Liam Neeson as Lincoln, due for release in :oo8.
Clearly, there is mileage in the old icon yet.
The Presidents on Film: From George Washington
to Dwight D. Eisenhower
After Lincoln, a century would elapse before the United States elected
another president who would be invested with the same emotive and
mythic resonance largely because of a similarly tragic end. The
Kennedy era coincided with the waning certitudes of that Manichaean
morality which had traditionally been peddled by classical Hollywood.
j:
Yet John Kennedy was the thirty-fth president; Lincoln had been the
sixteenth. How has Hollywood dealt with the lives and careers of those
other men who occupied the presidency through seven generations,
book-ended by two military heroes, from the birth of the Republic to
the Cold War?
A surprising number of presidents have been virtually ignored by
Hollywood, and it would be tedious and in no way illuminating to
recite the extensive list of presidential walk-ons and bit-parts in lms
through the decades. We are concerned here with lms in which Amer-
ican presidents have gured centrally or, at least, signicantly.
George Washington featured as a supporting character in a number
of silent-era epics, including D. W. Griths America (+:), but he
was not appropriately lionized on celluloid until the +8os; and, even
then, that was on television, rather than in a theatrically released feature.
Barry Bostwick portrayed the General in the +8 mini-series George
Washington (rst in war) and then reprised the role in the +8 sequel
focusing on his years in the White House, George Washington II: The
Forging of a Nation (rst in peace). Other actors have played the role
with varying degrees of success. Peter Graves registered authoritatively,
albeit briey, in the +y mini-series The Rebels. However, Kelsey
Grammers Washington in the :oo TV lm Benedict Arnold: A Ques-
tion of Honor is often unpleasantly reminiscent of the actors most
famous characterization; especially when smugly boasting of sexual
conquests to the pre-traitorous Arnold (Aidan Quinn), Grammer
comes across as a pompous braggadocio, more redolent of Frasier Crane
than of the Father of the Country. Yet, in the nal analysis, the George
Washington of history and even of myth is too correct, too bound up
with the Parson Weems image of the somewhat tedious, strait-laced,
good little boy grown up and frankly, not enough of a swashbuckler
to be the stu of which movie dreams and legends are made.
The actor William Daniels made his TV debut portraying John
Quincy Adams in an episode of the Hallmark Hall of Fame in +j:, and
he went on to play several members of the Adams clan throughout the
+yos. He played John Adams in the +y: musical , then later
marked the Bicentennial by portraying John Quincy Adams in the thir-
teen-part TV series The Adams Chronicles (+y). He was Samuel
Adams in the +y8 mini-series The Bastard, and then played John
Adams in the next years sequel, The Rebels. (Intriguingly, his very next
assignment thereafter was as G. Gordon Liddy in George Schaefers
j
TV mini-series of Blind Ambition, +y). Besides Danielss sterling
eorts on behalf of the entire family, the Adamses were best served on
screen by Hal Holbrooks cameo as pre-presidential John opposite Bost-
wicks George Washington, and by Anthony Hopkinss tour de force as
post-Presidential John Quincy in Steven Spielbergs Amistad (+y)
in which, by contrast, Nigel Hawthornes incumbent President Martin
Van Buren appears appallingly precious and ineectual.
Third president Thomas Jeerson was an intellectual colossus but,
again, this is not the stu of cinematic heroism. Nick Nolte, an actor
of immense physical power and expert in conveying simmering vio-
lence, gave an admirably low-key, restrained and sensitive performance
as Jeerson in Paris (+j). James Ivorys lm centred on Jeersons
pre-Presidential career as Americas rst ambassador to France, and
had more emphasis on his potential and putative love aairs than on
political wrangling. He is irresistibly drawn to the married Maria Cosway
(Greta Scacchi), but instead he takes as his mistress the young slave
Sally Hemings (Thandie Newton). A slaveholder who realizes the
American Revolution is incomplete due to the Founding Fathers failure
to address the problem of slavery conclusively, Jeerson is harangued
by his own daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) about the injustice and inequity
of the peculiar institution, and the lm ends with the future president
vowing to give Sallys restive brother his freedom.
Jeersons successor, James Madison, was beset by romantic troubles
of a dierent order in Frank Borzages lively costume melodrama
Magnicent Doll (+). Burgess Merediths Madison is quiet, gentle,
unassuming and a genuine patriot, to whom the widow Dolley Payne
Todd (Ginger Rogers) is instinctively drawn on account of his simple
goodness. Yet before succumbing to Madisons shy admiration, Dolley
j
Nick Nolte as
Thomas Jeerson
and Greta Scacchi
as Maria Cosway
in James Ivorys
Jeerson in Paris
(+j).
is wooed by over-ambitious Vice-President Aaron Burr (David Niven,
of all people), before exposing him as a traitor. An enjoyable though
ludicrous romp, Magnicent Doll is Hollywoods sole memorial to Madi-
son a lmic fate marginally better than that of the fth President,
James Monroe, who has eectively been forgotten by US sound-era
cinema.
The pre-Lincoln era president who has received the most cinematic
attention was the rst to be ratied by popular election: Andrew Jack-
son. Just as Raymond Masseys performance as Abe Lincoln in Illinois
made him a natural choice to play Lincoln in How the West Was Won, in
Jacksons case two actors portrayed this rambunctious icon of early
American history so eectively that each one returned to the role a
number of years later.
Lionel Barrymore played Old Hickory in Clarence Browns The Gor-
geous Hussy (+). The central focus was on Jacksons glamorous, spir-
ited young friend Peggy Eaton ( Joan Crawford), whose social ostracism
at the hands of the Washington elite prompted Jacksons fury, since it
reminded him of the snide back-biting of the election campaign that
jj
Charlton Heston as young Andrew Jackson, held at gunpoint by Lewis Robards
(Whiteld Connor) while ghting for the honour of his beloved Rachel (Susan
Hayward), in Henry Levins The Presidents Lady (+j).
had hounded his beloved wife Rachel (Beulah Bondi) to death. In +j:
Barrymores Jackson was a crusty elder statesman nearing the end of
his life, long out of politics but a passionate champion of statehood for
Texas, in Vincent Shermans Lone Star, which was principally con-
cerned with whether gorgeous Ava Gardner would ultimately fall
happily into the arms of soldier of fortune Clark Gable (she did, of
course). The following year, Henry Levins The Presidents Lady starred
Charlton Heston as a youthful Jackson, falling hard and ghting even
harder for the honour of Rachel (Susan Hayward). The lm concludes
poignantly with Jackson newly inaugurated but personally devastated
by Rachels recent death, leaving him to go forward and serve his
country alone. Heston was to return as Jackson, nicknamed Old Hawk-
face, in Anthony Quinns The Buccaneer (+j8), a remake of the +8
adventure directed by Quinns then father-in-law, Cecil B. DeMille.
The top-billed hero of Quinns lm was Yul Brynners swashbuckling
pirate, Jean Latte, whose aid to Jackson proved crucial to Americas
victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans; but Heston
invested his cameo role with enormous authority, in no small degree
due to his previous association with the role in The Presidents Lady.
The judgements of both history and Hollywood have decreed that
the occupants of the White House after Jackson and before Lincoln
were a fairly unimpressive bunch, so no cinematic mythologies sur-
round the names of Martin Van Buren (apart from Nigel Hawthornes
eete characterization in Amistad), William Henry Harrison, John
Tyler, James Knox Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin
Pierce or James Buchanan.
Honest Abes successor, however, was the subject of a + bio-pic
directed by William Dieterle and starring Van Hein in perhaps the
nest performance of his career. Tennessee Johnson told the tale of
Andrew Johnson, a runaway tailors apprentice who arrives at a small
Tennessean village with manacles still on his ankles and winds up as
President of the United States. A paradigm of the rags-to-riches
scenario, albeit with political distinction substituting for wealth, the
early part of Tennessee Johnson runs like a precursor to one of the great
lmic ruminations on American history and politics: John Fords The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (+:). Like James Stewarts earnest
young lawyer in Fords classic, Heins Johnson begins as a powerless
man who comes to town and raises the political consciousness of his
equally poor and disenfranchised neighbours. He becomes a devoted
j
jy
champion of law and order although, whereas Stewart in Valance
abhorred the idea of gunplay but nally came round to acknowledge its
inevitability (When force threatens, talks no good any more!), the
biggest mistake of Johnsons life is to pull a gun at a political meeting,
from which tragedy ensues. Thereafter, he averts further bloodshed by
calming his irate friends and insisting that they settle their political
grievances by ballot rather than with bullets. Convincing his fellow
mudsills of their stake in American democracy (Its our sh in the
stream, our ag on the fort), Johnson is elected sheri, thus launching
him on the path that will: take him to the US Senate; incur the anta -
gonism of fellow Southerners as he supports and ghts for the Union
in the Civil War; lead Lincoln to choose him as his vice-presidential
candidate in +8; and, nally, catapult him into the White House
following Lincolns assassination at Fords Theater.
A crucial subplot of Tennessee Johnson, as in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, is
the heros early yearning for literacy as his means of self-advancement.
Here, Johnson is taught to read by the village librarian, Eliza McCardle
(Ruth Hussey), who also gives him courage to believe he is as good as
any other man, which in turn gives him the courage to believe he is
good enough for her. Eliza thus symbolizes Woman as agent of civiliza-
tion, nurturer and champion of her husbands innate if untapped
potential. Signicantly, in Tennessee Johnson, the woman leads the man
to literacy. Later, in Liberty Valance, these roles are reversed. James
Stewart comes West already convinced of the sanctity of literacy and
legality. On the blackboard in his makeshift classroom is written: Edu -
cation is the basis of law and order. Rancher John Wayne, having lost
the uneducated waitress he loved to Stewart, tells his rival: You taught
her how to read and write. Now give her something to read and write
about. Literacy is vital to advancement in the American political lm.
Curiously for this genre, but accurately in this context, the hero of
Tennessee Johnson starts out as a political opponent of Lincolns. We
hear Johnson, as a Jacksonian Democrat, enthusiastically declaring that
he hopes Lincoln will be defeated in the +8o election but also stress-
ing to his unruly fellow citizens that, whoever wins, he stands four-
square behind the Union. Come secession, he is the sole Southerner to
remain in the US Senate and, as a Northern general in the Civil War,
he saves Nashville for the Union. He is nominated for the vice-presi-
dency over the objections of Northern hard-liner Thaddeus Stevens
(Lionel Barrymore, the once and future Andrew Jackson), who wishes
to impose a harsh peace on the soon-to-be vanquished South. Yet the
Presidents envoy informs Stevens: Mr Lincoln does not approve of
vengeance on anyone.
This hints at the saintly reverence in which Lincoln is held and
Johnson, initially his opponent, becomes a rm believer in Honest
Abes goodness and righteousness. The lm reinforces its perception
of Lincoln as set apart from and implicitly above other men by keeping
him o-camera in much the same way as Charlton Heston is allowed to
behold the face of Christ in William Wylers Ben-Hur (+j), but we,
the audience, are not. When Johnson turns up intoxicated at the Inau-
guration we never see Lincoln just a close-up of his stovepipe hat.
Johnson berates himself for having let the great man down, but Elizas
encouraging words also attest to the lms hagiographic representation
of its unseen spiritual hero: Mr. Lincoln sees deep into all hearts.
Right on cue comes a letter from Lincoln exonerating Johnson of blame
and shame, which he forever after carries with him, and which he later
quotes in his speech to the Senate hell-bent on impeaching him, using
this letter as a document of almost talismanic power. That speech also
provided the lms most explicit contemporary parallel. Audiences of
+ could easily have compared Tennessee Johnsons description of
Emperor Napoleon III with a warning about Hitler:
While we were ghting one another, a European tyrant master
of the strongest army in the world seized our sister republic of
Mexico. If we continue a divided nation, the day will come when
still stronger armies and eets from overseas will conquer and
enslave not only our Central and South American brethren, but
ourselves as well! As our forefathers knew united we stand,
divided we fall.
Tennessee Johnson is a ne, although now largely forgotten, bio-pic
about a poor, lowly-born man thrust into the eye of the whirlwind by
the cruellest of fates. The spirit of the slain Lincoln constantly hangs
heavy over Johnson, particularly during one scene in which Eliza
observes that the White House is full of ghosts, and her husband, stand-
ing before a portrait of the Great Emancipator, responds: Ghosts that
are hard to live up to.
Curiously, there has been no bio-pic of that other Civil War general
propelled into the White House. Ulysses Simpson Grant stalks the
j8
j
background of many Westerns, such as John Fords The Horse Soldiers
(+j) and his Civil War episode of How the West Was Won. Yet no
major lm has focused on Grant front and centre despite Fords own
best eorts to get such a project o the ground, as he told Peter
Bogdanovich: Ive always wanted to do a feature on Grant I think its
one of the great American stories but you cant do it. You cant show
him as a drunkard, getting kicked out of the Army.
Nor do any bio-pics lionize the lives of that obscure run of late nine-
teenth-century presidents: Rutherford B. Hayes, James Gareld,
Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison although
twenty-fth President William McKinley was a secondary but pivotal
character (played by Frank Conroy) in the Robert Taylor-Barbara
Stanwyck lm This Is My Aair (+y). That very ne actor Brian
Keith appeared as McKinley in the mini-series Rough Riders, shortly
before his death in +y. In one respect, this casting was ironic. John
Milius, the director of Rough Riders, has a keen sense of both Ameri-
can and cinema history, and he had cast Keith to powerful eect as
Theodore Roosevelt in his epic The Wind and the Lion (+yj). Yet, in
Rough Riders, the ailing Keith was relegated to a back seat as McKinley
while Tom Berenger took centre stage as the irrepressible TR.
Teddy Roosevelt, the most colourful and vigorous of all presidents,
has, on the whole, been poorly served by Hollywoods version of history.
This was the man who transformed his hitherto relatively cloistered
high oce into the bully pulpit. Roosevelt made the presidency the
vital and central focal point of US political culture at precisely the same
time that movies, in their infancy, were fast becoming the most popu-
lar form of mass entertainment for the majority of Americans; and he
was also the rst president to boost his image through signicant use of
newsreel lm and recordings of his voice.
y
In a life crammed with
adventure out West, personal tragedy (he lost his rst wife and his
mother on the same day), the heroism of San Juan Hill, the drama of
acceding to the presidency after McKinleys assassination and the irony
of enthusiastically supporting US entry into World War I, in which he
lost a son (and never recovered from that loss), there was ample mater -
ial for the most lavish of Hollywood bio-pics. Roosevelt was not only the
very rst president to appear on lm, but his personality and his life
story were made for Hollywood.
Roosevelt brought the presidency centre stage because that was
where he loved to be. He integrated the presidency into the cataclysmically
expanding US news media culture; and Teddy, more than anyone
else, introduced the concept of machismo into US political life. The
title of showman could have been invented for him. Yet Brian Keiths
supporting turn in The Wind and the Lion is the high point of Holly-
woods engagement with Theodore Roosevelt. Sidney Blackmer
played TR in This Is My Aair in +y and reprised the role half a
dozen times over the ensuing decade.
8
John Alexander played a harm-
lessly deluded madman who believed he was TR in Frank Capras
Arsenic and Old Lace (+), then essayed the genuine article for the
Bob Hope comedy Fancy Pants (+jo). Teddys larger-than-life per-
sonality seemed as suited to comedy as to historical drama. James
Whitmore turned in a superb performance as TR in his one-man show
Bully: An Adventure with Teddy Roosevelt (+y8, directed by Peter H.
Hunt) after similar triumphs as Will Rogers and Harry Truman.
Recently, Robin Williams has played him for laughs again in Night at
the Museum (:oo); but that is about it. The John Milius epics of +yj
and +y (the latter made for television) are the most ambitious
productions to feature the rst President Roosevelt. So far, Teddy has
never been treated to that big-screen, high, wide, handsome, multi-
million-dollar bio-pic he deserved and undoubtedly would have
loved.
Roosevelts successor, William Howard Taft, and the three Repub-
lican presidents of the +:os, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and
Herbert Hoover, received no major celluloid treatment prior to the +y
TV mini-series, Backstairs at the White House. Yet one of the greatest
paradoxes of cinema history and the US political genre is that perhaps
the most ambitious of all big-screen presidential bio-pics (with only
Oliver Stones Nixon as a serious rival) was about a man distinguished
by the cinematically unappealing trait of formidable intellect, rather
than the strenuous life of derring-do la Theodore Roosevelt.
Henry Kings Wilson (+), a labour of love by Twentieth Century-
Fox supremo Darryl F. Zanuck, was a sumptuous but soporic paean to
Americas twenty-eighth President, lmed in stunning Technicolor in
an era when politically themed lms were customarily in monochrome.
Woodrow Wilson had endeavoured to keep the United States out of
World War I but was eventually compelled to commit to the conict in
the spring of ++y. Determined that this would, indeed, be the war to
end all wars, Wilson staked his reputation, his political fortunes and his
sacred honour on the ratication of the League of Nations. He was
o
+
thwarted by a bloc of Republican senators concerned about the over -
extension of US blood and treasure in a never-ending ood of far-o
foreign wars. Wilsons nationwide tour campaigning on behalf of the
League wrecked his health and he suered a stroke. Thereafter, his wife
Edith (Geraldine Fitzgerald) supervised and limited the Presidents
administrative workload. The Democrats lost the election of +:o, the
Treaty endorsing the League was rejected by the US Senate, and
Wilson left the White House a broken man.
Darryl F. Zanuck was a Republican but not an isolationist. He
believed that Americas decision to remain aloof from the League had
contributed to the outbreak of World War II. His hagiographic salute
to Wilsons doomed idealism eectively equated Wilson with FDR,
insisting that the mistake Americans made after World War I should be
avoided, at all costs, in the wake of World War II.
Wilson was por-

trayed by Alexander Knox, a competent if generally uncharismatic
Canadian performer who began a curious tradition of non-American
actors playing US presidents (others include: Anthony Hopkins as both
John Quincy Adams and Nixon; Nigel Hawthorne as Van Buren;
Kenneth Branagh as Franklin Roosevelt; and Liam Neeson in Spiel-
bergs forthcoming bio-pic of Lincoln).
Wilson certainly embraces the concept of America as a redeemer
nation, evident in the scene with Wilson speaking from a oodlit
boxing-ring during the +:o election:
My great dream is, that as the years go on, the world will turn to
America more and more for those moral inspirations which lie at
the basis of all freedom. And that America will come into the full
light of the day, when all the world shall know she puts human
rights above all other rights. And that her ag is not only the ag
of America, but the ag of humanity.
Wilsons decency shines through in his pithy exchanges (I havent
thought to consider this war in terms of dollars and cents . . . Itd be the
easiest thing in the world for me as president to ask for a declaration of
war. The man on horseback is always a hero. But I wouldnt have to do
the ghting). Yet, when it comes to public speechifying, Knoxs Wil-
son (however accurately) is too cold, sti and preachy to be appealing.
The lm shares the same problems. Wilson fails to make the grade as a
rousing movie hero.
We see Wilson in his private moments as warm, humorous and even
vulnerable, especially in those scenes pertaining to the illness and death
of his rst wife and there are the customary invocations of earlier
presidential heroes. Just before announcing Americas entry into World
War I, he stands thoughtfully before a giant portrait of George Wash-
ington and we hear Yankee Doodle on the soundtrack; then, as he
crosses the room to gaze upon a painting of Lincoln, the music segues
into The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
+o
By coming to his momentous
decision he is encouraged by, and living up to the ideals of, Americas
great Founding Father and her Christ gure. It is all wonderfully
mythic. Still, in his campaign for the League he comes across as too
obstinate and, on occasion, unpleasantly messianic. Moreover, at +j
minutes, like many other self-styled messiahs, he outstays his welcome.
As with Tennessee Johnson, Wilsons central conict comes down to
the post-war clash of wills between a president and powerful congres-
sional opposition, in this case anti-League Republican senators led by
the Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (Sir Cedric Hard-
wicke). In Tennessee Johnson, Van Heins plebeian hero arouses audi-
ence sympathy. Yet the battle between Wilson and Lodge is a conict
:
Alexander Knox as Woodrow Wilson on the campaign trail in producer Darryl F.
Zanucks often too-stately hagiography of the :8th President, Wilson (dir. Henry
King, +).
between patricians, and Wilson possibly had its nose too high in the air
to appeal to most American cinemagoers. It was nominated for ten
Oscars and won ve, but lost out on Best Director, Best Actor and Best
Film to Leo McCareys and Bing Crosbys popular triumph Going My
Way (+). Despite lavish production values and enthusiastic reviews,
Wilson is not revered or remembered with aection in the manner of
Young Mr Lincoln or Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The director Henry
King was a superb chronicler of Americana, but his attempts to evoke
a nostalgic glow for a bygone America misred here. The sing-songs
round the old family piano just slow up the proceedings, and there is
way too much of the Boola-Boola spirit. One scene features Charles
Coburn as a family friend and university colleague explaining his
support of Wilson for President in ++:: Teddy Roosevelts a Harvard
man. Bill Tafts from Yale. And Id give ve dollars of my money any
day to let a Princeton boy have a crack at both of them in the same
game. It sounds a lot like government of the privileged by the privi-
leged. Quite likely Lincoln and certainly Andy Jackson must have been
spinning in their graves.
The next presidential bio-pic of note focused on another patrician
Democrat. But whereas Wilson was an idealist whose health was des -
troyed during his time in the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was a supreme pragmatist who surmounted his aiction with polio to
attain the greatest prize in American political life. In FDRs case, the
tragedy of ill health preceded his presidency. Vincent J. Donehues
Sunrise at Campobello (+o) starred Ralph Bellamy (reprising his stage
role) as FDR and Greer Garson as Eleanor Roosevelt. Unlike Tennessee
Johnson, Wilson or Oliver Stones Nixon, but akin to Jeerson in Paris,
Young Mr Lincoln, Abe Lincoln in Illinois and John F. Kennedys
wartime exploits in PT (+), Sunrise at Campobello focused not on
a presidents term in oce but on those personal trials and challenges
of earlier years which illuminated his character and proved him an
inspiring choice to lead the nation. Hence, Sunrise centred on FDRs
battle with polio (as did Joseph Sargents :ooj television lm Warm
Springs, starring Kenneth Branagh as FDR and Cynthia Nixon as
Eleanor). Sunrise was generally entertaining and uplifting. Yet, at only ten
minutes shorter than Wilson, its inordinate length worked to the lms
detriment. Moreover, appearing at the dawn of the ideologically con-
tentious +os, Sunrise was virtually the last hagiographic presidential
bio-pic, followed in this respect solely by PT . Ralph Bellamy
became so associated with FDR in American popular consciousness,

however, that he was the natural choice to portray Roosevelt in the epic TV
mini series The Winds of War and War and Remembrance in the +8os.
Franklin D. Roosevelt has been lionized in other high-quality tele-
vision productions, most notably Eleanor and Franklin (+y) and its
sequel Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (+yy), both
directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Jane Alexander and Edward
Herrmann in the title roles, and FDR: The Last Year (+8o), directed
by Anthony Page and starring Jason Robards. FDR also featured as a
supporting character in two +yy movie bio-pics of controversial right-
wing icons of the Cold War era. Real-life blacklist victim Howard Da
Silva portrayed FDR in Larry Cohens The Private Files of J. Edgar
Hoover (with Broderick Crawford as Hoover), while Dan OHerlihy
essayed Roosevelt in Joseph Sargents MacArthur, the Rebel General,
which starred Gregory Peck in the title role.
Ed Flanders portrayed Harry Truman, MacArthurs nemesis,
opposite Peck. Flanders had already played Truman in two television
productions of +y, George Schaefers Truman at Potsdamand Daniel
Petries Plain Speaking (and in +8: he supplied Trumans voice for
Terence Youngs Inchon, the epic misre nanced by the Reverend Sun
Myung Moon). E. G. Marshall registered strongly as Truman in
Anthony Pages +y TV movie, Collision Course: Truman vs. MacArthur
(with Henry Fonda as the General). Trumans historical stock had risen
considerably by the mid-+yos. In the wake of Watergate, many Ameri -
cans grew more appreciative of a president who had dealt in blunt,
unadorned truth and who had left the White House no wealthier than
when he entered it. The most engaging portrayal of Truman came
courtesy of James Whitmores Oscar-nominated one-man show Give
Em Hell, Harry! (+yj), directed by Steve Binder and Peter H. Hunt.
Essentially a lmed recording of a two-act play, Whitmores superbly
entertaining tour de force was Oscar-nominated but lost out to Jack
Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Still, this little-seen
and rarely revived movie aorded a refreshing reminder of the candour
and moral character which ought to characterize the occupant of the
White House. Twenty years later, Frank Piersons superior TV bio-pic
Truman (+j) echoed that endorsement, with a rst-class perform-
ance from Gary Sinise (who then went on to play a more abrasive
Southern politician in the title role of John Frankenheimers George
Wallace in +y).
Television lms featuring Dwight D. Eisenhower have alternated

between the wartime and peacetime phases of his career. The +y
mini-series Ike, directed by Boris Sagal and Melville Shavelson, with
Robert Duvall, and Robert Harmons TV lm Ike: Countdown to D-
Day (:oo), with Tom Selleck, were tributes to the General. Ike, as
president, was a supporting xture in several TV dramas. Andrew Dug-
gan played Ike in Jud Taylors Tail Gunner Joe (+yy), Robert E.
Collinss J. Edgar Hoover (+8y) and Michael OHerlihys Backstairs at
the White House (+y). Backstairs was a celebratory chronicle of patri-
otic service, the real-life story of two Black maids at the White House,
Maggie Rogers (Olivia Cole) and her daughter, Lillian Rogers Parks
(Leslie Uggams). This spanned the tenures of Taft (Victor Buono),
Wilson (Robert Vaughn), Harding (George Kennedy), Coolidge (Ed
Flanders), Herbert Hoover (Larry Gates), FDR ( John Anderson),
Truman (Harry Morgan) and Eisenhower (Andrew Duggan). The six-
hour saga ends in January ++. Maggie has died. Lillian decides to
retire, having grown old in the service of eight presidents. As she leaves
at the end of Eisenhowers second term, the White House is bathed in
sunlight, and the old woman walks away, to the echo of the Inaugural
exhortation of Americas new President: Ask not what your country
can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
j
The headline that
got it wrong: Gary
Sinise as Truman
(dir. Frank Pierson,
+j).
The era from John Fitzgerald Kennedys Inauguration to Richard
Nixons resignation has had an unparalleled hold on the imagination of
modern America. The +os had initially appeared to herald a new op-
timism and idealism, but the pervasive inuence of television made
Kennedys murder an instantaneous global trauma. It was the rst act
in a national nightmare that lasted a decade. Within a year, race riots had
begun to erupt in major US cities, and ames would engulf more than
a hundred of them before the +os drew to their bloodied, wearied
close. Within two years, Lyndon Baines Johnson had increased the
American military commitment to Vietnam. Assassins would claim the
lives of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, just two months
apart, in the summer of +8 and LBJ was hounded from oce, a
broken man denounced as a child killer. Yet, far from bringing us
together as he had promised in the election of +8, Johnsons succes-
sor would eventually give way to his own worst paranoid impulses, and
he became mired in a scandal with which his name will forever be
linked. In that decade between Dallas and Watergate, j8,ooo young
Americans died in Vietnam. Little wonder that, even now, millions of
Americans dolefully recall :: November + as the day the American
Dream soured irrevocably. In a very real sense, the United States has
never enjoyed the same unforced optimism or the same sureness of pur-
pose since the day those shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. Many movie-
makers have used their art to mourn Americas loss and to ask the
reason why.
cn+r+ra
Modern Presidential Parables: John
Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Beyond
Power is not a toy that we give to good children. Its a weapon. And the
strong man takes it and he uses it.
Ex-President Art Hockstader (Lee Tracy) in The Best Man (directed by Franklin
Schaffner, +)
y
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Americas Prince Charming
If John Kennedy had not existed, Hollywood might have been hard
pressed to invent him. He was the rst truly telegenic politician of the
telecentric age. The details of his political legacy, his family, his puta-
tive romances and, most of all, his murder have all become the stu
of legend. In the decades since his death, he has come to represent a
plethora of myths to a pluralist society, and his enduring appeal extends
far beyond Americas shores. Handsome hero-warrior. Poet-statesman.
Favourite son of one downtrodden race, staunch defender of another.
Witty, charismatic, blessed with all the gifts of the worlds richest
nation. Young war hero who became his eras greatest hope for peace,
but vigilant in Americas interests like the presidential eagle, bearing
the olive branch in one hand and a cluster of arrows in the other. Fallen
father-leader, his loss all the more tragic because he was so youthful.
There was much to regret and mourn in the passing of such a man.
John Kennedy has come to symbolize all myths to all men, but chief
among these is his image as a latter-day Lincoln. The John F. Kennedy
Library in Boston stocks a postcard titled Lincoln and Kennedy
Coincidence or Fate?, detailing sixteen common points of reference
between the lives and deaths of the two men. Clearly, the curators of the
Kennedy legend have consciously striven to exploit comparisons with
Abraham Lincoln, and understandably so. Kennedy was Lincolnized
in the cruellest way possible.
Assassination aside, nowhere is the Kennedy as Lincoln redux
imagery more potent than in the realm of Civil Rights. Several key sup-
porters of JFKs Civil Rights Bill openly referred to it as the Second
Emancipation Proclamation. This obscures the fact that Civil Rights
legislation had been relatively low on Kennedys list of priorities dur-
ing the election of +o. Yet popular mythology has recast Kennedy as
the Great White Hope who would undoubtedly have reshaped Ameri -
ca as a utopia of inter-racial harmony, while sidestepping the quagmire
of Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson, by contrast, has been widely perceived
as the vulgar, wily usurper who embroiled the United States in that
tragically divisive, ultimately unwinnable war. No matter that Jack
Kennedy was prone to slick foreign policy adventures. Also, no matter
that Johnson had made great headway in Civil Rights, until he was
catastrophically sidetracked in South-east Asia. The very names given
to their administrations, Kennedys New Frontier and Johnsons
Great Society, clearly indicate who nurtured an ambitious foreign
policy and who wished to prioritize a domestic agenda. No matter. The
shots in Dallas have sanctied the JFK legend forever.
Kennedy revitalized the presidency and glamorized his profession in
the popular consciousness. In the wake of the paternalistic Roosevelt,
the combative Truman and the grandfatherly Eisenhower, Kennedy
was a matine idol like his Rat Pack friends, the epitome of early +os
cool. He made the presidency exciting, racy, sexy. He was the president
as movie star, long before presidents began to posture as if life were
merely a movie. His beautiful wife, his children, his extended family
and his witty delivery at his press conferences all became part of the
greatest global TV roadshow of the early +os.
The celluloid lionization of Kennedy had begun while he was still
alive. Cli Robertson played Lieutenant John F. Kennedy in Leslie H.
Martinsons PT (+), based on the Robert J. Donovan book
chronicling Kennedys wartime command of a PT boat and his hero-
ism in the wake of its sinking (Kennedy himself had reputedly favoured
casting Warren Beatty as his younger self). Released just a few months
before Kennedys assassination, this was the very last unequivocally
hagiographic big-screen presidential bio-pic, a paean to an exemplary
hero: look at the courage of this man, and he went on to become presi -
dent of the United States! Like Wilson and Sunrise at Campobello, PT
was, at +o minutes, a handsome if decidedly over-long exercise in
hero-worship. Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as sub-standard
John Ford. Its comic-book characterizations suggest a conglomeration
of out-takes from Fords naval comedy Mister Roberts (+jj).
In the wake of Kennedys assassination, two impressive documen-
taries were released: Mel Stuarts Four Days in November (+) and
Bruce Herschensohns John F. Kennedy:Years of Lightning, Day of Drums
(+). The latter was originally conceived solely for exportation over-
seas and not intended for exhibition to US audiences. The next major
Kennedy-related feature lm did not appear until a full decade after
his death.
David Millers Executive Action (+y) hypothesized that a right-
wing cabal of Texan businessmen and former CIA agents had led the plot
to kill JFK. Despite an impressive cast that included Burt Lancaster,
Robert Ryan and Will Geer, the lm was (perhaps understandably, with
memories still too raw) both a critical and a commercial failure.
8
The Missiles of October (+y), a TV lm directed by Anthony Page,

was a dramatic re-creation of the Cuban Missile Crisis starring William
Devane as JFK and once and future FDR Ralph Bellamy as Adlai
Stevenson, with Howard Da Silva as Nikita Khrushchev. No doubt
right-wingers who had condemned Da Silva during the era of the
blacklist would have considered this a delicious piece of casting. Yet it
must be apparent by now that a number of prestigious American char-
acter actors often found themselves playing a succession of contempo-
rary or historical gures, which might render both their CVs and the
political genre itself a shade confusing. Da Silva, for example, also
played Benjamin Franklin in (+y:) and later FDR in The Private
Files of J. Edgar Hoover (+yy). However, the casting in The Missiles of
October which, in retrospect, seems most ironic was Martin Sheen as
Attorney-General Robert Kennedy. Within ten years, Sheen would
stamp his own personality and performance indelibly upon the legend
of JFK.
Through most of the +yos and 8os it was chiey American televi-
sion rather than cinema which celebrated the multi-faceted Kennedy
mystique. The epic mini-series Captains and the Kings (+y), based on
the novel by Taylor Caldwell and directed by Douglas Heyes, trans-
posed the Kennedy family saga to the nineteenth century. Richard
Jordans impoverished Irish immigrant Joseph Armagh laboured to
found a powerful dynasty. He rose to become a Joseph Kennedy-style
patriarch with the dream of making his son the rst Irish Catholic
President of the United States. The saga ended with bright presiden-
tial hopeful and JFK counterpart Rory Armagh (Perry King) gunned
down at the Democratic Convention of ++:. Gilbert Cates directed
Paul Rudd as the young JFK on the road to his rst Congressional
victory in Johnny, We Hardly KnewYe (+yy). William Jordan played
JFK in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, then reprised the role for
Abby Manns mini-series King (+y8), which featured a superb central
performance from Paul Wineld as Martin Luther King. James
Franciscuss President James Cassidy was clearly based on JFK in
J. Lee Thompsons lm The Greek Tycoon (+y8), and then in +8+
Franciscus reappeared as Kennedy sans pseudonym for Steve Getherss
TV lm Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. One may have imagined the
topic of the Kennedys would have been thoroughly exhausted by the
early +8os but a new prestige production was just around the
corner.
Kennedy (+8) was a ve-hour super-production directed by Jim
Goddard and produced by Britains Central Independent Television
station, with Martin Sheen as JFK. This epic spanned the entirety of
Kennedys presidency, from his wafer-thin victory over Richard Nixon
in +o to that fateful ride through Dealey Plaza. All the major events
of the era were accorded due coverage: the Bay of Pigs crisis, the Civil
Rights struggle, the Cuban Missile showdown, the incipient conict in
Vietnam and even JFKs now well-documented extra-marital adven-
tures were acknowledged, although subtly (no traditional Hollywood
hagiography would ever have dared to address his sex life, even
obliquely). Not least among the problems confronting Sheens JFK is
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Vincent Gardenia), who is motivated
by sheer hatred of the Kennedys and obsessed with sexual peccadillos
as the means of skewering his prey. The other major performances were
also rst-rate: Blair Brown as Jacqueline, John Shea as Bobby and, as
JFKs parents, two character actors with a distinguished pedigree in
the political genre: E. G. Marshall (whose roles included Ulysses S.
Grant, Harry Truman, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower and Nixons
Attorney-General, John Mitchell) portrayed Joseph P. Kennedy, while
Geraldine Fitzgerald (who had co-starred as Edith, the second Mrs
yo
Martin Sheen as JFK and Blair Brown as Jackie, just before the fatal shots in Dallas, in
the impressive mini-series Kennedy (dir. Jim Goddard, +8).
y+
Wilson, in Zanucks lavish bio-pic, Wilson) played Rose Kennedy.
+
Yet
the linchpin of this real-life family saga-cum-tragedy-cum-national
myth was, of course, Martin Sheens performance as the charismatic,
ultimately doomed JFK.
Sheen registered so powerfully as Kennedy that he has retained a
certain iconic association with the role ever since. Kennedy had its
virtually synchronized world television premiere in : countries on
three consecutive nights, :o:: November +8, the nal episode
screening on the twentieth anniversary of the martyred presidents
death. Only a month before this had come the movie premiere of David
Cronenbergs compelling psycho-political chiller The Dead Zone (+8),
based on the novel by Stephen King, featuring Christopher Walken as an
ex-teacher cursed with the power to see into the future and Martin
Sheen as the charismatic, unscrupulous, demagogic megalomaniac who,
if not stopped on his path to the White House, will ultimately trigger
a nuclear holocaust. Walken decides he must assassinate this monster;
and, given that the lm was playing as Sheens Kennedy premiered on TV,
moviegoers could not help but be shocked at this audacious inversion
of the cherished Kennedy mythology and iconography. Sheen later pro-
vided the opening narration for Oliver Stones JFK(++), hence evok-
ing the memory of his Kennedy credentials from the +8 mini series.
Additionally, Sheen later co-starred as the Chief of Sta to liberal
President-as-romantic-hero Michael Douglas in Rob Reiners The
American President (+j), written by Aaron Sorkin; and it is at the
centre of Sorkins most celebrated creation that Sheen has continued to
reassert his Kennedyesque association and appeal in the US political
genre. As President Bartlet in the phenomenally successful TV series
The West Wing (+:oo), Sheens character is liberal, intellectual,
witty, charming and the rst ocially Catholic president since JFK.
:
Many viewers in the United States and overseas have embraced The
West Wing as a palatable alternative to contemporaneous prevailing
realities in the Oval Oce, though the appeal of the series unquestion-
ably goes far deeper than that. Part of the shows appeal is that Sheens
President Bartlet is as close as the world will ever come to getting Jack
Kennedy back. Moreover, given that Sheens son Emilio Estevez has
recently written and directed Bobby (:oo), a Robert Altmanesque
tribute to JFKs slain brother, whom Sheen had played in The Missiles
of October back in +y, the Sheen dynastys on-screen association with
the Kennedy dynasty has, in eect, come full circle.
Nonetheless, John Fitzgerald Kennedys mythology and icono -
graphy can never escape that terrible day in Dallas, and a number of
cinema and television features have dwelt extensively on who might
have hit that particular John. William Richerts Winter Kills (+y),
based on a novel by Richard Condon of Manchurian Candidate renown,
was the rst cinema feature since Executive Action to enquire into the
ultimate responsibility for the crime. The protagonists were ctional,
albeit clearly based on the Kennedys, and the nal denouement was as
shocking as it was implausible: the slain Presidents ber-rich father
(John Huston) nanced the killing. Television lm hypotheses included
The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (+yy), co-directed by Gordon David-
son and David Greene, which imagined Oswalds survival and the sub-
sequent trial proceedings; and Michael Lerner and Frederic Forrest as
the leads of Mel Stuarts Ruby and Oswald (+y8). On the big screen,
the JFK assassination turned out to be the dark secret at the heart of
William Tannens Flashpoint (+8); Danny Aiello gave a sympathetic
portrayal as the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald in John MacKenzies
Ruby (+:); and failure to prevent Kennedys murder was the back
story that haunted Clint Eastwoods veteran Secret Service agent in
Wolfgang Petersens In the Line of Fire (+). Yet, undoubtedly, the
most ambitious, and aspiring to be the denitive cinematic take on the
assassination, was Oliver Stones JFK (++).
JFK is hagiography without the saint. Kennedy is killed immedi-
ately after the opening credits. No actor plays the role in this unctuous,
disingenuous and (in excess of three hours) excruciatingly overlong
valentine. This is a conspiracy narrative, marrying fact, hypothesis and
innuendo, pasting together documentary footage and dramatic recon-
struction in such a manner that it is frequently dicult to perceive the
seams. Some ne performances manage to withstand obliteration,
notably Tommy Lee Jones as the alleged conspirator Clay Shaw and
Edward Asner as the embittered anti-Communist Guy Banister. Just as
Kennedys mythology persists that he was a latter-day Great Emanci-
pator, his acolytes at the ame are also fond of the wistful, unprovable
contention that the Vietnam War would have been avoided if only he
had lived when, in actuality, he had begun the escalation. JFK is a
paradigm prettication of Kennedys true role. Stones dewy-eyed
thesis portrayed Kennedy as the sole obstacle to prolonged, unre-
strained war in Indochina, with Lyndon Johnson and the military -
industrial complex depicted as practically salivating at the prospect.
y:
y
Indeed, JFK appears hell-bent on suggesting in its unsatisfactorily
unfocused fashion that a plethora of politicos to the right of Kennedy
were complicit in his murder.
Kennedy had learned a hard lesson over the Bay of Pigs asco in
++, and so he may have been more sceptical about taking further ad-
vice from military and CIA experts at face value; we will never know. It
is certainly true that, had Johnson been shrewder, he might have scaled
down the US commitment to the war rather than opting for escalation.
Yet Lyndon Johnsons war was largely an extension, not a betrayal, of
Kennedys policy. Possibly the truth is not that John Kennedy would
have kept America out of Vietnam but, rather, that he died before he
could take America fully into Vietnam. But Stones thesis merely encap-
sulated popular mythic misconceptions of long standing. Assuredly the
worst element of the JFK experience (totally unsubstantiated by the
historical record) was Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison delivering an interminable and woefully indulgent clos-
ing speech to the jury. It is like a high-school essay crammed with
historical quotations where facts should be, and climaxing with his
ridiculously teary-eyed Do not forget your dying king. Upon its
release, JFKdeservedly attracted a barrage of criticism from historians
and cultural commentators, much of it preserved for posterity,
appended to the published screenplay by Oliver Stone and Zachary
Sklar.
Stone has done history a greater service in making those sources

readily accessible than he did by making the lm.
Bruce Greenwood as President John F. Kennedy in Roger Donaldsons Thirteen
Days (:ooo).
Arguably, JFKs most signicant contribution to American political
culture was that it awakened a nostalgic yearning for its idealized fallen
leader, the supposed liberal with the movie-star face. A few short
months later, along came Bill Clinton, posturing as Jack Kennedy redux.
Nostalgia for Kennedy conceivably helped to usher in the Clinton era;
and another paean to JFK, again with Kevin Costner, appeared just as
Clintons tarnished administration was drawing its last breath. Roger
Donaldsons Thirteen Days (:ooo) focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis,
with Bruce Greenwood as JFK, Steven Culp as Robert Kennedy (on
whose memoir this lm was based) and Costner as the presidential aide
Kenny ODonnell. Greenwood is appealing as JFK, but Costner is the
star here, as the homeboy who tells it like it is and takes no shit from the
godlike prez. In the rst place, it is hard to guess what this (admittedly
well-made) lm might have added to The Missiles of October or the
Kennedy mini-series. The ground of these intricate negotiations had
been fully covered in those earlier dramas. Second, neither the histori -
cal subject matter nor the principal audience demographic (males of
+::) suggested any likelihood of commercial success for such a lm
in :ooo. Third, the historical reputation being revised upwards here is
not Jack Kennedys, but Kevin Costners, following a string of box -
oce ops. Here, real-life Republican Costner reprises the persona of
his Kennedy devotee from JFK. Again, hes got the loving, long -
suering wife he doesnt spend enough time with because hes politi-
cally dedicated. Again, hes the father who has a cutesy, cloying
relation ship with his large brood. And, again, hes the Kennedy acolyte
par excellence, this time with an ersatz Boston accent instead of an
ersatz Southern accent. The underlying message of this lm seems to
be: ask not what the Kennedys did for America; ask how they would
ever have managed without Kevin Costner. Thirteen Days is the last
major cinematic paean to John F. Kennedy to date. There will surely
be others, but a long period of inactivity from Kevin Costner would
now be greatly appreciated. In any event, the adulation for JFK that
pervades much of modern US culture shows no signs of abating.
Lyndon Johnson has received comparatively short shrift in the
movies. Donald Moat played him as a buoon in Philip Kaufmans
The Right Stu (+8). Randy Quaid, who bears an uncanny resem-
blance to Johnson, starred in Peter Werners TV lm LBJ: The Early
Years (+8y). But the nest performance has come from yet another non-
American actor, the Irish Michael Gambon, in John Frankenheimers
y
yj
Michael Gambon
played Lyndon
Baines Johnson in
Path to War (:oo:),
director John
Frankenheimers
swan-song.
Path to War (:oo:). Made for television, it was the nal lm from the
great director of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May.
While acknowledging LBJs prodigious use of profanity, Path to War is
a sympathetic portrayal of a noble-hearted man diverted, derailed and
ultimately destroyed by an unwinnable war. It achieves the poignancy
of Shakespearean tragedy that eluded Stones JFK. Yet Lyndon John-
son is, for the foreseeable future, likely to remain perceived in popular
culture as a crude and devious usurper anked by those twin titans of
modern American mythology, his revered predecessor and his reviled
successor.
Richard Nixon: The Dark Side of the Dream . . .
and Beyond
Near the end of Oliver Stones Nixon (+j), the disgraced outgoing
president (Anthony Hopkins) stands before a portrait of John Kennedy
and observes wistfully: When they look at you, they see what they want
to be. When they look at me, they see what they are. This certainly
carries over the roseate hagiography of Kennedy that coloured so much
of Stones JFK and, signicantly, is powerfully suggestive of Nixons
self-loathing and his deeply engrained inferiority complex. Yet in one
respect, this fanciful utterance is way o the mark. Yes, Kennedy gave
Americans an idealized image to aspire to; but Richard Nixon did not
reect what the American people truly were, or are. Rather, Nixons
unenviable legacy is that his misdeeds revealed an aspect of American
political culture that was festering with corruption. For that, he may
never be forgiven. The sacred trust implicit in the US presidency meant
that (the shenanigans of the Grant and Harding years notwithstand-
ing) its occupant was assumed to be an individual of impeccable hon-
our, t to follow in the footsteps of Washington, Jeerson and Lincoln.
But Nixon changed all that. Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower had
been reliable father gures; Kennedy had been the young hero cut down
in his prime; Johnson had been both the paternalistic champion of the
Great Society and the consummate political horse-trader who bungled
into the quagmire of Vietnam. Then, only a year and a half after the
rst military defeat in American history, a president of the United
States was forced to resign in shame.
Americans could not forgive Nixon for besmirching the presidency,
for submitting the grandeur of his oce to corrupt practices and un-
Constitutional machinations, or for reducing the supreme representa-
tive of their nation to the status of a common criminal. Nixon symbol ized
not only an inversion but a perversion of the Lincoln myth. Here was
another poor boy who had prevailed over personal adversity to attain the
greatest prize in American political life not to become a wise and
honest man, in the spirit of John Adamss hope and Abraham Lincolns
example, but to plumb the depths of venal mendacity. Furthermore,
what shocked many Americans most was not the intricate details of
chicanery, but the fact that their president was taped in the Oval Oce
wallowing in the worst kind of profanity (including the Oedipal appel-
lation). Film-makers who have lionized Lincoln have been able to
y
Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) stands before the portrait of his old rival John
Kennedy in a melancholy moment near the end of Oliver Stones Nixon (+j).
yy
choose from his youth, his pre-presidential political career and the Civil
War. Likewise, Kennedy mythologists could opt for his war service,
decisive leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis or his assassination.
Films about Richard Nixon, however as with historical analyses of
his presidency inevitably come down to one issue, and to one word:
Watergate.
The rst major lm about Nixon was not, in the strictest sense, about
Nixon at all. Alan J. Pakulas All the Presidents Men (+y), based on
the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post
reporters who broke the Watergate story, did not feature Nixon as a
character. All the Presidents Men is assuredly the central lm in the Wa-
ter gate canon, in the same way that JFK is now perceived as the most
signicant lm statement on the Kennedy assassination. Also, like JFK,
All the Presidents Men consists in large part of long, detailed and often
complex conversations concerning the unseen but central gure in the
White House. No actor plays Nixon in the lm. Instead, the stars are
Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Homan as Bernstein. Part
detective story, part buddy-movie (scripted by William Goldman, who
had penned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), All the Presidents Men
teams the clean-cut All-American WASP Republican (Redford as
Woodward) with a pushy, persistent, (semi-)long-haired hustling Jew-
ish liberal (Homan as Bernstein). These contrasting protagonists
doggedly track down the biggest story of the decade; and, in true
Capraesque fashion, the sinister powers that be are vanquished by the
honest, tenacious little guys who still believe in Truth, Justice and the
American Way. Yet this really happened. Accordingly, I would suggest
that Watergate, far from proving the American political system was in-
herently corrupt, in actuality nally bore witness to the fact that gov-
ernance of the Republic was inherently sound. The ideals and
principles of the Founding Fathers still prevailed, and not even the US
President was above the law.
Director Pakula had previously helmed The Parallax View (+y),
one of the nest +yos movies about assassinations, conspiracy and
paranoia. All the Presidents Men expertly recaptured a kindred sense
of oppressive paranoia, not least in Woodwards underground garage
meetings with his anonymous source, Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook).
Likewise, the titanically imbalanced struggle between two young news-
papermen and the federal government is superbly conveyed as Redford
and Homan sift for evidence through masses of request slips in the
Library of Congress. The camera pulls away from their desk, rising
higher and higher in a birds-eye perspective, dwarng our intrepid
young heroes until they are little more than specks on the screen. Yet the
most signicant image in All the Presidents Men owed nothing to top-
drawer performances or virtuoso camerawork. A televised excerpt from
the Republican Convention of +y: showed the then-Congressman
Gerald Ford announcing that Richard Nixon had been renominated for
the presidency. This was the same Gerald Ford who, just one month
after entering the White House in +y, had granted Nixon a full
presidential pardon. Ford was the Republican nominee for president in
the year of All the Presidents Mens release and the inclusion of that
clip, implicitly linking him to Nixon, surely did Ford no favours on
polling day.
All the Presidents Mens supporting cast reads like a dream ensem-
ble of once-and-future stalwarts of the genre: Martin Balsam (Seven
Days in May), Jack Warden (Being There) and Hal Holbrook (Lincoln
in North and South). Jason Robards won the Best Supporting Actor
Oscar for his performance as the Washington Posts executive editor, Ben
Bradlee, but Robardss nest contribution to the political genre, and the
zenith of his career, was just around the corner.
y8
Footage that lost the presidency? Gerald Ford in +y:, declaring Richard Nixon as the
Republican presidential nominee. This snippet from Alan J. Pakulas +y film All the
Presidents Men might have hurt Fords own candidacy in that years election. Robert
Redford is seated o to the right.
y
+yy witnessed the release of several Watergate-related productions.
Even the tyrannical anti-hero of Larry Cohens The Private Files of J.
Edgar Hoover was astounded by Nixons hubris and surreptitious ille-
galities. Michael Lindsay-Hoggs Nasty Habits, based on Muriel Sparks
satirical novel of +y, The Abbess of Crewe, hilariously recast the
Watergate scandal in a convent. Glenda Jacksons ambitious, ruthless
Alexandra was a Nixon of the nunnery; Geraldine Page and Anne
Jackson played the sidekicks respectively based on H. R. Haldeman and
John Ehrlichman; and Melina Mercouris globe-trotting, peacemaking
nun clearly parodied Henry Kissinger. As the movie ends, the disgraced
Alexandra leaves America, stoically declaring in true Nixonian fashion:
You wont have Alexandra to kick around any more. The nest
dramatic reconstruction of Nixons presidency, however, was a TV
mini-series which rates as one of the greatest political melodramas
ever lmed.
Washington: Behind Closed Doors (+yy), directed by Gary Nelson,
derived its basic plotline from Nixon aide John Ehrlichmans lack -
lustre novel The Company. The novels scenario of a Kennedy protg
CIA director (Cli Robertson) anxious to stay on in his post in order to
keep the lid on his own past deeds was the most complex and least
interesting aspect of the narrative. Washington: Behind Closed Doors was
the tale of ruthless men whose vindictive lust for power leads them to
all measures of machinations and misdemeanours, and it was abrim
with rst-rate performances, from Robert Vaughns scary Halde-
manesque hatchet man to Barry Nelson as the nice-guy press secretary
who becomes his rst victim and Andy Grith (Lonesome Rhodes
himself) as the crafty outgoing President Esker Scott Anderson. The
chants Hey, hey! ESA! How many kids did you kill today? in the rst
episode instantly established Anderson as the equivalent of Lyndon
Johnson. Yet towering above all the others was one actor and a truly
magnicent performance. If there were a Mount Rushmore for cellu-
loid presidents, Jason Robards would surely be up there for his Presi-
dent Richard M. Monckton Nixon in all but name, and two-thirds of
that. Over the shows entire nine hours, Robards captured a huge range
of Nixonian emotions: paranoia, obsession, self-pity, anger, spite, loneli -
ness, inferiority, vindictiveness, hubris. Scene after scene was a master-
class in conveying raw, naked, unfettered ambition sometimes
com mingled with ruthlessness, sometimes with vulnerability. One
scene, for example, featured Monckton conferring with his closest
connivers regarding the chances of repealing the Twenty-second
Amendment, hence allowing him to run for a third term yet suddenly
degenerating into a self-pitying monologue, dwelling on his poor self-
image compared to Esker Anderson and the late, idolized William
Arthur Curry (clearly the JFK equivalent). Two decades would elapse
before The West Wing oered television viewers another compelling
American political melodrama of comparable ambition and scope.
Washington: Behind Closed Doors was the cream of those productions
based on books by Watergate personnel. John Deans memoir Blind
Ambition became a six-hour mini-series in +y, directed by George
Schaefer, with Martin Sheen (halfway between his disparate Kennedy
incarnations) as Dean and Rip Torn as Nixon. While Washington:
Behind Closed Doors had focused on its Nixon-substitutes paranoia and
vindictiveness, in Blind Ambition Nixon was a supporting character,
albeit superbly played by Torn. The principal emphasis was on Dean,
8o
Richard Nixon
(Philip Baker Hall)
comes unglued
while reliving the
tragedy of Water-
gate in Robert
Altmans Secret
Honor (+8).
8+
his moral odyssey away from Nixon and his henchmen, and his
relationship with his wife Maureen (Theresa Russell). Veteran director
Irving Rapper closed his long career with Born Again (+y8), which
charted the trajectory of Charles Colson (Dean Jones) from Nixons
hatchet man to born-again Christian. Robert Conrad starred as the
protagonist of Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (+8:),
directed by Robert Lieberman, but the Watergate alumni cycle petered
out thereafter.
Two very dierent portrayals of Nixon were aired in +8. Concealed
Enemies (+8), directed by Je Bleckner, was a TV dramatization of
the trial of the once prominent New Dealer Alger Hiss (Edward Herr -
mann), accused by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers (John Harkins)
of spying for the Soviets. Peter Riegert appeared as the opportunistic
young Congressman Nixon, whose role in the prosecution of the Hiss
case catapulted him to national prominence. Robert Altmans Secret
Honor (+8) was a one-man cinema feature, with Philip Baker Hall as
the disgraced ex-President undergoing a long dark night of the soul
and wandering drunken, rambling and suicidal through his CCTV-
buttressed study in San Clemente. Yet in the midst of all his incoher-
ence and profanities, an incredible hypothesis emerged that Nixon
himself was Deep Throat, the unnamed source who brought his ad-
ministration crashing down. This scenario suggested that Nixon, bound
to organized crime factions, was appalled by the Mobs use of the war
in Vietnam to proliferate their prots from heroin, so he pulled the plug
on their operations by blowing the whistle on himself. As a perform-
ance, Philip Baker Halls tragic, tortured Nixon was a tour de force. As
Lane Smith as
Richard Nixon in
The Final Days
(dir. Richard
Pearce, +8).
8:
a plausible oertory of the truth about Watergate, however, it was on the
far side of weird.
A much more balanced account, and surprisingly good for a now
largely forgotten TV movie, was The Final Days (+8), directed by
Richard Pearce, starring Lane Smith as Nixon. Based on the acclaimed
book by Woodward and Bernstein, The Final Days is, in eect, the
sequel to All the Presidents Men. Yet, while All the Presidents Men
focuses on the valiant little guy outsiders struggling to unearth the
shocking facts about the Nixon White House, The Final Days depicted
the meltdown from the inside. Apparently, Nixon saw the lm and, as
a result, withdrew his custom from AT&T, who had sponsored the pro-
duction. Nixonian misgivings aside, The Final Days is an intelligent
movie with a nely measured central performance, which thankfully has
been rescued from oblivion by its resurrection on DVD. By contrast,
there is precious little to recommend two Nixon-themed TV lms of the
+os, Daniel Petries Kissinger and Nixon (+j), starring Beau Bridges,
and Allan Arkushs Elvis Meets Nixon (+y), with Bob Gunton.
Oliver Stones mammoth Nixon (+j) was not so much a bio-pic as
a psychological exploration of one of the most fascinating, enigmatic
personalities in US history. Despite Stones cloying reverence for
Kennedy in his earlier political epic, he was scrupulously fair and, at
times, evidently sympathetic to his heros old foe. For an entire genera -
tion, from the Hiss case in + until his resignation over Watergate in
+y, Richard Milhous Nixon had been the bte noire of American
liberals. Stones Nixon was tortured by past demons, however, rather
than driven by a lust for power per se. This was a compelling, if awed,
portrait of a man gifted with the potential for greatness, but nally
Sterling support in Stones Nixon from Joan Allen as Pat Nixon . . .
destroyed by his worst impulses. Especially in the monochrome ash-
backs to his youth in Whittier, California, it was a deeply disturbing
lm (I recall wincing in the cinema as young Nixon besought his stern
Quaker mother, played by Mary Steenburgen: Think of me always as
your faithful dog).
Nixon was also extremely complicated in its structure, indebted to
Orson Welless Citizen Kane (++) in its contours, largely eschewing a
linear narrative and assuming extensive prior knowledge of Nixons life
and career. All these factors combined to doom Nixon at the box oce;
the lm was impressive, but not popular. The most accomplished
performances came from the superb Joan Allen as Pat Nixon (her hus-
bands worshipful but virtually asexual dependency on this multi -
faceted, admirable woman is represented as problematic and troubling);
and James Woods as Nixons ruthless Chief of Sta H. R. Haldeman
(Eight words back in y: I covered up. I was wrong. Im sorry and
the American public would have forgiven him). And one intriguing
scene, set in Dallas on :+ November +, features a demonic Texan
businessman, Jack Jones (Larry Hagman, taking his own famous J. R.
Ewing persona to the very depths of evil), dangling the + presiden-
tial election before Nixon during his visit there just prior to Kennedys
assassination. Jones is clearly aware that there is murder in the air, but
Nixon is not and in any event, he refuses to get sucked into the machi-
nations of the ultra-Right.
Stones lm was released just twenty months after Nixons death in
+. It ends with footage from his funeral, with tributes paid by Bill
Clinton and Republican Senator Bob Dole, who would later confront
each other in the + presidential election. Nixon was an ambitious,
. . . and James Woods as H. R. Haldeman (here at right of frame).
8
over-complex celluloid monument to a man whose life had been a great
American tragedy. But paradoxically, one of its most serious weaknesses
had no doubt been calculated as one of its greatest strengths. Anthony
Hopkins is a magnicent actor, but he was fundamentally miscast in the
title role. Stone justied his casting of Hopkins, declaring in an
interview: For over o years, hes demonstrated his chameleonlike
talents over and over again in movies, theater, and television . . . Some
of Tonys previous roles have shown a melancholy, lonely quality that
was perfect for Nixon.
Other stars considered for the role had included

Jack Nicholson (conceivable), Tom Hanks (unlikely) and Warren Beatty
(whom JFKhad wanted to portray himin PT ). Yet I would suggest
the perfect actor to have played Nixon was right under Stones nose,
having already served him superbly in JFK, Heaven and Earth (+) and
Natural Born Killers (+); and, ironically, he was even born on exactly
the same day (+j September +) as Oliver Stone: Tommy Lee Jones.
In sharp contrast to Stones compelling but awed epic of Shake-
spearean hubris, Andrew Flemings Dick (+) is truly wacky. It is
literally a shaggy-dog story in which Dan Hedayas Nixon sees his presi -
dency crumble all on account of an ill-judged, mismatched friendship
with two apolitical teenage airheads (hilariously played by Kirsten
Dunst and Michelle Williams), whom Nixon appoints as ocial pres-
idential dog-walkers for his beloved (in reality, by then long-deceased)
Checkers. According to this lm, the entire Watergate crisis grows
out of the girls vengeance when Williams realizes that her fantasy of
romantic passion with Nixon is unreciprocated. Having heard of (but
not seen) the contemporary porn lm Deep Throat, the girls hit on that
as the code name they will use to peddle dirty secrets about the Nixon
White House to two eager young reporters on the Washington Post. Dick
is a funny, knowing satire, but it is assuredly most likely to be appreci-
ated by baby-boomers who are old enough to recall details of the
Watergate scandal from the rst time around. Niels Muellers The
Assassination of Richard Nixon (:oo) was set in +y, but it is princi-
pally concerned with the true story of a loner-cum-loser named Samuel
J. Bicke (Sean Penn), who is so humiliated by his marginalization from
Americas religion of material success that he opts to make a name for
himself by hijacking a plane and ying it into the White House, thus
killing the incumbent President. It is conceived as an act of despair by
a man who has lost his moorings but, when lmed in :oo, this narra-
tive inevitably carried connotations of /++.
8j
The post-Nixon presidency has yielded a mixed bag politically and
cinematically, with three occupants of the White House deemed too
colourless to warrant sustained lmic attention; two others charismatic;
and one problematic. Josef Sommer played Gerald Ford in David
Greenes +8y TV lm, The Betty Ford Story, but the fact that this one
and only Ford narrative centred on the travails of the First Lady (Gena
Rowlands), rather than the historically unique position of her husband
(who attained the White House without ever being elected either presi -
dent or vice-president), suggests that there is no great popular appetite
for a lm about Nixons immediate successor. Jimmy Carter has also
been forgotten by the celluloid myth-mongers, but he is probably too
busy continuing to build his unrivalled reputation as a particularly ne
ex-president to be overly concerned. George H. W. Bush appeared in a
supporting role, played by Michael Greene, in Cyrus Nowrastehs The
Day Reagan Was Shot (:oo+), but has otherwise failed to capture lm-
makers imaginations.
The Day Reagan Was Shots executive producers included Oliver
Stone, and the lm began with a voice-over similar to the narration
which opened JFK. Richard Crenna played Reagan as a genial vision-
ary who avoided intricate administrative details (which was known to be
historically accurate). Yet the main focus of the lm was Secretary of
State (former General, and former Nixon Chief of Sta) Alexander
Haig (Richard Dreyfuss), who, in the wake of the attempt on Reagans
life, had erroneously proclaimed: I am in control here. The Day
Reagan Was Shot plays like a third-rate reworking of Seven Days in May
combined with Fail-Safe, insinuating that on o March +8+ Ameri-
cans stood just a hairs-breadth from either a coup dtat or a nuclear
showdown with the Soviets when, in fact, neither contingency was
imminent. Robert Allan Ackermans The Reagans (:oo) starred James
Brolin as Ronnie and Judy Davis as Nancy, but CBS bowed to right-
wing objections and pulled the telemovie from their schedule. Yet an
edited version which aired on the Showtime channel after all the fuss
had died down turned out to be more sympathetic to the former Presi -
dent and First Lady than conservative watchdogs had initially feared.
The most ambitious post-Nixon presidential movie has undoubt-
edly been Mike Nicholss Primary Colors (+8), scripted by Elaine May
and based on the novel by the journalist Joe Klein. Initially published
anonymously, the book was a juicy expos of the +: presidential cam-
paign of Southern Governor Jack Stanton, but everyone knew it was
really about Bill Clinton. John Travolta, complete with greying hair and
a Southern accent, played Stanton/Clinton, with Emma Thompson as
his implacably ambitious wife, Susan, who was just as clearly modelled
on Hillary. This was a portrait of a charismatic populist whose appetites
are out of control in terms of both gluttony (witness his liking for
Krispy Kreme doughnuts) and sexual excess (Kathy Batess character
memorably declares: Hes poked his pecker in some sorry trash-bins).
Travolta and Thompson had the lm stolen out from under them by
Bates and Billy Bob Thornton as their campaign supremos. By the time
of the lms release, the real-life prototypes had Whitewater and Lewin-
sky to contend with.
It is perhaps too early for history or Hollywood to judge George W.
Bush conclusively, but the early returns are far from favourable.
Timothy Bottoms played him in the :oo+ TV comedy Thats My Bush!,
created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame. Bottoms
then reprised the role with a straight face for Brian Trenchard-Smiths
stupefyingly bad DC /: Time of Crisis (:oo). Yet the most unusual
production to feature Bush is Gabriel Ranges Death of a President
(:oo). This British mockumentary presented digitally generated
footage of Bush and envisioned further crackdowns on Americans civil
liberties after his imagined assassination in October :ooy. Predictably
but quite understandably in this instance, Death of a President has
provoked the outrage of neo-conservatives. It is hard to disagree that an
unpleasant whi of wishful thinking seems to linger at the heart of this
scenario.
8
John Travolta as the Clintonesque Governor Jack Stanton in Mike Nicholss Primary
Colors (+8).
8y
Fictional Presidents: From the +os to the +os
The rst major screen portrayal of a ctional president was in the
movie Gabriel Over the White House (+). Thereafter, three decades
elapsed before movie-makers hypothesized concerning other ctional
characters in residence at Americas most famous address. Signicantly,
the rst cinematic indication that presidents might not always be
unalloyed idealists came in the portrayal of a ctional Chief Executive.
Franchot Tones President in Otto Premingers Advise and Consent
(+:) is dying but stubborn and so intent on having his nominee for
Secretary of State conrmed that he allows an honest young senator to
be blackmailed to the point of suicide. Overall, however, ctional pres-
idents in +os movies were honourable and upright. Fredric March in
John Frankenheimers Seven Days in May and Henry Fonda in Sidney
Lumets Fail-Safe (both +) were honest, idealized, father-gure
presidents faced with the respective political nightmares of a domestic
military coup and an accidental nuclear war. Spoong the latter
scenario in Stanley Kubricks scathingly satirical Dr Strangelove (+),
Peter Sellers sent up liberals of the Adlai Stevenson variety in his role
as the ineectual US President Merkin Muey. Also in comic vein,
Polly Bergen played the rst female Chief Executive in Curtis
Peter Sellers as the ineectual President Merkin Muey in Stanley Kubricks
Dr Strangelove (+).
Bernhardts Kisses for My President (+), anticipating Geena Davis in
televisions Commander-in-Chief by more than forty years but the
accent in Kisses was primarily on husband Fred MacMurray, and his
awkward adjustment to the unprecedented role of First Gentleman.
Even in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate +yos, when one of
Hollywoods most passionate liberals was willing to tackle themes of
political corruption head-on, he did so without wholly indicting the
presidency itself. Robert Aldrich, the cousin of Gerald Fords Vice-
President Nelson A. (for Aldrich) Rockefeller, launched a full-frontal
attack on the US political and military establishment in Twilights Last
Gleaming (+yy). Aldrichs lm features a conspiracy of complicity
(extending back at least as far as Presidents Johnson and Nixon) at the
highest echelons of both civilian and military power, but the ctional
President David Stevens (Charles Durning) is himself an honest man
who is deeply shocked by the cold-blooded rationale of attrition behind
the Vietnam conict. His subordinates will collude in his murder before
they will permit him to disclose the truth.
Although paranoid conspiracy thrillers reigned supreme in the genre
throughout most of the +yos, Twilight s Last Gleamings up-close
portrait of a ctional President was the exception rather than the rule.
During the Reaganite +8os, when big-screen American political lms
lay relatively dormant, movies seldom featured ctional presidents as
protagonists. Perhaps this may have been because the then current
President and ex-lm star Ronald Reagan lled the bill, and the
cultural need, comprehensively. Paradoxically, the American political
lm has experienced a resurgence in the Bush rr era, but so far movie-
makers have resisted the urge to make serious lms centred around
ctional presidents. This might be because of a liberal antipathy towards
88
Michael Douglas
as The American
President (dir. Rob
Reiner, +j).
8
Je Bridges as
the president in
Rod Luries The
Contender (:ooo).
Bush and therefore a reluctance to make lms that might imply an
equation between their idealized notions of a strong, heroic president
and the present incumbent; but that is only an instinctive guess.
It was during the administration of Kennedy acolyte and unabashed
lm fan Bill Clinton that movies about ctional presidents took centre
stage. This was perhaps in part fuelled by a happy days are here again
sentiment indulged by Clinton supporters in Hollywood. The most
charismatic Democrat in thirty years, Clinton inherited some of JFKs
mythic imagery. Moreover, no other president has fed so many ctional
alter egos on lm, ranging from the Capraesque Doppelgnger who
replaces the incapacitated, self-serving, insensitive president (both
played by Kevin Kline) in Ivan Reitmans whimsical comedy Dave
(+) and Michael Douglass First Widower defending his new romance
from prurient conservatives in Rob Reiners The American President
(+j), to Harrison Fords ass-kicking Vietnam vet president in Wolf-
gang Petersens Air Force One (+y) and Je Bridgess pro-feminist
Chief Exec, who selects Joan Allen as his vice-president in Rod Luries
The Contender (:ooo). Both The American President and The Contender
end with the heroic liberal presidents giving their mean spirited anti-
feminist GOP opponents (Richard Dreyfuss and Gary Oldman, respec-
tively) a thorough dressing-down in public with a gusto that would
undoubtedly have made Bill Clinton envious.
Yet there is a darker side to this all-conquering gure, just as there
was a darker side to Clintons presidency and this was evinced by both
the title and plot of Clint Eastwoods Absolute Power (+y), based on
the novel by David Baldacci, in which a ruthless president (Gene Hack-
man) abuses his mistress. When they struggle, she is shot by Secret
Service agents, who then attempt to cover up the killing. Lewinskygate
was scarcely on a par with that. Still, like his counterpart in Absolute
Power, William Jeerson Clinton learned the hard way that pretty girls
are not a guaranteed presidential perk. The resultant scandal derailed
his presidency, and demeaned the integrity of the oce. In life as in
lm, for better or worse, the character of the man in the White House
can and does make a dierence.
o
Just before the climactic debate in Sidney Lumets Power (+8), the
idealistic senatorial candidate Phillip Aarons (Matt Salinger) says:
Instead of me trying to impersonate a statesman, when its my turn to
speak, maybe we should just turn down the lights and run Mr Smith
Goes to Washington. Frank Capras + paean to American democracy
(scripted by a Communist, Sidney Buchman) is the cornerstone of
movie idealism. While that same year Young Mr Lincoln mythologized
the early life of the humble but uncommon man who eectively
became a legendary secular saint, Mr Smith glories the common man as
a potent American icon: a hometown idealist in whose pure breast beats
the spirit of George Washington, Thomas Jeerson and Abraham
Lincoln.
James Stewarts Jeerson Smith is the epitome of the innocent
abroad, the gentle true believer, the one honest man who faithfully
treads the path of righteousness (Either Im dead right or Im crazy!).
Even his name is equally endowed with patriotic and mythic signi -
cance (Jeerson) and prosaic, unpretentious resonance (Smith). If
Abraham Lincoln is American historys man for all seasons, Jeerson
Smith is Movie Americas Everyman for all seasons. So when Aarons
makes his suggestion in Power, this certainly testies to his perception
of his own idealism, but it is also a convenient shorthand by which
cinemagoers might instantly grasp that this character is an honest,
unassuming, all-around good Joe. I would argue, however, that Mr
Smith continues to be revered now for its innocent idealism rather than
for its enduring status as a true cinematic masterpiece.
Following the death of an incumbent US senator, Jeerson Smith is
appointed to ll his place. He hero-worships his senior colleague,
+
cn+r+ra
Country Boys and City Slickers
There are no Mr Smiths in Washington. Mr Smith has been bought.
Just a bunch of deal-makers. No visionaries.
John Bugs Raplin (Giancarlo Esposito) in Bob Roberts (directed by Tim Robbins, +:)
Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), the Silver Knight who was once
a close friend of his late father. Yet, despite his venerable public per-
sona, Paine is up to his eyeballs in graft and deep in the pocket of the
States political boss, Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold). Paine tries to keep
young Smith from asking too many questions by suggesting that he
drafts a bill for the establishment of his much cherished boys camp
(Smith is really just an overgrown Eagle Scout at heart). The diversion
seems to work until it transpires that the land Smith proposes to use
has been earmarked by Taylor and Paine for their lucrative dam project.
This pits the two Senators against one another, and the upstart new-
comer is unevenly matched against the national institution who has
decades of legislative experience, the respect of his colleagues and an
eye on the White House. All Smith has in his favour is the truth and
his Washington-wise secretary, Saunders (Jean Arthur), who is in love
with him. With Saunders guiding him, Smith stages a libuster. Paine
then counters by producing manufactured evidence which suggests
Smith is the corrupt politico who has dishonoured the Senate. Paine
has him outmanoeuvred and outanked. Smith, beaten, collapses with
exhaustion at which point Paine leaves the Senate chamber and tries
to kill himself. He then rushes back in to denounce himself, confessing
that he has been dishonest and Smith has been telling the truth all
along. The Senate erupts into chaos, Saunders whoops with delight,
and the Vice-President (Harry Carey) benignly surveys the mle. A
sloppier ending to a classic Hollywood movie would be dicult to nd.
The lm simply runs out of steam.
:
The heros false
idol Senator Paine
(Claude Rains) is
confronted by his
dishevelled, dis -
illusioned protg
( James Stewart)
in Frank Capras
Mr Smith Goes to
Washington (+).
Perhaps the buoyant optimism and generous-hearted populism
which infused the movies of Frank Capra ring uncomfortably shallow
and feeble in our own undoubtedly more cynical age. Perhaps Capra-
corn has not proved as aesthetically durable as, say, the Americana of
John Ford. Yet the good-hearted hick Jeerson Smith serves as a
prototype for one of the heroic (and ironically, often anti-heroic) gures
of the American political lm.
If Jeerson Smith is the genres prototypical country boy, then Dan
McGinty is its prototypical city slicker. Released ten months after Mr
Smith, Preston Sturgess directorial debut The Great McGinty (+o)
stars Brian Donlevy as an engaging, amoral charmer who may aptly be
called the anti-Smith. He is a bum down on his luck, and he rst
comes to the attention of the corrupt city boss (Akim Tamiro) when,
at the price of two dollars a vote, he votes y times during one election.
Soon McGinty is a strong-arm lieutenant in the bosss municipal pro-
tection rackets, rubbing shoulders with colourful types such as William
Demarests unnamed politician, who says: If it wasnt for graft, youd
get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jelly -
sh! Like Smith, McGinty falls under the romantic spell of his
secretary (Muriel Angelus); but, whereas Saunders managed to steer
Smith through many of the intricacies of Washington politics, McGintys
new bride proves his moral salvation which leads to his professional
undoing. In living up to her ideal of him as a good man, he renounces
his corrupt shenanigans and has to ee the country to avoid a long
stretch in the penitentiary.
Perhaps because of the Jeersonian pull of agrarian democracy on
the American imagination, the small-town protagonist has had a more
enduring appeal and fascination than the big-city hustler in the US
political movie. Two years after Mr Smith, Capra was back with another
cautionary tale in Meet John Doe (++), and this time the stakes were
even higher. The villains in Mr Smith were mere grafters, whereas the
megalomaniac media baron of Meet John Doe was openly fascistic.
Edward Arnold played D. B. Norton as though his Jim Taylor from Mr
Smith had grown super-rich and now wanted to come out from the
shadows to claim power for himself. The lm opens with Norton
assuming control of the honest, principled newspaper The Bulletin and
renaming its slick, soulless reincarnation The New Bulletin (a prophetic
irony probably not lost on any traditional Labour voters in Britain who
may have seen the lm since +). Newly redundant reporter Ann
Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), in despair at Nortons merciless down -

sizing, invents an imaginary hero, John Doe, who threatens to leap to
his death on Christmas Eve (therefore preguring the protagonist of
Capras best-loved movie, Its a Wonderful Life, +) in protest at the
savagery of modern society. This mythical gure captures the imagina-
tion of millions of Americans. Ann then makes a deal with a quirky,
likable hobo, Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), who assumes the
role of John Doe. John Doe Clubs spring up all across the nation, with
the apolitical purpose of fostering the spirits of brotherhood, neigh-
bourliness and kindness for their own sake. Long John and Ann start to
believe in the ideal. Norton sees an opportunity to harness this mass
movement as a third-party force to sweep him into the White House
with his fascistic agenda: Were coming to a new order of things.
Theres too much talk been going on in this country. Too many conces-
sions have been made. What the American people need is an iron hand.
Discipline!
As in Mr Smith, it boils down to a confrontation between honest
David (Cooper) and devious Goliath (Arnold), with the hero temporar-
ily discredited by manufactured evidence depicting himas corrupt. But
virtue triumphs in the end as members of the John Doe Clubs opt to
keep the ideal alive, encouraging Long John to forget about the suicide
he now truly intends and convincing him to work with them. The last
line has Nortons hard-bitten yet genuinely patriotic editor Connell
( James Gleason) declare to his erstwhile employer: There you are,
Norton The People. Try and lick that!
Gary Cooper as
one of Frank
Capras classic
Everyman heroes
in Meet John Doe
(++). His good-
hearted American-
ism is emphasized
by the portraits
of Lincoln and
Washington,
which ank him
like guardian
angels.
Norton would not be the last home-grown fascist in +os lms
who tried to lick The People. The deceased national hero of George
Cukors Keeper of the Flame (+:) turns out to have been a fascist, as
does a sleazy politico who is ultimately foiled by Loretta Young, Joseph
Cotten and Ethel Barrymore in H. C. Potters The Farmers Daughter
(+y). The charge of fascism is also levelled against city ber-slicker
Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles in his masterpiece
Citizen Kane (++). Still, despite his personal tyranny, his obsessive
acquisitiveness, his proprietorial treatment of his second wife and his
yearning for mass love through electoral validation, there is no hard
evidence that Kane is a fascist. His problem and his tragedy lie in his
monumental ego, rather than in any sinister political designs.
Frank Capra made one nal foray into the political genre after
World War II with State of the Union (+8). The real-life prototype for
Jeerson Smith had been the isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler
of Montana (the original model for Lewis R. Fosters source story The
Gentleman from Montana). By contrast, the prototype for the post-
war hero of State of the Union was that passionate One-Worlder,
Wendell Willkie, who had run as the Republican nominee against
Franklin Roosevelt in +o. Capras inimitable contribution to the
American war eort had been a series of high-quality propaganda lms
in the Why We Fight documentary series; but now Smith-type idealism
and Wheelers concomitant isolationism were no longer viable as cine-
matic or ideological propositions in the post-war nuclear age.
State of the Unions Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy), a self-made
man who intends to translate his business success into political achieve-
ment, at rst blush seems a more realistic protagonist for a late +os
political lm. Aeroplane manufacturer Matthews campaigns for the
Republican nomination for president, and State of the Union is rare in
making such overt references to one of Americas two political parties
within its narrative. Usually (prior to the +yos, anyway), lines were
blurred in such a way that perceptive moviegoers could guess which
party was supposed to be under the microscope, but they were seldom
named. This led to some dramatic, over-emphatic Manichaean con icts
within one party, wherein Dixiecrat-style mossbacks coexisted uneasily
with ardent pro-Soviet appeasers (Charles Laughton and George Griz-
zard in Advise and Consent) or principled liberal intellectuals rubbed
shoulders with unscrupulous right-wingers (Henry Fonda and Cli
Robertson in The Best Man).
j
State of the Union also marked the culmination of the Capra heros
bleak trajectory from James Stewarts rustic, wide-eyed innocent in
Mr Smith, to the transitional gure of Gary Coopers Long John
Willoughby, who agrees to become John Doe but is then repulsed by
the power-play he is supposed to endorse, to Tracys Matthews, who
quickly grasps that compromise is the essence of political advancement,
so his hazy ideals soon get left at the door. While not personally corrupt,
Matthews, in contrast to Jeerson Smith, is not really all that idea l istic
in the rst place. He is in eect the pawn of his mistress, media mag-
nate Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury, in a dry run for her role as the
ultimate Dragon Lady in The Manchurian Candidate). Matthews is
advised by a shrewd political hack (Adolphe Menjou), and soon there-
after he literally tries to appear as all things to all men, appealing to a
plethora of conicting interest groups in his quest for votes. Ultimately,
however, he renounces his candidacy, instead renewing and priori tizing
his marriage to his loyal and principled wife (Katharine Hepburn).
+
However, the lms conclusion is too pat: love and family are the all -
important things in life, and the quest for power is a poor substitute.
Angela Lansburys performance as the manipulative media magnate Kay Thorndyke

in Frank Capras +8 lm State of the Union was, in eect, a dress rehearsal for her
sinister role in The Manchurian Candidate fourteen years later.
This is surely an emotionally healthy viewpoint, but it makes for a
rather weak dramatic punch line.
State of the Union was an early attempt to delve deeper into the
mechanics of political campaigns, public relations and the accommoda-
tion of special interest groups: in short, the nuts and bolts of the
system, rather than a hagiography or a morality tale. While State of the
Union baulked at outright cynicism, in a very real sense it was the pro -
genitor of several downbeat movies of disillusionment and anomie from
the +yos and beyond. Matthews is more city slicker than country boy
and the forerunner of several Beltway protagonists.
Bill McKay (Robert Redford), the golden-boy hero of Michael
Ritchies The Candidate (+y:), is the wry, photogenic, laid-back son of
a former governor (the crusty, consistently excellent Melvyn Douglas).
Young McKay nds himself invited to run for Californias Democrats
against the incumbent conservative Republican Senator, Crocker
Jarmon (Don Porter). Assured that he cannot possibly win, McKay is
consequently in the enviable position of being able to say exactly what
he wants. It seems all fun and no responsibility but he is in for quite
a shock when, contrary to projections, he pulls o a surprise victory.
y
Presidential candidate Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) retains his integrity by with-
drawing from the campaign in State of the Union.
The ending is typical of the ironic, inconclusive ambiguity of early
+yos Hollywood. McKay asks his campaign manager (Peter Boyle):
What do we do now? Suddenly, the room is thronged with his
cheering supporters. Both victor and adviser are swept away, as if on
a tide, to join in the celebrations; and we are left with an empty room
and the unanswered question.
Jerry Schatzbergs The Seduction of Joe Tynan (+y) trod similar
ground, but it was essentially a bland little lm with a bland leading
man (Alan Alda) as a nice-guy liberal senator who is gradually sucked
into the power game, permitting his integrity to be eroded by a series
of small but signicant compromises, both professionally (breaking his
word to an honourable old senator, again played by Melvyn Douglas)
and personally, cheating on his wife (Barbara Harris) with sexy, snake-
hipped Southern gal Meryl Streep. The movie ends with Tynan poised
to address his partys Convention. As the delegates acclaim him, Joe
smiles wanly at his long-suering wife as if he, like Bill McKay in
The Candidate, is being driven and nally consumed by forces too
powerful for him to withstand. We are left with the implication that ego
and ambition will win out over cosy domesticity. The end is as much a
cop-out as The Candidates. At least State of the Unions hero made his
choice although it was dramatically implausible. But Joe Tynan does
not even have the guts to do that.
That same year, +y, Melvyn Douglas co-starred in another politi -
cally themed fable. Hal Ashbys Being There took the innocent abroad
theme of Mr Smith to a fantastic extreme. Chance (Peter Sellers, in his
last great role) is a middle-aged naf who has lived his entire life in a
childlike cocoon, tending a garden in the middle of Washington, DC.
Thus, Chance is surely the ultimate rustic innocent surrounded by city
slickers. It is no coincidence that this simple garden-dweller, his soul
unsullied by evil thoughts, words or deeds, is loved by and grows to love
a woman named Eve (Shirley MacLaine). On the death of his wealthy
employer (perhaps his unacknowledged father?), Chance is cast out of
his surroundings (his own hitherto undisturbed Eden) to survive on
the chaotic streets of modern Washington. A minor accident leads to
him recuperating at the opulent home of the super-wealthy political
lobbyist Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas) and his vivacious, much
younger wife, Eve. Rand is slowly dying, but he is still a political power -
house who commands the ear of the President ( Jack Warden). Chance
the gardener becomes known (through a simple misunderstanding) by
8
the WASPish name of Chauncey Gardiner, and when he meets the
President he can communicate only in banalities learned from TV. Yet
these, in conjunction with simple gardening homilies, are interpreted as
remarkably profound observations. Chance soon nds himself quoted
by the President, fted by the Washington elite and ultimately touted as
a presidential nominee. The Christlike qualities of Capras country boy
heroes were apparent from Jeerson Smiths mortication of the esh
(his libuster in the Senate, culminating in his collapse from physical
exhaustion) and Long John Willoughbys intended and symbolic self-
crucixion as the bells ring out to herald Christs birth. Yet Being There
is the only American political lm known to end with its hero actually
walking on water. Based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, Being There
turned the classic Mr Smith on its head. Chance is an innocent reduced
to a truly absurd degree. Je Smiths boyish idealism was steeped in
scouting lore and US history, and the city slickers laughed at him.
Chances childlike navet is the product of a life experience that has
never ventured beyond gardening and television shows, and this most
innocent of creatures nds himself ensconced among these most so-
phis ticated of city slickers; but, ironically, he conquers them
inadvertently and eortlessly, with no awareness of his coup.
Being Theres Chance took the rustic innocent to the most implaus -
ible extreme, but Warren Beattys Bulworth (+8) took the city slicker
to his most logical conclusion. Multi-millionaire and California Sena-
tor Jay Billington Bulworth (Beatty) has become a tortured soul. He is
plagued by the realization that, behind the glossy All-American image
of the dedicated US Senator, he is in actuality a willing pawn of the big
corporations. Jay Bulworth may be regarded as a younger reincarna-
tion of Mr Smiths Senator Paine, even down to the realization of his
own corruption, which prompts his sudden death wish. Yet Bulworth
does not attempt to shoot himself, as Paine did. He hires someone else
to do the job. Then, however, with a contract out on his own life, Bul-
worth nds himself liberated by the prospect of his impending assas-
sination and he starts to tell voters the truth, rst through straight
talk, then through gangsta rap. All of a sudden, he has rediscovered
joie de vivre, and now he wants to call o the assassination. But there are
unseen complications, not least in the fact that, unknown to him, the
young Black woman (Halle Berry) with whom he has found love is the
one hired to pull the trigger. Bulworths long dark night of the soul
results in his spiritual regeneration, but this funny, generally optimistic
lm is marred by the hero being abruptly gunned down at the end, as

if Beatty were not quite sure how to round the story o. This recalls the
bleak, pointless demise of Beattys anti-hero at the climax of Robert
Altmans McCabe and Mrs Miller (+y+) and, of course, the murder
of his journalist on the trail of assassins at the end of Alan J. Pakulas
classic political thriller, The Parallax View (+y). Like The Candidate
and The Seduction of Joe Tynan, Bulworth is a fable of integrity dim -
inished by proximity to power. Also, like those earlier movies, it is
ultimately glib and its ending is a cop-out.
Several real-life senators had been indignant at the portrayal of
their august body as vulnerable to chicanery in Mr Smith and Otto
Premingers Advise and Consent (+:). Yet, by the time of Bulworths
release, the representation of a US Senator whose rst priority was the
continuing satisfaction of giant corporate sponsors was virtually taken
as read by the public. Back in +o John Kennedy and Richard Nixon
had each spent around ten million dollars for their respective presiden-
tial campaigns. In +, two years before the release of Bulworth, the
combined total spent by the Democrats, the Republicans and H. Ross
Perots Reform Party was approximately $j million. US Senatorial
and Congressional campaigns also cost stratospheric amounts and
Bulworth was a reection of that reality. Both Hollywood movies and
grass-roots perceptions of political realities had come a long way since
the era of Frank Capra and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Yet one of
Capras contemporaries, himself a cinematic poet of populism, had
exhibited a much shrewder grasp in his own trilogy of old politicians,
lmed between +j and +:.
These three lms directed by John Ford The Sun Shines Bright
(+j), The Last Hurrah (+j8) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(+:) are, respectively, a Southern, a Northeastern, and one of the
greatest Westerns ever made. Ever since She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in
+, Ford had been making lms about ageing protagonists, with em-
phasis on lives well lived, and the implicit inadequacy of the younger
generation. Ever since The Quiet Man (+j:), Ford had been making
valedictory lms, and any one of around eight or nine movies from the
latter years of the Ford canon might have served as his ideal cinematic
farewell. The Sun Shines Bright was one of the rst of these.
Ford had already cast the great American folk hero Will Rogers in
the title role of Judge Priest in +, at which time Ford himself was
aged o. Two decades later, Judge Billy Priest (now played by Charles
+oo
Winninger) was also the central character of The Sun Shines Bright; but
this, like The Last Hurrah and Liberty Valance, was to be a lm about old
age. As Ford got older, his movies got bleaker. Viewed as an unocial
triptych, we can certainly see that logic at work in the trajectory of these
three lms. And, clearly, the higher up the political ladder these Fordian
protagonists go, the greater the loss of their innocence and moral
integrity. Billy Priest is a judge in a small town in Kentucky. The Last
Hurrahs Frank Skengton (Spencer Tracy) is the mayor of an un-
named New England city. Like the hero of Edwin OConnors source
novel, however, he was quite evidently modelled on James Michael
Curley, the colourful four-term mayor of Boston, who also served as a
congressman from and governor of Massachusetts. Liberty Valances
Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) is a US Senator, previously both the
rst governor of his State and ex-Ambassador to the Court of St James
and, we are told near the end, a man who, with the snap of his ngers,
could be the next Vice-President of the United States. Billy Priest
retains a childlike goodness of heart throughout his long municipal
career, while Skengton has played hardball cajoling, browbeating
and blackmailing opponents in the ethically compromised cauldron of
big-city politics to protect his predominantly Irish Catholic con-
stituents against the forces of bigotry, social snobbery and reaction. Yet
the greatest moral loss is suered by the nationally exalted Ransom
Stoddard the man who seems to have won everything but who, in his
heart, is left with nothing.
In The Sun Shines Bright, Billy Priest presides benevolently over a
post-Civil War community, in which veterans of the blue and the grey
coexist peacefully, and sectional and ideological rivalries are now rele-
gated to the old-timers military reunions and municipal elections. A
key scene features the old Confederate warrior Priest returning the
Stars and Stripes, playfully snatched by his comrades, to its rightful
place at the meeting quarters of the Grand Army of the Republic,
marching in with great dignity and proclaiming, One Country, One
Flag! In the rst year of Eisenhowers presidency, this is an archetypal
if undervalued example of +jos Consensus cinema. These old
warriors give one another their due respect, even if the Union veterans
will naturally be voting against Billy Priest come election time. The
Northern candidate is the slick prosecuting attorney Horace K.
Maydew (Milburn Stone). In his book John Ford: The Man and His
Films (+8), Tag Gallagher refers to this character as Nixon-like.
:
+o+
True, Nixon had been a nationally prominent gure since the Alger
Hiss case in + but, within the interior world of Fords icono -
graphy, Maydew was more reminiscent of Stephen A. Douglas in Young
Mr Lincoln. Ford used the same actor, Milburn Stone, to play the court-
room antagonist-cum-rival candidate of both Henry Fondas Lincoln
and Charles Winningers Billy Priest and this gets to the heart of the
scenario. Priest is a Southerner, physically the diametric opposite of
Fondas tall, lean, dark-haired, youthful Lincoln. Billy Priest is short,
fat, white-haired and, above all, old. He is also clad in a white suit (like
those later judicial white knights, Henry Fondas Juror No. 8 in
Angry Men, +jy, and Gregory Pecks Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mock-
ingbird, +: and another, later, far more problematic Southern
politico, Charles Laughtons Senator Cooley in Advise and Consent,
+:).
Yet that same innate goodness and simplicity of soul that beat in
Lincolns breast is alive in Billy Priests. He, too, is a secular saint. Even
his name, like that of Jeerson Smith, is a clue to the two equally im-
portant sides to his character. He is both Judge and Priest, secular and
spiritual leader. He has the gentle humility and the Christian charity to
lead virtually the entire community in a ne and dignied funeral for a
prostitute, reminding the congregation of the tale of Christs inter -
vention on behalf of Mary Magdalene. Furthermore, he has the moral
authority to prevent a lynch mob from hanging a Black boy wrongly
accused of attacking a white girl. This old man is therefore judge, priest
(his status as an aged widower renders his life sexless), teacher and
redeemer. He wins re-election by a single vote (his own), and the victory
parade that marches past his house that night includes a banner with the
declaration: He saved us from ourselves an accolade t for the
Christ-like Lincoln, if ever there was one. The old man is moved by
this outpouring of aection, and the lm ends with him going indoors
to have a drink, to get my heart started again! His is a good heart, but
it is an old and a tired heart, and we sense that this is his last election,
his last victory, his own last hurrah. The next time the crowds gather on
his behalf it will probably be for his funeral. Still, Ford allows his hero
his nal moment of triumph, and the foreknowledge that his life will
end bathed in the love and the validation of his community.
The Last Hurrahs Frank Skengton is not so fortunate. Like Billy
Priest, Skengton is aware that he is ghting his last valiant rearguard
action as the old order passes. Yet his battle is fought out in the relent-
+o:
less glare of the new, one-eyed monster poised to wreak unprecedented
inuence on the world of politics and elections: television. Skengton
is a pragmatist rather than a man of high principle and he is not averse
to incorporating ancient grudges into his political agenda. His lifelong
animosity towards the vindictive newspaper publisher Amos Force
( John Carradine) stems not only from Forces one-time membership
of the Ku Klux Klan but also, crucially, from the fact that Skengtons
mother had, as a young girl in domestic service, been humiliated and
branded a thief by Forces father for taking home some leftover fruit.
Skengtons foes are mostly an unlovely array of mean-spirited bigots
(Carradine), snooty blue-blooded WASPs (Basil Rathbone as Norman
Cass) and self-opinionated high Catholic windbags (Willis Bouchey,
who often essayed obnoxious loudmouths for Ford in the last decade of
the directors career). However, just as troubling as this unholy alliance
of the old guards of reaction is the feckless younger generation who
stand to inherit the Dream. In particular, there are three young men so
vapid that they could not safely be left in charge of a box of potato
chips. Kevin McCluskey (Charles FitzSimons, Maureen OHaras real-
life brother) is an amiable but dull young Irish-American championed
by the anti-Skengton forces. McCluskeys television address, designed
to present him as an ideal family man, is sabotaged by his barking dog
(plainly a satirical swipe at the televised Checkers speech that had sal-
vaged Richard Nixons vice-presidential candidacy in +j:). Skeng-
tons own son (Arthur Walsh) is a vacuous party-going chump so busy
with his own pleasures that he even neglects to vote for his father on
election day; when he rushes tearfully to his fathers death-bed to beg
forgiveness, Skengton grants him absolution as he would a frightened
child. McCluskey is ineectual and Junior Skengton is inane but
Norman Casss son The Commodore (O. Z. Whitehead) is jaw -
droppingly imbecilic. The most hilarious sequence features Skeng-
ton appointing this :-carat incompetent as chief of the citys Fire
Department (which appeals to The Commodore because he will get to
wear a re-ghters helmet). The manoeuvre is designed solely to prove
politically embarrassing to Skengtons old foe, who at least realizes
the catastrophic implications of his idiot son being invested with the
high responsibility of safeguarding the citizenry.
This anecdote speaks volumes about Skengton. It is devious, mis-
chievous and perhaps even wicked; but it is also witty, purposeful and
designed to achieve a benecial end. The movie lionizes Skengton as
+o
a grand old codger: charming, cunning, though benevolent, and always
mindful of the greater good of his constituents, who love him for the
enemies he has made. Skengton is perfectly capable of hijacking the
funeral of a neer-do-well for political purposes, but he populates the
wake with a huge supporting cast of cronies and voters, to suggest to the
widow that her husbands popularity was far greater than she knew.
Skengton relishes the rough-and-tumble of big city politics and
believes the end justies the means but, at the heart of the man,
there is greatness, resentment against injustice and prejudice, and much
kindness.
In the end, these qualities are not enough. Skengton is defeated,
the consummate political pragmatist unseated by a no-account novice.
Even the Cardinal (Donald Crisp), himself a long-time critic of the
Mayors, is appalled that a man of Skengtons stature can be brought
down by a nincompoop like McCluskey. As Skengton trudges his
lonely road home following his defeat, he suers a heart attack, and the
rest of the lm consists of various characters visiting the old giant on
his death-bed to say farewell before he slips gently away. The Last
Hurrah thus mourned the passing of a man, a breed of men, an era,
and a way of doing political business in America. In each respect, it was
deeply pessimistic about what might follow. Ironically, two years after
The Last Hurrahs release, an Irish Catholic from Massachusetts, whom
Mr Smith has become a glad-handing windbag: Carleton Young, Joseph Hoover and
James Stewart as the Senator returned from Washington in John Fords The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance ().
Ford revered, would win the greatest political prize of all and John
Kennedys victory would be partially due to the impact of television.
Nonetheless, The Last Hurrah was an elegiac lm rather than a

prophetic one.
Billy Priest is an exemplary country boy and Frank Skengton is
the most benign of city slickers. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
Ransom Stoddard ( James Stewart) begins as an Eastern dude lawyer
who arrives in the West and spearheads the campaign for Statehood on
behalf of the country boys. However, catapulted by a killing to fame,
and thence to Washington and the wider world, Stoddard becomes a
glad-handing, posturing and inherently hollow city slicker. One of the
richest, most multi-faceted lms in the history of the cinema, The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance is essentially a tragedy of the soul, and the tale
is given especial poignancy by its casting. In + John Wayne and
James Stewart each shot to stardom, in Fords Stagecoach and Capras
Mr Smith Goes to Washington respectively. Now, in +:, we see the
archetypes they established cross paths, mature and confront the
deterioration of their dreams. At the end of Stagecoach, Waynes Ringo
Kid heads o to settle on his ranch with the woman he loves. Here
+oj
In John Fords The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (+:), James Stewarts Ransom
Stoddard is the agent of civilization (note the motto on the blackboard and the portrait
of Washington, which subtly connects to Stoddard as Founding Father of democracy
in the town of Shinbone).
Waynes character Tom Doniphon is a rancher who anticipates settling
down with his lady love whom he will lose to Stoddard. Most perti-
nent in this context, Ransom Stoddard is quite clearly Jeerson Smith
grown old and gone sour. Ironically, the sleek, white-haired Senator
Stoddard resembles Smiths old adversary, the Silver Knight, Senator
Paine. Stoddard and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) return West (Mr Smith
comes back from Washington) for the funeral of an old friend, Tom
Doniphon, who has died in obscurity. The ashback forming the main
corpus of the tale concludes with the revelation that, contrary to the
legend which launched Stoddards career, it was not he but Doniphon
who had shot down the notorious outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Mar-
vin). Stoddard has built his life not only on a killing but also on a lie,
while Doniphon remained unsung, yielding both the credit for the deed
and the girl he loved to Stoddard. At rst sight, this tale seems to be
Doniphons tragedy.
But it is also Stoddards tragedy. He is basically a decent man who
aspires only to do good. He begins by teaching (traditionally a womans
role in Westerns) the undereducated people of Shinbone (adults and
children). Education is the basis of law and order is inscribed on the
blackboard. His classes consist primarily of instructions in citizenship,
though he is distinctly patronizing towards a young Mexican girl and to
Pompey (Woody Strode), Doniphons faithful Black retainer. Later, one
of the great successes of his career will be the irrigation bill that trans-
forms the frontier wilderness into a garden.
Yet, at the core of his soul, he is not a man pued up by achieve-
ment. Doniphons action may have saved Stoddards life, but his reve-
lation has ruined it. Stoddard has lived with the burden of this lie for
decades. Now, at last, he tells the truth. But the newspaper editor in
attendance refuses to publish the scoop, declaring: When the legend
becomes fact, print the legend. Stoddard is too late. The world prefers
the confected myth, and even the verdict of history refuses him abso-
lution. Still, ironically, Ransom Stoddard is a genuine hero. He faced
Valance of his own volition, with no idea that Doniphon was lurking
across the street to save him; but that is not what the lm stresses, and
it is not what Ransom Stoddard remembers. He sees only that his life
has been based on a falsehood, which has eaten away at his conscience
like a cancer. The lms last line of dialogue reinforces this tortured
predicament, as an obsequious railwayman remarks: Nothings too
good for the man who shot Liberty Valance. The most shameful
+o
incident in his life is the one that will guarantee him immortality. All his
truly great achievements will be buried with his bones. This is the
logical, if bitter, conclusion for that idealistic country boy persona
with which James Stewart had attained stardom in Mr Smith Goes to
Washington. Ransom Stoddard has already been to Washington. Now,
after Liberty Valance, Jeerson Smith had no place left to go.
The line of heroes from the uncomplicated idealist Jeerson Smith
to the deeply troubled Ransom Stoddard represents one facet of the
country boy archetype so beloved of American myth and legend. How-
ever, another, profoundly negative rural gure looms large in American
popular consciousness and, unlike the bright-eyed boy scout, the
backwoods demagogue shows no sign of losing his relevance to modern
US society. This gure, too, has been immortalized as a celluloid
archetype. The lm that launched the demagogue as a star-spangled
monster was Robert Rossens Oscar-winning All the Kings Men (+).
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren,
rst published in +, All the Kings Men is the classic tale of a back-
woods politician who comes to prominence as a populist champion, but
who is corrupted and ultimately destroyed by his lust for power. It is
widely acknowledged to be based on the life and career of Huey Pierce
Long, the charismatic Governor of and Senator from Louisiana who was
felled by an assassins bullet in September +j. During the early +os,
as Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal to rescue America
from the Depression, a variety of grass-roots leaders, visionaries and
reactionaries emerged as outspoken critics of the new President and his
administration. Some were wary of the growth in bureaucratization
and federal power. Others held that FDRs reforms did not go far
enough. In California, Dr Francis Townsend led the campaign for
generous old-age pensions, while in Michigan, Father Charles Cough-
lins radio sermons became increasingly anti-labour, anti-FDR and
anti-Semitic. That last sentiment was certainly in unwelcome abun-
dance. Several home-grown fascist groups sprang up, among them the
Friends of New Germany and William Dudley Pelleys Silver Shirts
modelled after that German organization with the same initials.
Huey Long was simply the most charismatic (and by no means the
most virulent) of the would-be messiahs who peddled their fake salva-
tions to the discontented and dispossessed of +os America. Yet it was
Long whom the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, termed the closest
thing to a dictator America ever had.
+oy
On the plus side, Long single-handedly dragged Louisiana kicking
and screaming into the twentieth century. The Kingsh, as he was
known, broke the stranglehold of the big corporations within Louisiana,
abolished State poll taxes and exempted impoverished citizens from the
general property tax. He modernized Louisianas infrastructure by
launching an ambitious programme of road- and bridge-building. Long
championed education by providing free school books and sponsoring
new night schools to combat adult illiteracy. Alone among Southern
governors of that time, he stood on a platform of racial equality, openly
defying the Ku Klux Klan and vowing to prevent the Imperial Grand
Wizard from setting foot in Louisiana.
On the minus side, Long ran Louisiana as though it were his own
personal efdom, wielding power over teachers and tax collectors,
bankers and judges, the Louisiana State Supreme Court and both the
State police and the municipal police. Under his sway, the Louisiana
State legislature actually outlawed democracy. Thereafter, Long was to
be the ultimate arbiter. He called out the militia and entered New
Orleans at the head of his troops. Strong-arm tactics aside, he had fre-
quently resorted to low cunning at the polls, derailing one opponents
campaign by claiming the mans wife was a thespian.
His nationwide Share Our Wealth campaign was the bandwagon
intended to take him all the way to the White House in +. Personal
fortunes would be limited to $j million, with an annual income ceiling
of $+.8 million and a oor of $:,ooo. Long stood poised to reap perhaps
six million votes in the presidential election of +. If he had been
elected, he planned to abolish the Republican and Democratic parties
and serve sixteen years as the dictator of the United States. That aston-
ishing ambition was literally stopped dead in its tracks after Long was
struck by a bullet following a confrontation with the disgruntled Dr
Carl Austin Weiss, Jr, who was in turn shot by Longs bodyguards;
Weiss had been the son-in-law of Judge Benjamin Pavy, who was set to
lose his seat due to Longs gerrymandering. The writer William Man-
chester was undoubtedly correct when he observed: Huey Long was
one of the very few men of whom it can be said that, had he lived,
American history would have been dramatically dierent.
j
Longs legend continued to grow beyond his lifetime. He was the
prototype for Chuck Crawford, the demagogue in John Dos Passoss
novel Number One (+). Yet it was Robert Penn Warrens All the
Kings Men which recast the myth-legend of Huey Long as The Great
+o8
+o
American Overreacher. Warren had lived in Louisiana during the nal
year of the regime of The Kingsh. His ctional Governor Willie Stark
was a consummate re-creation of Huey Long, whom Warren recalled
in the +yos as a wit, a deliberate vulgarian, a crusader and redeemer,
an orator capable of high style or low, a philosopher of politics, and an
amoral schemer . . . He was the perfect political animal.
Columbia Pictures initially wanted a box-oce heavyweight for the

lm of All the Kings Men, so the role of Willie Stark was originally
oered to both Spencer Tracy and John Wayne (ironically, later the
moral victors, even in defeat and death, of The Last Hurrah and Liberty
Valance respectively). Yet Wayne was forcefully indignant about the
proposed script, condemning its negative representations of human
relationships and American society. The prized role of Stark went to an
equally forceful but not very likable character actor, Broderick Craw-
ford, who prepared himself by studying newsreels of Huey Long.
The +os were topped and tailed by two classic lms about the
corrosive inuence of power on a mans soul: Orson Welless Citizen
Kane (++) and Rossens All the Kings Men (+). Both had as their
prototypes real, larger-than-life American originals who had each in
their time been labelled as fascists (the prototype for Kane was, of course,
the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst). Kane begins as a
young boy suddenly thrust into a life of wealth and privilege; Willie
Stark, a self-taught, self-made, self-confessed hick, tirelessly champions
the poor people of his State (unnamed, but clearly modelled on
Louisiana), and achieves what Charles Foster Kane (Welles) yearned
Broderick
Crawford as the
triumphant Willie
Stark, just before
his assassination,
in Robert Rossens
All the Kings Men
(+) (note the
uniformed armed
guard in the fore-
ground).
for mass electoral love. Kanes political campaign is derailed by
adultery. The married Starks aairs, rst with his hard-bitten secretary
Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge), then with society girl Anne
Stanton (Joanne Dru), are merely perks for the potentate. Stark would
surely have agreed with Henry Kissingers observation that power is
the ultimate aphrodisiac. These relationships are never presented as
issues for the voters consumption or consideration. Kane is the tragedy
of a man who had everything in the world but love, with part of that un-
requited quest the desire for validation at the polls. Yet Starks tragedy
is that of a man for whom even the mass adulation of the electorate is
not enough. Both have (implicitly intellectual) best friends (Kane has
Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland, Stark has John Irelands Jack Bur-
den), each of whom sporadically acts as the great mans conscience, and
each of whom is ultimately unable to save the tragic anti-hero from his
own worst, overweening impulses. Both Kane and Stark believe that
++o
Cult of personality on the campaign circuit: Orson Welles directed and starred
as Citizen Kane (++), largely based on the personality of media baron William
Randolph Hearst.
power and money can x any problems, especially their own. When
Starks adopted son Tom (John Derek) goes o the rails and causes a car
crash that results in a girlfriends death, the boy admits to drunken
driving and is willing to face the consequences. Stark, instead, attempts
to buy the girls father o; and when the man refuses, he disappears
and is later found murdered.
Crawford develops Stark from an earnest, honest, sincere populist
(complete with simple Southern political heros white suit) to a Kane-
type ogre drunk on power (dressed, when he tries to bribe the dead
girls father, in a plush monogrammed robe). Finally, he is like a spoiled
child as emperor, a veritable peckerwood Caligula, shouting, hectoring,
demanding everything his own way, glibly identifying himself as the
embodiment of the will of the people, and exacting an absolute loyalty
that he does not reciprocate.
He has no compunction about seducing Anne Stanton, the love of
Jack Burdens life. He believes she would make a wife t for a presi-
dent. His hold over Anne is so great that he even convinces her to hand
over long-buried incriminating evidence about her uncle, the honour -
able Judge Stanton (Raymond Greenleaf), formerly Starks Attorney-
General, who had later resigned in protest at the corruption of his
regime. Stark tries to head o the judges public opposition with black-
mail (the lm never reveals the details of his ancient sin), but the judge
kills himself. The State legislature deliberates on Starks impeachment,
but, as crowds gather outside to roar their intimidating approval of
Stark, the vote runs in his favour. Stark appears, and he declares to his
adoring supporters: Your will is my strength. And your need is my
justice. And I shall live in your right and your will. And if any man tries
to stop me from fullling that right and that will, Ill break him. Ill
break him with my bare hands for I have the strength of many. Both
the messianic and fascistic overtones are unmistakable, but the crowds
still cheer frantically. Now, we see precisely what Stark is made of,
and precisely what the People are willing to let him get away with in
their name.
Seconds later, Stark is gunned down. His nemesis, like Longs, is a
doctor with a family grudge. Adam Stanton (Shepperd Strudwick),
Annes brother and the late Judges nephew, has never been a believer
in the force of nature that was Willie Stark. Ironically, when they rst
met, the sceptical doctor wished to ask a question and Stark said,
Shoot. Now, unhinged equally by his uncles suicide and his sisters
+++
aair with the man who caused it, Dr Stanton does exactly that and
is himself killed by Starks henchman. Yet, even as he lies dying, Stark
cannot understand why a man whose family he had wronged so ter ribly
should want to kill him; and, with his dying breath, he mutters: Could
have been . . . whole world . . . Willie Stark . . . whole world . . . Willie
Stark. Why did he do it to me Willie Stark? Why? He dies as he had
lived: a self-centred, overreaching megalomaniac.
Crawford won the Best Actor Oscar, Mercedes McCambridge was
named Best Supporting Actress for her role as Sadie Burke, and the
openly left-wing producer-director-screenwriter Robert Rossen (soon
to be one of the most famous victims of the Hollywood blacklist) lifted
the statuette for Best Picture of +. Crawford and McCambridge
briey attained late-career heights of movie demonology in the +yos.
Crawford played another political ogre in the title role of The Private
Files of J. Edgar Hoover (+yy). Mercedes McCambridge went one
better, furnishing the voice of the Devil for The Exorcist (+y).
All the Kings Men was critically acclaimed, but it never became a
popular success. This may have been partly attributable to a cast led by
unappealing actors. Crawford and McCambridge were powerful
performers, but they were certainly not congenial screen personalities.
The nominal hero, Jack Burden, the intellectual journalist drawn into
Starks circle, was played by screen heavy John Ireland, who was equally
unaccustomed to playing likable characters, and here he was unable to
invest Burden with that quality. Even Irelands real-life wife Joanne Dru
(so fetching in the great late +os Westerns Red River, She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master) struck a discordant note as the
aristocratic Anne Stanton, Burdens girlfriend, who gravitates towards
the coarse, ruthless Stark. In short, there was no one to root for. But it
was not just the actors. All the Kings Men was an ambitious but ulti-
mately awed lm, with its portentous warning about the corruption of
power and the dangers of home-grown fascism. All the Kings Men
failed to deliver the punch it promised. It was neither the grandiose
statement nor the compelling entertainment it aspired to be.
Still, Huey Long and the archetypal gure of the country boy cor-
rupted by power has retained a strong mythic resonance within Amer-
ican culture. In Raoul Walshs A Lion Is In the Streets (+j), James
Cagneys Hank Martin was another Long-type demagogue a one-man
bucolic plague again felled by a bullet. Long has also received his due
on television, in three productions over four decades. Sidney Lumet
++:
directed a television version of All the Kings Men in +j8, with Neville
Brand as Willie Stark. Edward Asner played Long in Robert E. Collinss
The Life and Assassination of the Kingsh (+yy). In +j John Good-
man took his turn in Thomas Schlammes Kingsh: A Story of Huey P.
Long.
y
On the subject of Long bio-pics, honourable mention must go to
Ron Sheltons good-hearted comedy Blaze (+8). Paul Newman plays
another Governor Long of Louisiana Hueys brother Earl, who, near
the end of his term of oce, embarked on a passionate aair with the
ame-haired, buxom stripper Blaze Starr (Lolita Davidovich). On the
stump, Newman as Long proclaims his populist credentials: The three
best friends that the poor people ever had Jesus Christ, Sears &
Roebuck . . . and Earl K. Long!
8
Unlike Spencer Tracys grand old
man in The Last Hurrah, Earl wins his last election (this time to the US
Congress). But, like Skengton, the race takes its toll on his ailing
health and he dies shortly thereafter.
Huey Long and his alter ego Willie Stark continue to represent
scenery-chewing opportunities for larger-than-life character actors.
:oo saw the release of a new cinema version of All the Kings Men
directed by Steven Zaillian (the screenwriter of Schindlers List), star-
ring Sean Penn as Willie Stark, Jude Law as Jack Burden, Kate Winslet
as Anne Stanton and Anthony Hopkins as the Judge. One of the
executive producers was James Carville, the Ragin Cajun, who had
rst come to national prominence as Bill Clintons campaign manager
in +:, and who has since established himself as a leading liberal
spokesman on American television. Penn has been one of Hollywoods
most high-prole critics of George W. Bush. His recent movie The
Assassination of Richard Nixon had been just one of a prestigious crop
from :oo (The Manchurian Candidate, Fahrenheit /, Silver City)
which were thematically unfavourably disposed to the current occu-
pant of the White House. Yet, if the new All the King s Men was
intended to tread a similar path, it misred. Zaillians lm refocused
the narrative, shifting the principal emphasis away from Starks mate-
rial rise and moral decline towards Jack Burdens dilemma of personal
integrity versus his political commitment to Stark. Granted, this was a
major concern of the book, but existential angst seldom pays o at the
box oce. Moviegoers are interested in protagonists of action, not
thought; but even the characterization of Stark left much to be desired
in this new version. This was essentially a pusillanimous portrayal,
unworthy of Penn. We had the sense only that his Willie Stark was a
++
bit of a shady opportunist. There was no sense of an individual with
immense charisma, or a volatile personality, or the potential to become
a dictator. And worst of all, Penns supposedly authentic Louisianan
accent was so mangled and dicult to understand that this might be
the rst American lm to require subtitles. Furthermore, instead of the
Depression-wrought +os, the narrative was relocated to the +jos.
While that decade had its own demagogue in Joe McCarthy, the socio-
political circumstances were markedly dierent. The anxieties of the
+os, which gave rise to Huey Long and his slogan Every Man a
King, sprang from poverty and despair. The anxieties of the +jos
were those of an auent era, stemming largely from fears of internal
subversion and foreign aggression in the atomic age. These were the
fears that McCarthy exploited. Nevertheless, if transposition of this
classic +os scenario to the +jos was a mistake, it was perhaps a
halfway good idea. It might have been intriguing and instructive to
bring the cautionary tale of Willie Stark right up to date. With so many
Americans currently living in poverty not least in post-Hurricane
Katrina Louisiana could a Stark-type demagogue ourish in the early
twenty-rst century? This listless new version of All the Kings Men
missed the chance to explore that hypothesis.
Beyond All the Kings Men, the demagogue has remained a power-
fully resonant ogre in American movie culture, stalking the dark corners
of the political genre and the national psyche. Elia Kazans A Face in the
Crowd (+jy), based on Budd Schulbergs short story Your Arkansas
Traveler, traced the rise of a folksy television star, Lonesome Rhodes
(Andy Grith), whose cornball patter and cracker-barrel philosophy
mask a truly megalomaniac personality. Like several central gures in
lms examined here, Rhodes was reputedly based on a real-life proto-
type (chiey the TV personality Arthur Godfrey, but with a touch of
Will Rogers-style geniality mixed in for good measure). Loathsome
Lonesome aligns himself with right-wing politicians for his own self-
aggrandizement. He secretly despises the TV audiences to whom he
owes his good fortune; secretly, that is, until his ex-lover Marcia Jeries
(Patricia Neal) hits the switch in the control-room and broadcasts him
as he contemptuously mocks all the viewers at home. His phenomenal
appeal and his burgeoning power vanish in an instant. This demagogue
is stopped not by a bullet, but by the ick of a switch.
The most terrifying of all the movie demagogues was perhaps
Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson in David Cronenbergs compelling The
++
Dead Zone (+8), based on the novel by Stephen King. Following a car
crash, teacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) has spent four-and-
a-half years in a coma. He wakes to nd that he is cursed with the power
to see a persons fate just by the touch of his hand. At a Senate campaign
rally for Greg Stillson (who is already adept at violent intimidation),
Johnny shakes the candidates hand and realizes that this man is on
course to become president and will, in pursuit of his destiny, launch
a nuclear war.
Johnny decides that the only way to avert this catastrophe is to assas-
sinate Stillson. He plans to do so at a rally in the town hall. Johnny res
at Stillson from the balcony, but his rst shot misses. Stillson, now alert
to the attempt on his life, seizes a small child and shields himself with
the toddler. Johnny cannot shoot at the child, and in his natural hesita-
tion he is fatally wounded by Stillsons thuggish henchman. As Johnny
topples from the balcony, in the confusion a photographer ees from the
scene, armed with a devastating picture of Stillson saving his own skin
by hiding behind the child. While Johnny lies dying, Stillson grabs him
++j
Marcia Jeries (Patricia Neal) discovers Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Grith), the hick
headed for stardom but with an ambitious secret agenda in Elia Kazans A Face in
the Crowd (+jy).
and demands to know who was behind the assassination attempt, Johnny
touches Stillsons wrist. He has his last glimpse into the future. He sees
a gun lying atop a magazine cover. A hand lifts the gun, revealing the
cover picture of Stillson holding the child up to protect himself. The
headline declares that Stillson is nished. The hand on the gun is Still-
sons. He puts the barrel beneath his own chin, a shot rings out and
blood spatters the fateful picture. Johnny dies content, knowing that he
has stopped the monster and averted a global holocaust.
Had Willie Stark been a near-miss? Was Lonesome Rhodes an aber-
ration? Might Greg Stillson have been the most horric of nightmares?
Or was he too bad to be true? Could a demagogue truly come to power
in the United States? Gore Vidal, novelist, essayist, author of the
magnicent political drama The Best Man and a cousin of former Vice-
President Al Gore, once wrote in Life magazine:
I have often thought and written that if the United States were
ever to have a Caesar, a true subverter of the state, (+) he would
attract to himself all the true believers, the extremists, the hot-
eyed custodians of the Truth; (:) he would oversimplify some
dicult but vital issue, putting himself on the side of the major-
ity, as Huey Long did when he proclaimed every man a king and
proposed to divvy up the wealth; () he would not in the least re-
semble the folk idea of a dictator. He would not be an hysteric
like Hitler. Rather, he would be just plain folks, a regular guy,
warm and sincere, and while he was amusing us on television
storm troopers would gather in the streets.
Three decades after this observation, Vidal had his opportunity to

underscore the dangers of demagoguery as a co-star in Tim Robbinss
Bob Roberts (+:). Roberts (Tim Robbins) is the slickest of the slick,
a right-wing folk singer running to unseat the long-serving Senator
from Pennsylvania, liberal Democrat Brickley Paiste (Vidal) in the
autumn of +o. Bob Roberts is framed as a Spinal Tap-style docu -
mentary, with the British lm-maker Terry Manchester (Brian Murray)
charting the Roberts phenomenon. Raised in a commune by hippie
parents, Roberts rebelled against his +os-style upbringing and ran
away to military school, then later became a multi-millionaire through
shrewd investment and trading on the stock market. Roberts is a
country boy and a city slicker, and his world-view is highlighted and
++
reinforced by the truly banal lyrics that send his faithful fans into almost
orgasmic adulation: Some people will work, /Some simply will
not, /But theyll complain and complain and complain and complain
and complain. It is not exactly Cole Porter, but it is perfectly illustra-
tive of a rather smug brand of meritocracy that amounts to little more
than a self-rationalized predestination. There is, after all, a world of
dierence between a multi-millionaire folk singer-cum-stock investors
denition of hard work and that of a coalminer or a waitress. Even the
socially benecially titled Drugs Stink features lines that could be an
incitement to a lynch mob: Be a clean-livin man with a rope in your
hand . . . Hang em high for a clean-livin land. Real-life liberal activist
Robbins declined to release these songs on a soundtrack album, for fear
they might be adopted out of context by exactly the type of politicians
that his lm sought to excoriate.
Robbinss hunch was, in all likelihood, correct. Bob Roberts is clean-
cut, smooth, supercially pleasant and supremely manipulative. He is
precisely the type of man who could succeed where a Willie Stark, a
Lonesome Rhodes or a Greg Stillson would fail. He has recreated him-
self as the Rebel Conservative; and, ingeniously, here Robbins tapped
into Americas cultural heritage and took the pulse of the times. The
titles of Bob Robertss best-selling record albums (The Freewheelin
Bob Roberts, Times Are Changin Back and Bob on Bob) are, obviously,
references to Bob Dylans early successes, The Freewheelin Bob Dylan
++y
Folk singer, multi-millionaire, right-wing populist: Tim Robbins directed and starred
as the slick Bob Roberts (+:), with Alan Rickman as the sinister power behind the
throne.
(+), The Times They Are a-Changin (+) and Blonde on Blonde
(+). The central narrative premise of the youthful outsider running
against the veteran senator who epitomizes the Establishment was rst
used twenty years earlier in Michael Ritchies The Candidate, although
in that instance outsider Robert Redford was part of the wave of cool,
college-kid radical liberalism which grew out of the +os. By con-
trast, Roberts is in Reagan-Bush I era revolt against the Baby-Boomer
idealism and altruism which emerged as core liberal values during the
+os. Roberts is a corporate yuppie whom we could easily imagine
seated at the same table as Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) of Oliver
Stones Wall Street (+8y), the monetarist monster whose mantra was
Greed is good.
In Robert Altmans masterpiece Nashville (+yj), a third-party pop-
ulist campaign threads unobtrusively yet insistently through a week-
end-long country music festival. The unseen Replacement Party
Presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker propounds New Roots for
the Nation, and there is a persistent if largely unarticulated implication
that behind his folksy, nostalgic rhetoric lurks a vaguely fascist agenda.
In both Nashville (implicitly) and Bob Roberts (explicitly) ambitious
politicos harness popular enthusiasm for country or folk music for their
own exploitative purposes. Walkers telegenic advance man was played
by Michael Murphy, who looks like John F. Kennedy crossed with
Gary Hart. Murphy later starred as the eponymous hero of Tanner
(+88), a satirical TV serial mockumentary, directed by Altman and
scripted by Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, about a ctitious
presidential candidate whom some pundits and media personalities
initially took at face value. Tanners contrived documentary format
++8
The face of voters
to come? Fanatical
supporters of
Bob Roberts,
among them a
young Jack Black.
marked it as the immediate forerunner of Bob Roberts. However, Rob-
bins not only mined a rich vein of pre existing myths, movies and music,
but, as the writer, director and star, he created a Zeitgeist classic. While
Bob Roberts was playing in American cinemas in +:, Texan billionaire
H. Ross Perot was mounting a third-party challenge to the incumbent
President, George H. W. Bush, and the Democratic candidate, Bill
Clinton. Perots impressive showing in the polls siphoned o a signi-
cant number of Republican votes but the ultimate beneciary was Bill
Clinton. Still, Perots strong performance demonstrated a high level of
popular frustration with the gridlock that had become characteristic
of US two-party politics by the early +os.
While Roberts is not specically identied as a Republican, his
opponent, Senator Brickley Paiste, is at one point billed in a TV
screen appearance as a Democrat. Paiste is an archetypal, old-style, big -
government liberal (rst elected to the Senate in +o, when Kennedy
won the White House), and he is apt to represent, depending on the
particular viewer, everything once deemed honourable in the Ameri-
can political system or everything that is wrong with it. During their
televised debate, Paiste appeals to the electorate to choose reality (him-
self) over image (Roberts), but his earnest paternalism risks boring the
voters to death. Paiste wants to talk about facts, issues and statistics,
whereas Roberts is already master of the slick, glossy, well-crafted
sound-bite. Moreover, like Skengton in The Last Hurrah, Paiste has
quite possibly just been around too long, and the voters are ready for a
change. As in The Last Hurrah, television plays a crucial role in the
grand old mans defeat, yet Paistes nemesis is not a well-meaning idiot
la Kevin McCluskey, but a maestro of the modern entertainment
medium. Bob Roberts is the man that Lonesome Rhodes might have
dreamed of being, once his rough edges had been smoothed o.
The campaign degenerates into a tale of rival scandals, involving
Robertss campaign chairman Lukas Hart III (Alan Rickman is wonder-
fully creepy in the role), and a wholly concocted aair between Paiste
and a sixteen-year-old girl. Harts anti-drugs organization Broken
Dove is implicated in a Savings and Loan scandal. The funds sup -
posedly raised to provide low-cost housing have been diverted to pro-
vide air transport for covert operations overseas, including the import
of narcotics into the United States. The scandal involving Paiste is in
fact a cropped photo showing him with the sixteen-year-old girl, a
friend of his granddaughter, in the front seat of his car. The entire
++
picture (omitted from the newspapers) would have shown his grand-
daughter in the back seat. Yet the Roberts teams choice of contrived
scandal shows their shrewd grasp of the power of the sound-bite. One
of the basic, and basest, rules of tabloid journalism is: Watergate, Iran-
gate, This-gate, That-gate, it does not matter. A huge percentage of
the reading, voting and tax-paying public lose interest as soon as the
trail slopes o into intricate tales of stolen les, laundered cash, oshore
investments or taking from Peter to pay Paul; but Congressman Caught
in Motel Room with Buxom Stripper that they understand.
Just in case the sex smear does not seal the deal, the Roberts team
have another trick up their sleeves, and this one has a double bonus.
Roberts visits New York to appear as a guest on the comedy show Cut-
ting Edge Live (based, of course, on Saturday Night Live). His stint on
air is cut short when a left-wing crew member pulls the plug on a live
rendition of his crypto-fascist song Retake America (in doing so, she
has pulled the plug on her own career). In A Face in the Crowd, a woman
destroyed Lonesome Rhodes by leaving broadcasting equipment
switched on; in Bob Roberts, another woman working in television tries
to stop the demagogue by switching him o. However, an even more
dramatic event is, literally, waiting in the wings. As Roberts leaves the
TV studio, he is shot twice (the scene is strongly reminiscent of the
assassination of Robert Kennedy). Throughout the lm, the dark-skinned
radical journalist John Alijah Bugs Raplin (Giancarlo Esposito), a
writer for the underground paper Troubled Times, has been dogging
Roberts with awkward questions about his connections to Lukas Hart,
+:o
Idealism and
irony: Jeerson
Smith ( James
Stewart) pays
homage to Thomas
Jeerson) . . .
Broken Dove, the Savings and Loan scandal and the diversion of funds.
Now Raplin, who was in close proximity to Roberts when the shots were
red, is accused as the would-be assassin. But Raplin is aicted with
cerebral palsy and could not possibly have held the gun. Nevertheless,
when his name is made public, a few fanatical Roberts supporters xate
on his middle name, Alijah, and immediately conclude that he is an
Arab. This is set in late +o, when, as news snippets running through
the movie remind us, America was gearing up for war in the Persian
Gulf. Bob Roberts survives, but he is conned to a wheelchair. Will he
ever walk again?
On election day Roberts wins a narrow victory over Paiste, very likely
boosted by a sympathy vote after the shooting. Raplin, who has vowed
to bring Roberts down by exposing the facts (I dont need a gun) is
now a widely hated gure. Later, at a celebratory dinner in Washington,
we see Roberts in his wheelchair, on stage, strumming his guitar, singing
one of his ballads. The audience are clearly enjoying themselves. So is
Roberts so much so that, as the camera closes in on him, he is even
tapping his foot along with the music. The shooting was a hoax. His
fans, more reminiscent of a cult than of conventional political sup -
porters, congregate outside his hotel. Through the curtain we see his
silhouette as he walks past the window, but his disciples outside do not
seem to notice. They are too busy celebrating the news that a patriot
has just shot and killed Bugs Raplin. Late that night Terry Manches-
ter, who has grown progressively more sceptical of Roberts (I dont
know if I really like him; I dont know if hes healthy for your country),
+:+
. . . and the
nal scene from
Bob Roberts,
consciously
referencing the
pilgrimage of
Mr Smith Goes
to Washington.
pays a late-night visit to the Jeerson Memorial. It is the sort of
pilgrimage that the heroes of earlier political movies made (though
usually to the Lincoln Memorial), to gain inspiration and encourage-
ment to soldier on, during the times that tried their souls (e.g., James
Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Kevin Costner in JFK). Yet
in this scene, it is not an American but a friendly outsider, disillusioned
and profoundly disturbed by the ascendancy of men like Bob Roberts.
Terry stands in solemn contemplation of the third President, his legacy
and his words: I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility
against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. As the camera
pans over Jeersons words, on the soundtrack we hear one of Bob
Robertss martial ballads plus a news report, announcing that war is
about to begin in the Persian Gulf and that US public opinion has
switched dramatically in favour of military action within the past two
weeks. Another case of manipulation? The gap between the ideal and
reality is tragically wide.
Bob Roberts is at times didactic, particularly in Vidals and Espos-
itos addresses to (Terry Manchesters) camera. Vidals lines were
largely unscripted and improvised to deliver the Gospel according to
Gore. Vidals Senator Paiste was at his most bitingly perceptive when
discussing the erosion of American liberties that have been incremen-
tally yielded to the National Security State. His Brickley Paiste is a
portrait of a tired but decent man, ghting the good ght, even though
some of his remarks to Manchesters camera suggest that he realizes
the battle to preserve Americans hard-won liberties has already
suered a crucial downturn.
Yet what of Paistes successor, the new US Senator from Penn -
sylvania? Unlike Willie Stark or Lonesome Rhodes or Greg Stillson,
Bob Roberts pushes a lot of the right buttons for the televisual and,
implicitly, the televangelical age. Could such a gure be prophetic?
Could such an individual ever ourish and triumph in America, trans-
forming the faithful into the fanatical? Vidal delivers another line in the
lm, with enough irony to register on the Richter scale: Course not!
This is America. Virtue always prevails.
+::
+:
The myth of America as a perfectible society, in which justice habit -
ually triumphs and virtue always prevails, was cultivated assiduously by
Hollywood lms during the +os, os and jos. Movie America was a
promised land of limitless opportunity, unbridled liberty, unparalleled
prosperity, unprecedented power and eternal, unstoppable progress.
That myth was severely punctured by the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, and denigrated further by the ensuing decade of mayhem at
home and carnage in South-east Asia, perhaps beyond lasting repair.
However, just as the United States stood poised on the cusp of that
tragic, tumultuous decade, there appeared a cluster of remarkable
political melodramas. These were grounded equally in the consensus-
building liberalism of +jos Hollywood and the cool, grace-under-
pressure political pragmatism of the Kennedy era, and they not only
addressed contemporary anxieties but also anticipated potential crises
for America.
+
It would be my contention that this cycle of lms from
+: and + (hence bracketing Kennedys murder) constitutes the
highest point in the evolution of the genre. Products of the Camelot
era, they are the genres own brief, shining moment and, more than
four decades later, they are all still riveting, relevant and timely. Their
central premise, that Americans need to be ever-watchful in defence of
their liberties and their democracy, is still current.
The popular appeal of American political melodramas in the early
+os was largely due to public fascination with all things Kennedy -
esque. Kennedy had, in eect, glamorized his profession in the popu-
lar consciousness. His personality had helped revitalize the market for
political lms, and his own brand of politics had undoubtedly set the
tone. JFKs progressive, pragmatic style of leadership was distinguished
cn+r+ra j
The Brief, Shining Moment: Political
Movies in the American Camelot
What this country needs is bigger and better patriots.
Fred Barham (Paul Stanton), secret leader of the Black Legion
(directed by Archie L. Mayo, +y)
+:
by a winning blend of idealistic rhetoric and practical, decisive action.
All of this infused the tough-but-liberal ethos of the classic political
lms of the early +os. Still, this cycle cannot be attributed solely to
Kennedys popularity. The late +jos and early +os had witnessed
the publication of several popular political novels, all tailor-made for
screen adaptation. Thus the loosely contemporaneous production of
this cluster of rst-class political lms also sprang from a fortuitous
convergence of era, ethos and artefact.
Five lms constitute the core of this short-lived golden age: Otto
Premingers Advise and Consent, John Frankenheimers The Manchurian
Candidate (both +:), Frankenheimers Seven Days in May, Franklin
Schaners The Best Man and Sidney Lumets Fail-Safe (all +). All
ve were lmed in black and white, which had long been the norm for
political lms (Wilson excepted), but which was very much at odds with
the trend for most big-budget, all-star Hollywood productions of the
early +os. Two gures asserted their dominance within the genre at
this juncture: John Frankenheimer directed two of the ve lms, while
Henry Fonda, Young Mr Lincoln himself, starred in the other three.
Ideologically, thematically, and as regards personnel crossover, this
political cycle was the natural successor to the cluster of prestigious
courtroom movies made between +jy and +:: Stanley Kubricks
Paths of Glory, Sidney Lumets Angry Men and Billy Wilders
Witness for the Prosecution (all +jy), Otto Premingers Anatomy of a
Murder (+j), Stanley Kramers Inherit the Wind (+o), Kramers
Judgment at Nuremberg (++) and Robert Mulligans To Kill a Mock-
ingbird (+:). Again, all these lms were made in black-and-white, and
they adopted liberal positions on major social and humanitarian issues,
expressing abhorrence of, among other sins, reckless militarism,
bigotry, brutality, intolerance and genocide. Two of these political
classics, Seven Days in May and Fail-Safe, were also akin to another
distinctly liberal strand of late +josearly +os Hollywoods Grand
Statement cinema: the nuclear apocalypse lm (Stanley Kramers
earnest, heart-breaking On the Beach, +j; Stanley Kubricks
irreverent, side splitting Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb, +; and James B. Harriss taut, fatalistic
The Bedford Incident, +j). Kubrick and Kramer made courtroom and
nuclear apocalypse lms, while Preminger and Lumet segued eort-
lessly from courtroom to political drama. Equally striking was the
re-emergence of courtroom movie stars in the political arena. Kirk
+:j
Douglas (Paths of Glory), Fredric March (Inherit the Wind) and Burt
Lancaster (Judgment at Nuremberg) all turned up in Seven Days in May.
Angry Mens liberal hero, Henry Fonda, fought the good ght in The
Best Man and Fail-Safe; and, in Advise and Consent, he went head-to-
head with Charles Laughton, himself the crafty courtroom wizard of
Witness for the Prosecution.
:
In both temporal and thematic terms, political melodramas of the
early +os took up where the recent classic courtroom dramas had left
o. Indeed, the rst great political lm in this cycle was partially struc-
tured to resemble a courtroom drama. Allen Drurys novel Advise and
Consent, rst published in +j, had won the Pulitzer Prize for ction
and had combined hardback and paperback sales in excess of two
million copies. It had featured on the best-seller list from shortly after
its publication in August +j until June ++ and, for most of the
eighteen-month period from September +j to March ++, Advise
and Consent remained the Number One best-selling novel in the United
States. Its longest unbroken stretch as Number One best-seller spanned
the period from +j August +o to February ++, holding centre
stage at exactly the same time as the historic race between John F.
Kennedy and Richard Nixon. If the popularity of Advise and Consent
helped to emphasize a sense of melodrama in the world of politics, in
one instance, the drama of the +o election helped to keep Drurys
novel at the top of the best-seller lists. The two candidates met by
chance at an airport, and Nixon was carrying a copy of Advise and Con-
sent. Kennedy asked to see it. A photograph was taken of the two men
standing together, poring over Drurys book. Drurys publisher, Double-
day, was able to use the picture as an ad with the caption: Nearly
Everybodys Reading Advise and Consent.
Compelling drama though it was, Advise and Consent harked back to
memorable Senate battles from the +os and jos. Its chief appeal was
not to the up-and-coming Baby Boomer Generation. Even the lm
has a distinctly retro look, feel and avour to it. This is, in essence, a
+jos movie, although it was made in +:.
A dying president (Franchot Tone), clearly based on Franklin D.
Roosevelt, nominates liberal public servant Robert A. Lengwell
(Henry Fonda) to be his new Secretary of State. Lengwell is an excep-
tionally intelligent man (he self-deprecatingly calls himself a pre -
meditated egg-head), but he has made powerful enemies and none
more so than wily old Southern Senator Seab Cooley (Charles
+:
Laughton), whose resolve to block Lengwells appointment stems
from a long-held private vendetta. The movie revolves principally
around those disparate machinations in the Senate for and against the
nomination, as anti-Lengwell senators back Cooley while those in
favour of the nominee fall in behind majority leader Bob Munson
(Walter Pidgeon). The subcommittee hearing to review Lengwells
suitability for the post soon assumes the appearance of a trial when
Cooley produces a witness, a once mentally ill former government
servant called Herbert Gelman (Burgess Meredith), who testies that
he and Lengwell were, in their youth, members of a Communist cell
in Chicago. This is clearly a re-run of the + confrontation between
Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, but any viewers who had not
read Drurys novel might have readily assumed that the Fonda
Laughton conict would be, in cinematic terms, the Manichaean clash
between the upright, liberal man of conscience and the devious
Southern rabble-rouser.
These stars cumulative screen iconographies reinforced the expec-
tation that this would be a square-o between good guy Fonda and bad
guy Laughton. Long before he was the white-clad Juror No. 8 in
Angry Men, Fonda had been Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, Mister Roberts
and the decent anti-lynch-mob hero of The Ox-Bow Incident. Above
all, he had been Young Abe Lincoln. Seab Cooley, Laughtons last role
before his death from cancer, completed his late-career trilogy of crafty,
cantankerous old curmudgeons (the others being his defence lawyer in
Witness for the Prosecution and his Roman senator in Stanley Kubricks
Spartacus in +o, and there are recognizable traces of these two char-
acters in Cooley). In the +os Laughton had played an impressive array
of tyrants, bullies and monsters. He had been Henry VIII, Javert from
Les Misrables, over-bearing Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street and Quasi-
modo. Above all, he had been Captain Bligh. Signicantly, this was a
long line of non-American ogres. Thus Laughtons appearance in the
Franchot Tone
as the ailing
President in
Otto Premingers
Advise and Consent
(+:).
+:y
role predisposed audiences to view Cooley as the prime villain of the
piece. If producer-director Preminger had cast Spencer Tracy as Coo-
ley, as he had initially hoped to do, this would surely have established an
entirely dierent set of audience expectations.
Yet Advise and Consent, as both novel and lm, is a saga of great
moral complexity. Lengwell easily shreds Gelmans credibility. The
problem is, he is lying when he denies his previous Communist alia-
tions. Cooley is on to the truth. Lengwell goes to the President,
privately confesses all, and requests his nomination be withdrawn but
the President refuses. Subcommittee chairman Brigham Anderson (Don
Murray) then becomes privy to evidence that Lengwell has lied. In a
meeting, with Bob Munson as a witness, Anderson secures the Presi-
dents promise that he will withdraw the nomination. But the President
has now lied to Anderson. At the Presidents instigation, Fred Van
Ackerman (George Grizzard), a young, irresponsible, pro-Lengwell
senator (who is in favour of appeasing the Soviets) and his entourage of
sinister, suited thugs begin to intimidate Anderson, threatening to ex-
pose his own youthful indiscretion, a homosexual aair in wartime
Hawaii. Rather than yield to blackmail, Anderson commits suicide.
In the wake of these events, the Senate votes on the nomination. Van
Ackerman is shunned by his colleagues and leaves the Senate chamber
in disgrace, after Munson tells him: Fortunately, our country always
manages to survive patriots like you. While the vote is being broad-
cast live over the radio, the President is listening anxiously. Suddenly,
he collapses. Lafe Smith (Peter Lawford), Andersons best friend in the
Senate, disgusted at the skulduggery that cost Brig his life, switches
from the pro-Lengwell camp, voting against the nomination, and so
the vote is tied. Signicantly, here the unscrupulous Presidents plans
are derailed by another young Mr Smith in the US Senate not by a li-
buster this time, but with a single word: No. The amiable, seemingly
Lengwell
(Henry Fonda)
confesses his
youthful indis -
cretion to
the President
(Franchot Tone)
in Advise and
Consent.
+:8
ineectual Vice-President, Harley Hudson (Lew Ayres), is now expected
to break the tie in Lengwells favour but, before he can do so, he is
notied that the President has died, which elevates him to the White
House. Like Harry Truman before him (on whom Hudson was mod-
elled), the new, unexpected President has more gumption than his col-
leagues had anticipated. He declines to use his casting vote, telling
Munson he would prefer to nominate his own Secretary of State.
Advise and Consent is a thoughtful, rst-rate entertainment that, in
retrospect, is notable for a few historical curiosities. Otto Preminger
had approached Dr Martin Luther King and asked him to appear in
the lm as a senator. In +: there were no Blacks in the US Senate
(and there had been none in Drurys novel), but the liberal Preminger
had hoped that by including King in such a role, this would indicate to
other black Americans that membership of the US Senate was not be-
yond their grasp. This stroke of casting was intended as an inclusive
gesture, but King feared it might backre, so he declined the role.
Equally intriguing was the casting of Peter Lawford as the womanizing
Senator Lafe Smith, who may have been partly modelled on JFK,
Lawfords brother-in-law. However, this particular connection would
not have been apparent to the general public at that time. Washington
newsmen in the know (which Drury was) were aware of Kennedys
sexual adventurism, but this knowledge was not in the public domain
during Kennedys lifetime.
Advise and Consent may actually be the rst mainstream American
lm to feature a scene in a gay bar (where Anderson, harassed by Van
Ackermans blackmailers, tracks down the man with whom he had the
long-ago aair). Van Ackerman himself is generally thought to have
especial historical resonance as a left-wing inversion of Joe McCarthy.
I would, however, challenge this last suggestion. In + Drury published
A Senate Journal, . Close comparison of A Senate Journal with
Advise and Consent clearly illuminates the various real-life prototypes for
Drurys ctional senators. Van Ackerman is based not on Joe McCarthy,
but on Republican Senator William L. Langer of North Dakota:
If his ideas have any value no one will ever know it, for he pres-
ents them at the top of his lungs like a roaring bull in the empty
chamber, while such of his colleagues as remain watch him in
half-amused, half-fearful silence, as though in the presence of an
irresponsible force they can neither control nor understand . . .
+:
There is a disturbing sense about him, somewhere underneath
the very smooth heartiness and the rm, lingering handshake,
that here is a man of great violence and great anger . . . [H]ere
might be a man as dangerous in his way as Huey Long in his, one
of those wild, harsh men out of the wild, harsh places of Ameri -
ca, uncontrollable and elemental. He lacks the essential quality of
appeal to the masses, but aside from that he was built for power
too much power. It is the nations good fortune that he will
never achieve it.
Drury projected McCarthys infamy onto a left-wing demagogue. It

was, however, his perception of the right-wing isolationist Langers per-
sonality that he used to round out the character of Van Ackerman,
rather than that of the more lastingly notorious McCarthy.
Yet what is most remarkable about the lm of Advise and Consent is
its function as a paradigm of Hollywood liberalism in action. Allen
Drurys novel is unmistakably right-wing in its sympathies, hard-line
anti-Communist in its rhetoric, and a paean to the glories of the Ameri -
can spirit from the Revolutionary era to the Cold War. Drury served as
a technical adviser on the movie (and can even be glimpsed briey in one
scene in the Senate chamber), but Preminger and the screenwriter
Wendell Mayes toned down the books overt right-wing posturing. The
casting of Fonda as Lengwell certainly helps blunt the conservative
thrust of the original novel, as does the lms conclusion. In the book,
the Lengwell nomination is resoundingly defeated by a margin of
around fty votes, with most senators rebelling against the Presidents
heavy-handed approach which resulted in Andersons death. In the
lm, the vote is neck and neck, as if Lengwell may still be worthy of
The Lengwell
nomination excites
fierce passions in
the Senate in
Advise and Consent.
L-R: Don Murray
(rear), Charles
Laughton (stand-
ing), Walter
Pidgeon and Paul
Ford (foreground)
as Senators caught
up in the battle.
+o
conrmation. In the lm, the Presidents death is the ironic stroke of
fate which nally puts paid to Lengwells conrmation. In the novel,
his death is retribution for the duplicity he has practiced and the
tragedy he has wrought. Finally, Drurys novel ends forcefully (whereas
the lm ends inconclusively), with conrmation of Harley Hudsons
nominee for Secretary of State conservative Senator Orrin Knox,
who, following Andersons death, had assumed leadership of the anti-
Lengwell forces. This crucial gure, the novels ultimate hero, is
eectively dropped by the movie, reduced to one scene and played by
the sixteenth-billed character actor Edward Andrews.
Drury was disenchanted with the screen version of Advise and
Consent, and he vowed to sell no more of his books to Hollywood. He
left Washington for California, and he wrote another nineteen novels
before his death in +8. Sixteen of those nineteen dealt with Ameri-
can politics. Five were sequels to Advise and Consent: A Shade of Dier-
ence (+:), focusing on the United Nations and race relations in the
United States; Capable of Honor (+), a strident indictment of liberal
bias in the US media; Preserve and Protect (+8), a timely if occasion-
ally overheated drama about a Presidential election tragically inuenced
by political violence; Come Nineveh, Come Tyre (+y), which envis-
aged a Soviet takeover of the United States; and The Promise of Joy
(+yj), which posited an alternative to Nineveh, with the Soviets ex-
hausted and America triumphant.
Drurys displeasure with Hollywood notwithstanding, the explicitly
conservative ideology of his novels made them unlikely screen projects
for the +os and yos. Also, much of the suspense in the Advise and
Consent sequels was derived from intricacies of voting procedure a
dicult thing to render exciting on lm. There was a great deal of both
shrewd prophecy and shrill propaganda in Drurys novels, though they
are likely to be best appreciated by conservatives (Ronald Reagan, for
example, was known to admire these books).
As the Advise and Consent series progressed, Drurys representation
of liberals became increasingly skewed, so that a politician was a good
Joe merely by dint of being conservative, while his liberals fell into three
negative categories: +) Smug, self-satised and arrogant; :) Personally
ambitious, illogical, morally weak, easily led and easily duped; or )
Utterly evil, consciously anti-American and nurturing deep hatred
for all that is good and decent in humanity. This last was the persona
of Senator Fred Van Ackerman throughout Drurys series, whereas
++
George Grizzards portrayal in the lm hints at none of this char acters
sociopathy. Grizzards characterization seems more like a pushy, over-
zealous schoolboy who is out of his depth. Thus Premingers liberal
movie even lets Van Ackerman o the hook.
Drurys Advise and Consent almost single-handedly ushered in the
twentieth-century genre of the Great Washington Novel. Henry Adams
had drawn political life in the District of Columbia in Democracy: An
American Novel in +88o, and John Dos Passos had published The Grand
Design (+), a decade before Drurys book. Yet, prior to Advise and
Consent, the most celebrated modern novels of the US political genre
had tended to be regional in focus, e.g., Robert Penn Warrens All the
Kings Men (+), set in a Southern State, and Edwin OConnors The
Last Hurrah (+j), set in a North-eastern city. Advise and Consent
successfully federalized the political novel, attempting as it did to en-
compass the spirit of America within its pages. Moreover, it was in the
wake of Advise and Consent that the US political genre became a staple
of modern popular ction throughout the +os and yos, exemplied
by novels such as Seven Days in May (+:) by Fletcher Knebel and
Charles W. Bailey II, Fail-Safe (+:) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey
Wheeler, The Man (+) by Irving Wallace, Washington, DC (+y) by
Gore Vidal, and The Senator (+8) and The President (+yo) by Drew
Pearson.
The second great political movie of +: was based on another +j
novel, yet this was a tale of an altogether dierent stripe: Richard
Condons slyly subversive satire The Manchurian Candidate. If Advise
and Consent, directed by Preminger and peopled by a cast of veterans,
had a kind of retro feel to it, the movie of The Manchurian Candidate,
helmed by John Frankenheimer, who had cut his directorial teeth on
+jos television dramas, was contemporary and tragically prophetic
with a vengeance. Advise and Consent blurred moral certainties in the
cut-and-thrust cauldron of predominantly centrist politics, whereas
The Manchurian Candidate condemned the extreme ideologies of right
and left by insinuating that these were in eect collaborating in con-
junction to undermine American democracy.
The Manchurian Candidate begins in +j:, with a US Army patrol
ambushed and captured during the Korean War. After the war, the
platoons sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), returns to
America a hero, having won the Congressional Medal of Honor for
saving the lives of several soldiers on that fateful patrol. Raymond is
+:
welcomed home by his mother, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury),
an ambitious, domineering woman, and his stepfather Senator John
Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a vacuous buoon t solely to do his
wifes bidding. Raymond despises them both.
Meanwhile, the captain of Raymonds old platoon, (now Major)
Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), has been having a bizarre, disturbing,
recurring nightmare. He, Raymond and the other soldiers are in a New
Jersey hotel during a meeting of the Ladies Garden Club. That is what
Marco and the other soldiers think they are witnessing. In fact, they are
arrayed before a group of high-ranking Soviet and Chinese Communist
ocials, as Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), a Chinese expert in psychological
conditioning, explains how he has brainwashed these American sol-
diers. He eortlessly persuades Raymond to kill two of his men. In
Marcos dream the reality (the Communists, the strangling of a soldier)
keeps intruding on the illusion (the Ladies Garden Club meeting).
Marco noties his superiors, but they are unwilling to countenance
his concerns about a prominent and well-connected hero. Marco is
reassigned to public relations duties where he encounters Senator
Iselin.
With his wifes contrivance and connivance, Iselin declares on tele-
vision that the Defense Department is knowingly harbouring a large
number of Communists. The actor James Gregory bore a pronounced
physical resemblance to Richard Nixon, but in the lm it is obvious, as
it was in Condons novel, that Iselin is treading the same ground and
also willing to indulge in the same smears as Joe McCarthy; and, like
McCarthy, Iselin keeps changing the number of Reds allegedly lurking
within the government. One ingenious and memorable scene shows
Iselin telling his wife he would be much happier if he could only settle
The woman who
pulls the strings:
Eleanor Shaw
Iselin (Angela
Lansbury) looks
on as her vacuous
husband, Senator
Iselin ( James
Gregory), makes
his headline-grab-
bing speech in John
Frankenheimers
The Manchurian
Candidate (+:).
+
on one particular number and stick to it. He pours ketchup onto his
breakfast, then looks thoughtfully at the Heinz bottle and the lm
cuts to him proclaiming on the oor of the Senate, There are exactly
fty-seven Communists . . .
What is at the back of all this? The brainwashing, Raymonds false
status as a war hero who saved his platoon (when in actuality he mur-
dered two of them), his stepfathers reckless charges of Communist in-
ltration of the Defense Department how do all these strands come
together? Yen Lo, the mischievous brainwashing maestro puts it best,
saying of Raymond:
A normally conditioned American, whos been trained to kill
then to have no memory of having killed. Without memory of his
deed, he cannot possibly feel guilt; nor will he, of course, have any
reason to fear being caught. And having been relieved of those
uniquely American symptoms, guilt and fear, he cannot possibly
give himself away . . . Now Raymond will remain an outwardly
normal, productive, sober and respected member of the commu-
nity. And I should say, if properly used, entirely police-proof. His
brain has not only been washed . . . it has been dry-cleaned.
Raymond has thus been programmed by the Communists to act as
an assassin, without even being consciously aware of it. Who is he sup-
posed to assassinate? All will be revealed by his American operator
who turns out to be his own mother. Despite her stance as a rabidly
right-wing American patriot, Eleanor Shaw Iselin has for years been in
collusion with the Communists, and her grand scheme is to secure the
vice-presidential nomination for John Iselin. When the presidential can-
didate (a white-haired, white-suited fatherly type reminiscent of FDR)
addresses the Convention, he is supposed to be gunned down. At that
point, Iselin will rush forward, cradle his dying running-mate in his
arms and, soaked in his blood, vow to continue the great crusade. These
dramatic images will catapult the Iselins to the pinnacle of power in
Eleanors words, Rallying a nation of television viewers into hysteria to
sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial
law seem like anarchy! In pursuit of this objective, Eleanor orders
her son to kill her chief political foe, Senator Thomas Jordan ( John
McGiver), Raymonds own father-in-law, who is determined to stop
Iselin from winning the partys vice-presidential nomination.
+
Jordan, a (literally, egg-headed) liberal in the Adlai Stevenson -
Hubert Humphrey mould, had with remarkable albeit unwitting pre-
science told Eleanor: I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he
could not do more to harm this country than hes doing now. Basically,
the central political message of The Manchurian Candidate is that the far
right and the far left are mirror images of the same anti-democratic
cancer. There is a stylish, wickedly witty touch to Jordans death scene.
Raymond shoots Jordan while he is holding a carton of milk, and (as
bets a milquetoast liberal) the consequence is a jet of milk rather than
of blood. Seconds after this killing, Raymonds wife Jocie (Leslie Par-
rish) comes downstairs, and Raymond, not even realizing what he is
doing, matter-of-factly kills the one person on earth he truly loves.
Jocies death unhinges Raymond. Marco, who has nally pieced most
of the plot together, tries to thwart the Iselin-Communist scheme with
some counter-brainwashing of his own. But Raymond still turns up at
the Convention as planned, dressed as a priest, equipped with a high-
powered rie, to perform his peculiar last rites and alter the course of
American history and destiny. Marco locates the position from which
the fatal shots are supposed to be red. Before Marco can reach him,
however, Raymond pulls the trigger killing Iselin and Eleanor.
Finally, Raymond dons his Medal of Honor and turns the gun on him-
self. It is a last rite, a crucixion and an absolution all in one. In the
book, it is quite clear that Marco programmed Raymond to kill himself,
to avoid the trial and execution of a winner of the Medal of Honor. In
the lm, Raymond seizes control of his destiny, telling Marco: You
couldnt have stopped them. The Army couldnt have stopped them. So
I had to. In this context, assassination, matricide and suicide become
acts of redemption.
The murder of
Senator Jordan
( John McGiver)
in The Manchurian
Candidate.
+j
The Manchurian Candidate is one of the most dazzling, delirious,
wonderfully weird mainstream American lms ever made. It kick-
started the political sub-genre of the conspiracy thriller, and it is a
hugely entertaining Chinese puzzle of a movie indeed, the Citizen
Kane of psycho-political thrillers. A large part of its enduring fascina-
tion is attributable to its intriguing, seductive through-the-looking
glass quality. The book was published in +j, just ve years after Joe
McCarthys fall from power (when the Senate voted to condemn him
following his conduct in the televised ArmyMcCarthy hearings of
+j), and two years after his death in +jy. Both Condons novel and
Frankenheimers lm satirize McCarthy mercilessly through the
character of Iselin. Trivia question: who plays the title role in The
Manchurian Candidate? I would suggest it is not Laurence Harvey, but
James Gregory. Raymond Shaw is the instrument of the Soviet-Chinese
Communist (i.e., Manchurian) plot, but Iselin is the candidate they plan
to install in the White House. Frankenheimer would surely have
relished this delicious swipe at McCarthy. He had actually served as
assistant director on the Edward R. Murrow programme See It Now
for the broadcast in which Murrow tackled McCarthy head-on: an
event which, four decades later, became the central focus of George
Clooneys Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj).
Yet where this lm really scores as a cult classic and as the pinnacle
of the paranoia sub-genre, is not in its retroactive sweet revenge on the
recent phenomena of McCarthy and McCarthyism, but in its unset-
tling, uncanny prophecy of the cycle of assassinations which blighted
American political life during the +os. The lm was released just a
year before the murder of John F. Kennedy. Frank Sinatra, a Kennedy
crony, owned the rights to the movie; and, following the assassination
of the President, he withdrew the lm from circulation for an entire
generation, until its successful theatrical re-release in +88. The
Manchurian Candidate eerily pregured the dislocation of the +os.
Ironically, Frankenheimer was with his friend Senator Robert Kennedy
a few minutes prior to his assassination and the gunman Sirhan
Bishara Sirhan actually brushed past the director.
The narrative has certain shortcomings, particularly in the construc-

tion of two of its three major female characters. Rosie ( Janet Leigh) is
a stunning beauty who encounters Marco on a train. Seeing this trem-
bling wreck of a man (under severe psychological stress due to his
recurring nightmare and the Armys unwillingness to take the matter
+
seriously), she promptly throws herself at his head, immediately there-
after nishing with her anc, having decided that she knows all she
needs to know about Marco and he is now her lifelong soul-mate. It is
no more credible in synopsis than it is in the movie. Given that The
Manchurian Candidate is built on several wildly fantastic premises, this
is one of the most ridiculous of them all. It is also stretching the bound-
aries of plausibility that Leslie Parrishs sweet, lovely Jocie Jordan
would still be carrying a torch for Raymond after several years dis-
tance, absence and absolute silence. But the third female character,
Angela Lansburys Eleanor Shaw Iselin, is a career-best performance,
an original and unforgettable ogre, and the screens most terrifying
incarnation of the nightmare of Momism.
j
Sinatra had wanted
Lucille Ball for the role, but when Frankenheimer screened his recently
completed All Fall Down (+:), featuring Lansbury as a possessive
mother, this persuaded Sinatra of the directors choice (Lansbury was,
in fact, only three years older than her screen son Harvey). This
monstrous mother would have given Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia a
run for their money. She primes her son to kill his wife and his father-
in-law, and there is even an incestuous interlude between Eleanor and
Raymond before she sends him on his nal (and mutually fatal) assign-
ment. The lm consciously acknowledges this element of classical -
mythical-Oedipal allusion. When a drunken Raymond talks about his
mother, Marco says: Its rather like listening to Orestes gripe about
Clytemnestra.
Yet the movie ultimately hinges on, and revolves around, Laurence
Harvey as the tragic anti-hero Raymond Shaw. Harvey, by all accounts,
was a chilly, unlikable man. So, by his own admission, is the cold, prig-
gish Raymond. It was a perfect merger of actor and role. Iselin pur-
posely appropriates the iconography of Abraham Lincoln (busts of
Lincoln and stovepipe lampshade in his study; dressing up in stovepipe
hat and beard at his costume ball, which Senator Jordan terms a fascist
rally; Iselins supporters similarly disguised at the Convention). Yet it
is Raymond who, like Lincoln, will save the Republic and atone for all
the bloodshed he has wrought with the sacrice of his own life. Ray-
mond is the complete opposite of Lincoln. He is glacial, cynical, boor-
ish and misanthropic but, in the end, he is a hero. In the nal scene, as
the gunshot which takes Raymonds life becomes a peal of thunder,
Marco composes a citation attesting to Raymonds gallantry, but it is
one that will never appear in the history books. The American people
+y
can never be told the truth. We are back in the realms of that other +:
masterpiece about a lurking rieman, The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
In this instance, however, it is more a case of: in order to preserve the
legend, hide the facts. What Marco is protecting is the sacred reputa-
tion of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yet Frankenheimer was
clearly wary of the trappings and the rhetoric of super-patriotism. He
returned to the paranoid political thriller in + with a tale of another
Congressional Medal of Honor winner plotting to subvert US democ-
racy. Yet unlike the brainwashed Raymond Shaw, the would-be dicta-
tor of Seven Days in May knows precisely what he is doing.
The Manchurian Candidate was a prophetic psychological thriller.
Seven Days in May was a timely ideological page-turner. Based on a
+: novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, Seven Days in
May fed contemporary concerns about the insidious and ever-increas-
ing power of the military-industrial complex within US social, economic
and political life. Just three days before JFKs Inaugural, outgoing Presi-
dent Eisenhower had in his Farewell Address issued a stern warning
about the relentless growth of the US militarys domestic power and in-
uence (Oliver Stone would later use footage of this speech behind the
opening credits of JFK). In doing so, modern Americas most revered
military hero was following a tradition and an ideological concern as
old as the Republic itself. During the Revolutionary era, American
patriots had protested against British standing armies, with Samuel
Adams pleading cedant arma togae (let arms yield to civic robes), and
George Washingtons own Farewell Address had included a rm
admonition to avoid overweening military establishments. Eisenhowers
valediction reinforced his own place in the great American pantheon of
citizen-soldiers.
The ramparts
they watch: Burt
Lancaster as
General Scott and
Kirk Douglas as
Colonel Casey in
John Franken-
heimers Seven
Days in May
(+).
+8
Eisenhower was not alone in expressing anxiety over the pervasive
inuence of the military-industrial complex. The crusading journalist
Fred J. Cooks +: book, The Warfare State, revealed that the Ameri-
can militarys payroll outstripped the automobile, steel and petroleum
industries combined; and the political revelations in his book were even
more alarming.
y
John Kennedys rst six months as president had given
rise to intense friction between the White House and the Pentagon. Sec-
retary of Defense Robert S. McNamaras reforms buttressed regula-
tions which several high-ranking ocers had often ignored, especially
when they made sabre-rattling speeches for public consumption. A
number of these ocers, both serving and retired, had displayed radi-
cal right-wing sympathies. The most notorious was General Edwin
Walker, who would become a rallying gure for right-wing extremists
in Dallas, but there was also a retired Marine Colonel in Texas, a win-
ner of the Medal of Honor, who had advocated hanging Supreme Court
Chief Justice Earl Warren.
In October +: this issue of excessive military inuence was placed
before the reading public in the form of an entertainment and a tanta-
lizing, terrifying premise what if the US military were disaected by
presidential policy and thus attempted to overthrow the government?
The result was the novel Seven Days in May.
The book was set in the then futuristic +y a year which, in actu-
ality, would witness a unique crisis for the presidency, culminating in
Richard Nixons resignation. Yet the lm of Seven Days in May leaves
the year unspecied. US President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has
signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, despite strong
dissent from the military, headed by four-star General James Mattoon
Scott (Burt Lancaster), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta. In the
run-up to an All-Red practice alert, Marine Colonel Martin Jiggs
Casey (Kirk Douglas) uncovers a series of irregularities (cryptic
messages, minor falsehoods), which gradually lead him to deduce that
General Scott plans to use the alert to stage a coup dtat involving a
California senator, an ultra-right-wing broadcaster and all but one of
the Joint Chiefs. Casey takes his suspicions to the President. Aided by
a small handful of other loyal souls (Edmond OBriens alcoholic South-
ern senator, Martin Balsams press secretary and George Macreadys
imperious government lawyer), Lyman and Casey have only a week to
save the Republic. In the end, the coup is averted, Scott and his cohorts
resign and American democracy prevails, triumphant and intact.
+
Seven Days in May had been published virtually simultaneously
alongside another melodrama of hypothetical political nightmare.
Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, imagined nuclear
confrontation as the result of a computer error. Published in October
+:, the very month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, these novels with
their dire warnings about drastic military solutions and atomic cata -
strophe could not have been more timely. Furthermore, several
senior Washington correspondents at the time were convinced that
Seven Days in May was based on the actual thought processes of some
of the leading military gures at the Pentagon (not least US Air Force
General Curtis LeMay, who may have been the authors immediate
prototype for General Scott), and that McNamaras reforms of the
Defense Department were designed, in eect, as a pre-emptive strike.
There were other pronounced parallels between characters in the
novel and real-life gures. The collision between President Lyman and
General Scott had its roots in the TrumanMacArthur clash over the
conduct of the Korean War. The strident Colonel Broderick ( John
Larkin) is an ocer who has made statements which come close to viola -
tion of the Sedition Acts. Broderick is quite possibly a thinly disguised
equivalent of General Walker, who had circulated ultra-right-wing lit-
erature among his troops in Germany, and who had claimed that Eleanor
Roosevelt and Edward Murrow were left-wing dupes. Walker served as
an excellent real-life example, as Seven Days in May did ctitiously, of
the political dangers inherent in giving the US military its head.
President John Kennedy had admired the novel. With a real Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty in the pipeline, he had been eager to see it lmed. At
a buet in Washington, JFK communicated his enthusiasm to Kirk
Douglas, who later co-produced the lm. All three stars (Lancaster,
Douglas and March) were liberal Democrats. More signicantly, while
the lm was being made, the US Senate ratied the Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty on : September +. All eighteen senators who voted against
the Treaty were reserve generals in the US Air Force or the Army,
including Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Strom Thurmond of South
Carolina and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.
The lm opens with a riot between pro- and anti-disarmament cam-
paigners. This scene was in fact lmed only two days after the Test Ban
Treaty was signed in Moscow. Ironically, real protesters outside the
White House found themselves being shifted aside so that the movie
picketers could stage their demonstration. This was not just an example
+o
of art imitating life, but an indication of the Kennedy Administrations
tacit cooperation in the making of the lm.
The inclusion of this riot scene was a sign of the times. Riots would
increasingly become both a symptom and a symbol of +os America,
and by beginning with a riot not featured in the book, the movie high-
lighted one of the decades key political phenomena. Overall, however,
Seven Days in May endorsed liberal solutions within the pre-existing
conservative framework, and thus hewed closely to Hollywoods dom-
inant ideology of consensus just as that dominance was beginning to
wane. Seven Days in May roots out the bad apples but maintains there
is basically nothing wrong with the barrel. After all, the lms heroes are
the US President and a Marine Colonel, and they do not come much
more pro-Establishment than that. While the lms message about the
inuence of the military would become increasingly pertinent through-
out the +os and beyond, after My Lai and Kent State a similar pro-
Establishment stance would have appeared poignantly nave.
Johnson and Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate would cause many
Americans to lose faith not only in their presidents but also in the pres-
idency itself. By comparison, Fredric Marchs Jordan Lyman resem-
bles a throwback to FDR, Truman and Eisenhower. He is a fatherly
sage endowed with a sense of his own humility, a mid-twentieth-century
disciple of Lincoln to whom you could take all your troubles. There is
perhaps a clue in the fact that Lyman is a mirror-image of Truman. Yet,
as fate would have it, since November + the name bore a similarity
to another President; and ironically, this Jordan Lyman is exactly the
type of president that Lyndon Johnson had always wanted to be. Thus,
while Seven Days in May warned of a possible nightmare for America,
its resolution was safe, conservative and consensual. Equally, its con-
struction of national identity was essentially rooted in a +jos denition
of consensus in both political and lmic terms. All the major characters
in the movie (as with most of the lms in this book) were mature white
males. The only female character (Ava Gardner as Scotts ex-mistress,
Eleanor Holbrook) was peripheral; and Blacks were even more margin-
alized, limited to eeting appearances in crowd scenes at the beginning
and the end. The lm is essentially a +jos version of (presumably)
+yos America, as imagined in the +os. Though undoubtedly a liberal
tract, Seven Days in May is still a paean to white patriarchy, and its
Kennedyesque criticism of Pentagon shenanigans is closer in spirit to
Dwight D. Eisenhower than to Daniel Ellsberg.
++
One scene makes pointed reference to the appeal of self-styled, mes-
sianic right-wing demagogues, when Lyman says of General Scott:
Hes not the enemy. Scott, the Joint Chiefs even the very emo-
tional, very illogical lunatic fringe theyre not the enemy. The
enemys an age. A nuclear age. It happens to have killed mans
faith in his ability to inuence what happens to him. And out of
this comes a sickness, out of the sickness a frustration, a feeling
of impotence, helplessness, weakness. And from this this desper-
ation, we look for a champion in red, white and blue. Every now
and then a man on a white horse rides by and we appoint him to
be our personal god for the duration. For some men, it was a
Senator McCarthy. For others, it was a General Walker. Now its
a General Scott.
This was an audacious speech, considering that, unlike Joe McCarthy,
General Edwin Walker was still alive (although there had been an
attempt on his life in Dallas on +o April + by one Lee Harvey
Oswald). Lyman has his nger on the pulse here. Scotts assiduous cul-
tivation of disenchanted super-patriots is exactly what makes him such
a potential danger to the US democratic process. It is during Scotts
rousing speech to the American Veterans Order that Colonel Casey,
hitherto an admirer of the General, calls the White House to request an
appointment with President Lyman. Scotts consummate performance
before the wildly cheering crowd nally convinces Casey that he has not
just been nurturing an overactive imagination: this man means business.
Seven Days in May had a powerful contemporary resonance for the
imminent presidential election of +. When Republican candidate
Honest men
against the coup:
George Macready,
Edmond OBrien
and Fredric March
as President
Jordan Lyman
in Seven Days
in May.
+:
Barry Goldwater advocated giving NATOs Supreme Commander in
Europe authority over tactical nuclear weapons, this compounded
anxieties about military actions devoid of civilian control. In his +y
memoir, With No Apologies, Goldwater wrote:
the publics hysterical, almost unreasoned attitude toward nuclear
war was fattened on the misrepresentations of three works of c-
tion [Nevil Shutes On the Beach, Fail-Safe and Seven Days in May]
. . . We were urged to believe the Russians were no threat to world
peace. What we should be concerned about, these writers said,
was our own national defense forces. These books were acclaimed
by all the voices supporting unilateral disarmament.
8
Senator Goldwater might have added that his own candidacy was in no
way helped by the screen versions of Seven Days in May and Fail-Safe,
which, along with The Best Man and Dr Strangelove, were as much
cinematic votes for Lyndon Johnson in + as All the Presidents Men
was later to be a vote for Jimmy Carter in +y.
The nal scene of Seven Days in May features Fredric March as
President Lyman telling the assembled press corps:
Theres been abroad in this land in recent months a whisper that
we have somehow lost our greatness. That we do not have the
strength to win without war the struggles for liberty through-
out the world. This is slander! Because our country is strong
strong enough to be a peacemaker. It is proud proud enough to
be patient. The whisperers and the detractors, the violent men
are wrong! We will remain strong and proud, peaceful and
patient. And we will see a day when on this earth all men will
walk out of the long tunnels of tyranny, into the bright sunshine
of freedom.
All the White House, America and the world need the early +os
political classics seem to be saying is a decent, resolutely honest man
of mature wisdom and sober judgement at the helm, and all will be well.
Order will be restored in Advise and Consent after the demise of the
devious President and the accession of Harley Hudson, a self-eacing
man of integrity; and chaos is prevented in The Manchurian Candidate
and Seven Days in May because the megalomaniacal designs of both
+
Eleanor Shaw Iselin and General James Mattoon Scott are thwarted.
Here, the theme is implicit, but it is the same as that of many lms scru-
tinized in this book: the right man in the White House makes all the
dierence. Preventing the bad guys from attaining power is vital for the
survival of liberty and democracy in the United States and, by impli-
cation, around the world.
Fundamentally, that is what the plot of Franklin Schaners The
Best Man (+) boils down to: a contest between a decent man who is
essentially too good for politics and an unprincipled demagogue who
will go to any lengths to become president. Based on Gore Vidals stage
drama of +o about the Manichaean conict between a noble liberal
and a vicious right-winger at a Presidential Convention, The Best Man
crackles with sly wit and top-ight performances. The rousing credit
sequence features the music Hail, Columbia!, accompanyied by suc-
cessive portraits, caricatures or photographs of all the presidents from
George Washington to the then current incumbent, Lyndon Johnson,
thus stressing the historical continuation of the US presidency and of
the democratic tradition.
This Convention is principally a two-horse race between former
Secretary of State William Russell (Henry Fonda), a liberal intellectual
wit clearly modelled on Adlai Stevenson, and Senator Joe Cantwell
(Cli Robertson), a ruthless younger man who has made his name in-
vestigating links between Communism and organized crime in televised
committee hearings. Both candidates are eager to secure the endorse-
ment of ex-President Art Hockstader (Lee Tracy), a Trumanesque old-
school politico who relishes the prospect of a knock-down, drag-out
slugfest. This Convention will be Hockstaders last hurrah; the old man
is dying from cancer of the innards but his endorsement is still
President Lyman
(Fredric March)
confronts General
Scott (Burt
Lancaster) with
evidence of the
conspiracy in Seven
Days in May.
+
crucial. He likes and respects Russell, but Russells tendency to vacil-
late to be a man of thought rather than action disposes Hockstader
to favour Cantwell. Russell is shrewd enough to realize this, and he is
genuinely sympathetic and shocked when he learns that his old friend
is dying.
When, as part of his political pas de deux, Hockstader discloses his
state of health to Cantwell, the senator steam-rollers right over this
revelation. He has other matters on his mind, producing documented
proof that Bill Russell once suered a nervous breakdown. With this
damning evidence, he plans to procure Hockstaders support. If neces-
sary, he is willing to release the details of Russells illness to the Con-
vention. If Hockstader endorses Russell, Cantwell promises to brand
his rival as mentally unstable . . . manic depressive, apt to crack under
stress. This threat has the reverse eect on Hockstader, who now
resolves to stop Cantwell, saying: You know, its not that I object to
your being a bastard. Dont get me wrong there. Its your being such a
stupid bastard that I object to.
Hockstader now begins working behind the scenes for Russell,
attempting to win over the support of the three minor candidates still
in the running. One of these, Southern Governor T. T. Claypool, played
by the formerly blacklisted radio personality John Henry Faulk, has the
funniest single line in the lm. Nice thing about you, Joe, he says of
Cantwells lackadaisical attitude towards integration, is that you can
sound like a liberal, but at heart youre an American. Cantwell is still
intent on smearing Russell, but then a skeleton emerges from his own
closet. Former Army buddy Sheldon Bascomb (Shelley Berman)
surfaces to allege that Cantwell was involved in a homosexual scandal
during World War II. Both Fondas presence as the liberal intellectual
protagonist and the ancient spectre of a wartime homosexual liaison
echo Advise and Consent. The unprepossessing accuser (of Lengwells
former Communist aliations) in Advise and Consent, Burgess Mere -
diths Herbert Gelman, is psychologically unstable; by contrast, The Best
Mans nger-pointer, Sheldon Bascomb, is just (hilariously) socially
inept. The homosexual blackmail in Advise and Consent leads to tragedy.
In The Best Man, it is played partly for laughs. We had some nurses
later on, Bascomb explains, but not enough to make much dierence.
It is never established beyond doubt whether Cantwell actually parti -
cipated in the homosexual ring, or was instead the ocer who blew the
whistle on the participants (or both?). Anyway, Bill Russell refuses to
+j
make capital out of such potentially explosive material. This is exactly
the sort of thing I went into politics to stop, he says. All the business
of gossip instead of issues, personalities instead of policies.
Russell operates from the same honourable code as Jordan Lyman.
At one point in Seven Days in May, it seems that Lyman can stop Scott
only by publicizing the Generals letters to his mistress, but he decides
not to resort to blackmail. Bill Russell, like Jordan Lyman, is dedicated
to serving America but not at the cost of his own honour. If I start
to ght like Cantwell, Russell tells Hockstader, I lose all meaning. But
Hockstader counters his idealism with hard pragmatism, saying:
Power is not a toy that we give to good children. Its a weapon.
And the strong man takes it, and he uses it. And if you dont go
down there and beat Joe Cantwell to the oor with this very dirty
stick, then youve got no business in this big league. Because if
you dont ght, this job is not for you. And it never will be.
Immediately after this meeting, the stricken Hockstader is rushed to
hospital.
Following a confrontation between the front-runners, in which Rus-
sell oers, I wont throw my mud if you wont throw your mud,
Cantwell discredits Bascomb and appears to refute his allegations. Still,
Cantwell now grows ever more desperate, and he prepares to pressur-
ize delegates pledged to the minor candidates in his bid to secure the
nomination. Hockstader, on his deathbed, is dismayed that Russell
could not bring himself to smear Cantwell. He dies, wishing a plague
on both their houses (The hell with both of you!). Cantwell is gaining
on the Convention oor, and Governor Claypool, who had once pledged
support to Russell, rallies to Cantwells banner. T. T. Claypool has all
the characteristics of a dog except loyalty, quips Russell. Cantwell goes
to see Russell and, dreading a hung Convention, he pleads with Russell
to release his delegates in exchange for the Vice-Presidential nomina-
tion. Russell agrees to contact his oor manager, but he then instructs
the man to release his delegates in favour of the last remaining dark
horse in the race, a young Western governor, John Merwin (who has not
had a single line of dialogue in the lm). Merwins nobody! Russells own
campaign manager protests. Well, he is now somebody, Russell replies
calmly. Cantwell is devastated. Russell explains his actions by telling
him: You have no sense of responsibility toward anybody or anything.
+
And that is a tragedy in a man and it is a disaster in a President.
Cantwell is nished.
The sacricial resolution is at one with Henry Fondas larger screen
iconography. Fonda frequently played characters who favoured the ap-
plication of intelligence over a knee-jerk resort to violence as their
means of solving problems. This certainly colours the whole approach
of his heroes in Angry Men and Anthony Manns underrated West-
ern The Tin Star (+jy). In another very ne Western, Edward
Dmytryks Warlock (+j), Fondas legendary gunghter eventually
clashes with Richard Widmarks honest deputy. Instead of gunning his
opponent down, as he could easily do, Fonda twice outdraws him with
his gold-handled Colts, then tosses the cherished weapons into the dust
and rides out of town. This is, in eect, the ending that The Best Man
employs: the morally superior individual ultimately refuses to resort to
a violence that would diminish his best sense of himself. He leaves the
eld ostensibly defeated, but in fact the moral victor. Bill Russell is con-
vinced his decision was correct, remarking of Merwin: Men without
faces tend to get elected president. And power or responsibility or per-
sonal honour ll in the features. Usually pretty well. This is, again, the
assurance common to the American political genre (and to much of
American political culture) that everything will no doubt turn out for
the best as long as a decent, honourable man sits in the White House.
Russells arch, self-deprecating wit not only recalls Adlai Stevenson,
but also anticipates the +8 campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy;
and the nervous breakdown issue pregures George McGoverns ill-
fated rst choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate in
+y:. Yet Joe Cantwell is a much more intriguing gure. Formerly in
the insurance business, Joe is a hustler from humble stock. On occa-
sion, he displays some status anxiety vis--vis Russells inherited wealth.
Russell responds: Self-made man with a self-made issue. Your imagi-
nary Communist Maa. Cantwell seems partly based on Joe Mc-
Carthy, who made his name whipping up hysteria over Communism;
but he is also partly based on Bobby Kennedy, who had had a high -
prole role as chief counsel to the US Senate hearings into corruption
within the Teamsters Union. Moreover, like Bobby Kennedy, Joe
Cantwell has an older brother who was once a power within the party.
Rather than a martyred president, Don Cantwell (Gene Raymond) is
a former presidential aspirant who ran against Hockstader for the
nomination, but Don lacked the killer instinct which Joe believes is
+y
essential to be a winner. Joe Cantwell is as much an All-American
monster as All the Kings Mens Willie Stark. However, the clearest
indication of the true prototype for Cantwell came, appropriately, from
Gore Vidal himself:
When I based the character of the wicked candidate in the play
on Richard Nixon, I thought it would be amusing if liberal par-
tisans were to smear unjustly that uxorious man as a homosexual.
I was promptly condemned by a conservative columnist who said
that my plot was absurdly melodramatic since no man could rise
to any height in American politics if he were thought to be a fag.
Yet this same columnist used to delight in making coy allusions in
print to Stevensons lack of robustness.
Whoever was the prototype for Joe Cantwell, it is intriguing to imag-

ine a sequel in which Cantwell, like Nixon in +8, bounces back and
this time wins the presidency. What would America look like with such
a man in the White House? Cliff Robertson, who had played the young
Jack Kennedy in PT a year before his turn as Cantwell, turned up
as a smooth and slippery Deputy CIA Director in Sydney Pollacks
Three Days of the Condor (+yj); and two years later he was top-billed
in the superb mini-series, Washington: Behind Closed Doors. There, as
irony and screen iconography would have it, he played a CIA Director
who (given the thinly ctionalized veneer) was a Kennedy protg, at
odds with Jason Robardss Nixonesque president, who was hell-bent
on eroding civil liberties. Nonetheless, would it be too fanciful to hypo -
thesize, in that great unseen intertextual ber-narrative of the genre,
that Joe Cantwell perhaps dropped out for a few years during the +os,
taking temporary refuge in a hippie commune in Pennsylvania and
fathered a child who would later be known to the world as Bob Roberts?
The Best Man features some of the sharpest dialogue in the history
of the American political lm. World-weary ex-President Hockstaders
observations are particularly pithy, such as this admonition to Joe
Cantwell:
The end justies the means, huh? Well, son, I got news for you
about both politics and life. And may I say the two are exactly the
same? There are no ends, Joe. Only means . . . All Im sayin is
that what matters in our profession, which is really life, is how
+8
you do things and how you treat people, and what you really feel
about em and not some ideal goal for society or for yourself.
It would surely benet political aspirants to watch this lm and
weigh those words carefully before throwing their hats into the ring.
Yet what happens when the human element is largely taken out of
politics and the world stands on the brink of catastrophe, because of
technological error? That was the nightmare premise at the heart of the
last great political lm of the early +os. Sidney Lumets Fail-Safe,
based on Eugene Burdicks and Harvey Wheelers novel, was the last of
the implicitly pro-LBJ lms of +. Fail-Safe brought up the rear in
helping to annihilate Barry Goldwater at the polls, but Columbia
eectively doomed their own movie to obliteration at the box oce,
having released Stanley Kubricks Dr Strangelove earlier that year.
Kubricks lm, with its almost identical plot, had taken the prospect of
nuclear holocaust and played it for laughs. Thus, Fail-Safe had been
ridiculed before it had even premiered.
Nevertheless, Fail-Safe is a powerful and deeply disturbing lm. Six
US Vindicator bombers, led by Colonel Grady (Ed Binns), make their
routine ight to their fail-safe points, fully expecting that they will
thereafter be ordered home. But because of a technological error, they
are ordered to y beyond fail-safe to bomb Moscow. Back in the States,
US military leaders work frantically to urge the bombers to return
home, and they are nally placed in the terrible position of having to
order their own planes shot down. Five of the planes are destroyed, but
Henry Fonda as the President in Sidney Lumets Fail-Safe (+).
+
Gradys crippled bomber makes it through. The President (Henry
Fonda) pleads with Grady to return, telling him that his orders are a
mistake and the nation is not at war. However, the US bomber crews
have been thoroughly trained. They realize that the Soviets are capable
of simulating the Presidents voice, and their orders are to disregard
such communication.
As this last damaged bomber ies relentlessly towards Moscow,
the President tries desperately to convince the Russian premier that it
is all a terrible, tragic mistake and not, as the Russians suspect, a pre-
emptive strike. To convince the Soviets of Americas good faith and to
avert a global nuclear holocaust, the President orders his trusted friend,
US Air Force General Black (Dan OHerlihy), into the air. As soon as
Gradys bomber annihilates Moscow, Black is to drop a nuclear bomb
on New York. Black carries out his orders and then, conscious that his
wife and sons are among the victims on the ground, he commits suicide.
Burdicks and Wheelers novel ended with the President posthumously
awarding General Black the Congressional Medal of Honor for his
courage and devotion to duty and to his country. The movie omits this
detail but, otherwise, this is kindred to Raymond Shaws nal valiant
act: murder and suicide as the supreme, redemptive sacrice to save
America. If not as sophisticated as The Manchurian Candidate, Fail-Safe
might surpass Frankenheimers classic in one respect. It has perhaps
the bleakest ending in the genre.
From Advise and Consent to Fail-Safe, Henry Fondas decent, intel-
ligent liberal hero experienced an elliptical career progression. In
Advise and Consent, his character is a nominee for Secretary of State, but
he is not conrmed. In The Best Man, Fonda is now a former Secretary
of State who is running for president, but he does not succeed in that
Honourable and
irresponsible men
in Fail-Safe:
Frank Overton as
the solid General
Bogan and Fritz
Weaver as the
unstable Colonel
Cascio.
+jo
quest, either. He has, however, nally acceded to the presidency in Fail-
Safe, and he and Fredric March of Seven Days in May constituted the
unpretentious, Middle American ideal of what a movie president
should be what he should look like, and how he should act. Marchs
Jordan Lyman and Fondas president in Fail-Safe are respectively en-
dowed with the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon. In one
sense Fondas three performances merge into the same character, but
there is also a clear ideological trajectory at work here. Allen Drury had
based Bob Lengwell partly on FDRs protg Alger Hiss. Gore Vidal
based Russell on Adlai Stevenson. Burdicks and Wheelers idealized
President in Fail-Safe was based on JFK himself. Within two short
years, Fondas liberal protagonist has been transformed from a last
remnant of the New Deal into the hero of the New Frontier.
Fail-Safe was scripted by the formerly blacklisted Walter Bernstein,
but anyone expecting a shrill, left-wing diatribe would have been disap-
pointed. The lm is eminently fair to US military leaders, depicting
them not as right-wing crazies akin to General Buck Turgidson (George
C. Scott) and General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in Kubricks
darkly comic Dr Strangelove, but instead as brave, dedicated ocers
who are committed to preserving the peace. This is true of General
Black and of the War Room commander, General Bogan (Frank Over-
ton). The most loathsome character in the lm is a civilian, the
grotesque Groeteschele (Walter Matthau), a hawkish political scientist
Military mania in Stanley Kubricks Dr Strangelove (+): Sterling Hayden as the
paranoid, delusional General Jack D. Ripper . . .
+j+
(loosely based on the military strategist and systems theorist Herman
Kahn), who speaks glibly of o million dead as an acceptable price to
win thermonuclear war.
+o
When the crisis erupts, Groeteschele sug -
gests that America should take advantage of the situation and reduce the
USSRto rubble in a rst-strike attack.
++
It is rather refreshing to see the
moral lines redrawn here so that the military representatives (Black and
Bogan) are cast as men of reason and the intellectual as a cold, irrespon -
sible sociopath. Admittedly, this turns Seven Days in Mays worst
nightmare on its head. Yet, ironically, this same dichotomy of military
caution and civilian recklessness is disturbingly prescient of the cur-
rent debacle in Iraq. What is depressing, however, is that the honourable
General Black dies while Groeteschele Fail-Safes own Dr Strange -
love survives, quite possibly to shape future policy.
Nevertheless, the respective ideological, moral or amoral positions in
Fail-Safe are nally reduced to the posturing of one-dimensional
gures overwhelmed by the awesome and awful technology that holds
them in thrall. We cannot quite get under the skins of these characters
and feel we know them well as we might with those disparate protag-
onists of Advise and Consent, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in
May and The Best Man.
The classic political lms of the early +os tempered idealism with
pragmatism. Jeerson Smith could not possibly have survived in this
milieu. This was not an arena for wide-eyed, hopeful innocents. The
. . . and George C. Scott as the sly, cynical General Buck Turgidson.
+j:
nal paragraph of Drurys novel Advise and Consent describes the
United States as a nation so strangely composed of great ideals and
uneasy compromise, and that, despite a liberal world-view markedly
divergent from Drurys own, in eect sums up the early +os political
lms representation of America.
+:
Decent men are faced with dicult,
often cruel choices, but the Republic is dependent on such men: Bob
Munson, Brigham Anderson, Harley Hudson, Ben Marco, Jordan
Lyman, Jiggs Casey, Bill Russell, Art Hockstader and Generals Black
and Bogan. Without such real patriots, American democracy would not
survive; and, on the other hand, Americans were warned to steer clear
of fanatics, true believers and self-styled super-patriots, such as Fred
Van Ackerman, Eleanor Shaw and John Yerkes Iselin, James Mattoon
Scott, Joe Cantwell and Professor Groeteschele.
Signicantly, the heroes of the classic pre-World War II lms (Mr
Smith, Young Mr Lincoln) were youthful idealists, and almost amateur
politicians. They possessed an Everyman quality, which was later also
recognizable in the protagonists of several paranoid thrillers from the
+yos (The Parallax View, +y; Three Days of the Condor, +yj; and
All the Presidents Men, +y). Yet in those early +os classics by Pre-
minger, Frankenheimer, Schaner and Lumet, it fell to professionals
politicians and dedicated military men to save America from plotters
and power-grabbers; and those cruel choices they faced often involved
the supreme sacrice. Three of the heroes from this cycle (Brigham
Anderson, Raymond Shaw and General Black) commit suicide, each
for the continued security of America. Another thread common to these
lms was a frank treatment of unconventional sexual themes as
subplots. Brigham Anderson and Joe Cantwell are both susceptible to
homosexual blackmail; Eleanor Shaw Iselins relationship with her son
Dan OHerlihy
as the humane
General Black and
Walter Matthau
as the amoral
Groeteschele in
Fail-Safe.
+j
nally becomes incestuous; General Scott is an adulterer; and Groete -
schele is a sexual sadist. The genre had come a long way from the
roseate worlds envisaged by Frank Capra and John Ford.
The classic political lms of the early +os had a lasting impact on
the genre. Three of the ve have been remade, with varying degrees of
success. Seven Days in May was remade in + as a TV movie, The
Enemy Within (directed by Jonathan Darby), with Jason Robards in the
Burt Lancaster role, Sam Waterston as Fredric Marchs successor and
Forest Whitaker stepping into Kirk Douglass shoes. Despite its pres-
tigious cast, this was a needless, utterly inferior exercise, ludicrously
featuring Russian agents, in this era of glasnost, helping Whitakers
marine colonel to foil the dastardly plot and to keep US democracy on
the right track. Far better was the :ooo TV version of Fail Safe (now
sans hyphen), directed by Stephen Frears and introduced by Walter
Cronkite. The new version of Fail Safe was the rst live broadcast
feature-length drama on American television in years, and it boasted
a stellar cast, including Harvey Keitel as General Black, George Clooney
as Colonel Grady, Brian Dennehy as General Bogan and Richard Drey-
fuss as the President. Then, in :oo, Jonathan Demmes polished re-
working of The Manchurian Candidate recast the conspiracy at the heart
of the nightmare as the work of a corporation called Manchurian
Global (otherwise the original title would no longer make any sense). At
rst blush, the idea sounded as ill-advised as attempting to remake
Citizen Kane, but Demmes movie brought the tales paranoia and
pertinence up to date.
It is worth noting, however, that there have been no direct remakes
of Advise and Consent or The Best Man, which were principally proce-
dural political melodramas, i.e., chronicling dramatic events as they
unfolded in the operation of the US political process. In these two nar-
ratives, the drama grew out of extraordinary characters placed in (for
high-ranking politicians) commonplace situations; whereas in the other
three movies, the drama stemmed from individually fantastic nightmare
scenarios. A remake of Advise and Consent would be particularly
unlikely. Both the Cold War posturing and the homosexual blackmail
leading to suicide might date the melodrama and tie it too closely to
a specic, bygone era. Still, one can discern enduring traces of
Drurys classic in Rob Reiners The American President (+j), in
which the Senate Minority Leader (Richard Dreyfuss) is named Bob
Rumson (quite possibly a homage to Advise and Consent, in which
+j
Walter Pidgeons Majority Leader was called Bob Munson); and in
Rod Luries The Contender (:ooo), in which the Congressional battle
to conrm Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) as the rst female Vice-
President of the United States is just as virulent as the Senatorial
wrangling over Robert Lengwell in Drurys novel and Premingers
lm four decades earlier.
However, it is the three thrillers, be they paranoiac (The Manchurian
Candidate), apocalyptic (Fail-Safe) or both (Seven Days in May), which
have had a hold on modern Americas cultural imagination and a last-
ing impact upon the genre. We cannot fully appreciate Alan J. Pakulas
The Parallax View (+y) or Don Siegels Telefon (+yy), a tale of drug-
induced, hypnotized Soviet sleepers in America who are lethally acti-
vated by a quote from a Robert Frost poem, without a knowledge of
The Manchurian Candidate; or Robert Aldrichs Twilights Last Gleam-
ing (+yy) or Edward Zwicks The Siege (+8) without Seven Days in
May; or Rod Luries truly nasty nuclear countdown drama Deterrence
(+) without Fail-Safe.
Yet the greatest legacy of the classic political movies of the early
+os is perhaps most likely to be found on television. The immediate
progenitor of The West Wing (+:oo) was certainly The American
President but its fascination with the inner workings of the American
George Clooney as the pilot of the ill-fated bomber in Stephen Frearss live-broadcast
TV version of Fail Safe (:ooo).
political process is directly descended from Advise and Consent and The
Best Man. Likewise, (:oo+present) has its own movie roots in John
Badhams Nick of Time (+j) and its immediate cultural roots in post-
/++ paranoia. Nevertheless, the constant urgency of s various
Republic-in-danger scenarios is inevitably indebted to The Manchurian
Candidate, Seven Days in May and Fail-Safe those three great pillars
of paranoia, nightmare, panic and despair in the American political lm.
+jj
+j
American identity is a contested concept. A vaunted unease lies at the
heart of American-ness. No other country in the world entertains the
concept of rst-generation or seventh-generation as a yardstick of
nationality, pedigree or belonging as if the foreign status preceding
ones identication as American were essentially an inferior condition.
In +8 the British anthropologist Georey Gorer observed: only the
fully American can be considered fully human . . . Americanism is an
act of will, and failure to achieve complete Americanism is an indivi dual
fault much more than it is a misfortune.
+
To be American is, implicitly,
perceived as both a gift and a blessing.
While American-ness constitutes the state of being American,
Americanism is a term embraced and co-opted by disparate and often
wildly divergent ideologies: to emphasize adherence to the principles of
the Founding Fathers; or to assert chauvinistic superiority over an Oth-
er within US society; or, conversely, to insist on the inclusion of mi-
norities as Americans when their true entitlement to that status appears
endangered.
The brand of Americanism which was heartily embraced by Mr
Smith, the paeans to Lincoln, Tennessee Johnson, Wilson and The Sun
Shines Bright was the genuine article devotion to the ideals of the
Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. That same
heartfelt dedication to the principles of the Founding Fathers inspired
the heroes of early +os lms such as The Manchurian Candidate,
Seven Days in May and The Best Man although their patriotism was
expressed in muted terms, in sharp contrast to the rabid ag-waving
of the self-styled super-patriots who were the real villains of those
dramas. Put simply, the Americanism of Abraham Lincoln, Jeerson
cn+r+ra
Enemies Within: White Hoods,
Red Scares, Black Lists
Fanaticism, and ignorance, is forever busy and needs feeding.
Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) in Inherit the Wind
(directed by Stanley Kramer, +o)
+jy
Smith, Bill Russell and Jordan Lyman was safe, consensual and
uncontested. Many ne lms, however, have focused not on consensual
protagonists, but upon problematic strands of Americanism or Ameri -
can identity, as exemplied by extremists, outcasts and other enemies
within.
Right-Wing Extremism
Ultra-right-wing groups have received little sympathetic treatment in
American cinema, although the major exception is D. W. Griths ro-
manticized Civil War and Reconstruction era epic The Birth ofa Nation
(++j), which lionized the Ku Klux Klan as the valiant defenders of
white Southern Christian womanhood. In +y Warner Brothers, ex-
hibiting their customary air for progressive and incendiary stories torn
from the headlines of the day, released Black Legion, directed by Archie
L. Mayo. It starred Humphrey Bogart as a good Joe who loses out on
promotion to a co-worker of Eastern European stock, then becomes
embittered and seeks solace and salvation in the hooded Americanism
of the sinister Black Legion. Bogarts association with this group results
in his moral deterioration and the murder of his best friend. Even
though his change-of-heart testimony at the pictures end guarantees
the imprisonment of his racist cohorts, there is no redemption for this
tortured and now lost soul. The penitentiary doors must nally seal him
o from his family, too.
Warners returned to the theme of hooded thugs terrorizing small-
town America in Stuart Heislers Storm Warning (+j+), which featured
Ginger Rogers stopping o to visit her sister (Doris Day) and her
brother-in-law (Steve Cochran), who happens to be active in the local
Klan klavern. The courageous district attorney who sets about busting
the KKK was played by none other than Ronald Reagan. Yet, although
several lms of the +os and jos took sideswipes at diverse brands of
home-grown right-wing extremism (George Cukors Keeper of the
Flame, +:; Arch Obolers Strange Holiday, +j; H. C. Potters The
Farmers Daughter, +y; and William Cameron Menziess The Whip
Hand, +j+), Storm Warning was uncommonly daring in addressing the
danger of the Ku Klux Klan head on. There is also some irony in the
fact that Reagan, who portrayed the anti-Klan D.A., was from the mid-
+os to the late +yos perceived by many liberals as an ideologue on the
+j8
ultra-right of the political spectrum. Throughout the +os and yos
the Klan and other grass-roots racist organizations had a low lmic
prole (with the notable exceptions of William Shatner in Roger
Cormans incisive The Intruder, ++, and Terence Youngs sensation-
alistic The Klansman, +y). The Ku Klux Klan featured in the climac-
tic episode of the mini-series Roots (+yy), and Marlon Brando won an
Emmy Award for his cameo as the American Nazi leader George
Lincoln Rockwell in the +y sequel, Roots: The Next Generations. Yet
in the Reaganite +8os the Klan, racists and fascists were prominent
gures in Hollywood demonology, especially on television.
Herbert Wises Skokie (+8+) dramatized a real-life crisis which oc-
curred in +yy, when American Nazis enlisted the aid of the American
Civil Liberties Union (incredible, but true) in their bid to march
through the Illinois suburb of Skokie, many of whose residents were
Jewish. The distinguished cast was headed by Danny Kaye as an ordi-
narily mild-mannered Holocaust survivor who is prepared to resort to
violence if the Nazis are permitted to march. The mini-series Chiefs
(dir. Jerry London, +8) chronicled a series of brutal murders near a
small Georgia town called Delano (Franklin D. Roosevelts middle
name). All the villainous characters were virulently anti-Black, and
most of them were fully paid-up members of the Klan. Lesli Linka
Glatters Into the Homeland (+8y) starred Powers Boothe as an ex-cop
who inltrates a neo-Nazi group to rescue his daughter, who has fallen
for the farmland Fhrers son and heir (C. Thomas Howell). Boothe
saves his daughter and even shows the younger man the error of his
ways, but Howell crosses his extremist father at the cost of his own life.
This TV movie ends with Howells father (Paul Le Mat) telling his
younger son that now he must carry forward the Aryan struggle; and,
as they talk, a small boy draws a swastika in the sand. The threat is far
from over, and a caption informs us: There are approximately :oo
white supremacist organizations active in the United States today. The
end-title song features Willie Nelson singing And room for everyone,
livin in the Promised Land, thereby reinforcing Into the Homelands
inherent message of racial tolerance and coexistence. A ne three-hour
telefeature, Cross of Fire (+8), starred John Heard as David C.
Stephen son, the charismatic Indiana Klan leader of the +:os whose
obsession with Madge Oberholtzer (Mel Harris) ended in death for her,
life imprisonment for him and the demise of the Klan as a potent force
in Indiana politics. Lionel Chetwynds So Proudly We Hail (+o) was
+j
one of several TV movies in which ultra-right-wingers sought to
seduce young minds by pushing a revisionist agenda denying the reali -
ties of the Holocaust until a decent citizen stands up for the truth.
:
In
this case David Soul played the white supremacist batting for Hitler,
while Edward Herrmann portrayed a college anthropologist tempor -
arily duped into academic collaboration.
+88 saw the release of two big-screen movies (both directed by non-
Americans) which addressed the menace of right-wing extremism in
the recent past and the present. Alan Parkers Mississippi Burning chron-
icled the FBI investigation into the murders and disappearance of three
Civil Rights workers in + (this had previously been covered in Mar-
vin Chomskys three-hour TV drama Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the
Ku Klux Klan, +yj, and would also be revisited yet again in the +o
TV lm Murder in Mississippi). Mississippi Burning was an involving,
superior thriller which excoriated the Klan while also establishing an
ethical dichotomy characteristic of the Kennedyesque liberalism that
had informed those classic political melodramas of the early +os. Mis-
sissippi Burning divides its heroic allegiance between two contrasting
FBI agents: the pragmatic Southern conservative Anderson (Gene
Hack man) and the idealistic, puritanical, Northeastern liberal intel -
lectual Ward (Willem Dafoe). This clash between pragmatist and
idealist pervades countless Hollywood movies. It is the classic conict
between the rogue cop and the rule-bound bureaucrat, between the man
of action who bends the rules to achieve results and the man of princi-
ple who lives by an abstract code.
Signicantly, this saga of racial

oppression is framed as so many Hollywood lms have been as a
John Heard as
David C. Stephen-
son, a charismatic
KKK leader
eventually ruined
by scandal, in
Cross ofFire (dir.
Paul Wendkos,
+8).
+o
problem to be solved by white protagonists. This was evident, perhaps
inevitable, in conservative lms such as John Fords Sergeant Rutledge
(+o) and his Cheyenne Autumn (+), which were apologias for his
earlier negative racial stereotypes of Blacks and Native Americans
respectively. Yet the assertion of this mythic-cum-ideological resolu-
tion in a liberal tale, directed by an Englishman, a generation later, testi -
es to the durability of the white men to the rescue narrative which
has prevailed throughout the history of Hollywood cinema.
Costa-Gavrass Betrayed (also +88) starred Debra Winger as a
federal agent assigned to inltrate a group of ultra-rightists in the
American heartland a task she achieves by becoming the lover of a
young farmer (Tom Berenger), whose family-man exterior conceals a
virulently racist anti-Semite with a penchant for hunting terried Black
men to death. Dispossession and marginalization fuel the extremism
of these rural right-wingers, and Costa-Gavras seems to be suggesting
that there is something inherently rotten at the heart of America; but
occasionally Betrayed attempts to understand the motivation of the
ordinary Americans sucked into an extremist and xenophobic ideology.
On a visit to a grand-scale far-right jamboree in Montana (a family
camp complete with cross-burning Klansmen and swastika-saluting
Nazis singing Amazing Grace), Shorty (John Mahoney), the most
likable of Berengers cohorts, explains to Winger: All I ever wanted was
just to raise my crops and raise my boy. The bank took my farm, and
Vietnam took my son. I got nothing left to take . . . I got a good heart,
too, Katie, just like you. It is a brief, quiet moment, but it illustrates
the essential decency of a man who has been ground under the life -
crushing demands of impersonal, indierent power structures.
Still, Betrayed nally falls short of penetrating insight and settles for
a formulaic narrative. The lost opportunity of this lm can be pin-
pointed to a subsequent exchange at the camp in Montana. As children
are trained in paramilitary and survivalist activities, an American in
brownshirt and swastika is hawking Lugers and other Nazi regalia.
Berenger responds in disgust: My Dad got a Purple Heart ghtin uni-
forms like that and your goddamn Adolf Hitler! Here was scope for
this character to grow and change, realizing that the thugs he had been
associating with ran contrary to the classic American tradition; but no
more was made of this potential epiphany. Instead, Berenger remains
committed to the ultra-right agenda; and Winger, despite her love for
him, has no choice but to shoot him as he prepares to assassinate a
++
presidential candidate. Her sole triumph is that she has left Berengers
young daughter with an incipient faith in free speech as the true
American Way.
Right-wing extremism reared its head in a cluster of mid- to late
+os movies. The spectre of the Oklahoma City bombing was clearly
visible in James Foleys The Chamber (+) and Mark Pellingtons
Arlington Road (+), respectively featuring Gene Hackman and Tim
Robbins as ultra-rightist terrorists who blow up government buildings.
Rob Reiners Ghosts ofMississippi (+) chronicled the titanic struggle
to bring white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith (James Woods) to
justice for the killing in + of the Civil Rights campaigner Medgar
Evers. A full generation elapsed between Everss death and Beckwiths
eventual imprisonment. The protagonist of Joel Schumachers A Time
to Kill (+) chooses a swift, summary brand of justice: when two
racist rednecks rape and torture a ten-year-old Black girl, her outraged
father (Samuel L. Jackson) shoots them down in the courthouse. The
rest of the lm deals with Jacksons trial, ending with his acquittal. Both
John Singletons multicultural campus melodrama Higher Learning
(+j) and Gus Van Sants Elephant (:oo), the latter based on the
Columbine High School tragedy of :o April +, conclude with sexu -
ally insecure, Nazi-infatuated youths massacring their fellow students.
Yet perhaps the most incisive analysis of right-wing extremism in
American lm to date has been Tony Kayes brutal American History X
(+8), condently treading the path from which Betrayed had shied.
Edward Norton plays a hardened young veteran of the White Power
movement (with a huge black swastika tattooed on his left breast). This
character is surely the most unlikely hero of a mainstream American
movie, but he is virtually a blood-brother (literally) to Clint Eastwoods
The face of
American neo-
Nazism: Edward
Norton stars in
Tony Kayes
American History
X (+8).
+:
aged, world-weary protagonist in Unforgiven (+:). Nortons Derek
is disillusioned with the racist creed he has bought into and heart-sick
of the violence he has wrought. After serving time for murder, Derek
tries to dissuade his hero-worshipping younger brother (Edward
Furlong) from following a similarly destructive path but with tragic
results. It is raw, uncompromising and powerful. This brave lm might
just as aptly have been titled American Tragedy X.
Left-Wing Extremism
The history of on-screen representations of the American Left in the
Hollywood cinema has been decidedly schizophrenic. On the one hand,
the post-World War II cycle of anti-Communist movies depicted home-
grown Red sympathizers and collaborators as traitors, mists and
heretics. Films such as Gordon Douglass Walk a Crooked Mile (+8),
Robert Stevensons I Married a Communist (a.k.a. The Woman on Pier ,
+), R. G. Springsteens The Red Menace (+), Gordon Douglass
I Was a Communist for the FBI (+j+) and Alfred L. Werkers Walk East
on Beacon! (+j:) portrayed a netherworld of treasonous ingrates and
moral degenerates unt to inhabit or enjoy the protection of freedoms
land. I Was a Communist for the FBI even scurrilously implied that the
Civil Rights movement played into the hands of Communists. Several
of these lms were not so much paeans to the House Committee on
Un-American Activities as they were celluloid valentines.
One of the most trenchant was Edward Ludwigs Big Jim McLain
(+j:), starring John Wayne as a HUAC investigator assigned to smash
a Communist spy ring in Hawaii. When Big Jim McLain was shown in
Germany, script changes and dubbing shifted the source of villainy
from Communism to drug-running. That anecdote actually contains a
kernel of truth about the anti-Red cycle of the late +os and early
+jos. Many of these movies were little more than G-Men versus
gangster narratives updated with a contemporary political gloss. Even
the most prestigious of the cycle, Leo McCareys My Son John (+j:),
nally came down to a Manichaean morality tale with a none-too -
subtle ideological undertow. John Jeerson (Robert Walker) endowed,
like Jeerson Smith, with a name both common and classically Ameri -
can is an unlovely example of how treachery may creep, unsuspected,
into the most respectable of American families. Equally contemptuous
+
of his mothers devout Catholicism and his American Legionnaire
fathers ag-saluting patriotism, John Jeerson is an eete, sneering
intellectual who is implicitly disloyal to America: a state of disgrace
that can be redeemed only by his death.
On the other hand, by the +yos, when the era of the blacklist and
the witch-hunts had become a popular lmic subject, the ethical align-
ment of good and evil along strict ideological lines of Right and Left
had undoubtedly altered. Nevertheless, that veneer of Manichaean
morality remained. Now the victims of the witch-hunts became the
heroes, while the supporters of HUAC and Joe McCarthy were the
villains. The impact of the blacklist on showbusiness personalities per-
meated Sydney Pollacks The Way We Were (+y), Lamont Johnsons
TV movie Fear on Trial (+yj), Martin Ritts The Front (+y) and,
over the next twenty-plus years, Graeme Cliords Frances (+8:),
about the tragic +os star Frances Farmer, Irwin Winklers Guilty by
Suspicion (++), Richard Attenboroughs Chaplin (+:) and Frank
Darabonts The Majestic (:oo+). Yet the focus was frequently on protag-
onists who had been wrongly accused of Communist sympathies or
aliations. William Devane as the folksy radio host John Henry Faulk
in Fear on Trial (the real-life Faulk had played the Southern Governor
T. T. Claypool in The Best Man), Woody Allens front-man scriptwriter
in The Front, Robert De Niros movie director in Guilty by Suspicion
and Jim Carreys screenwriter in The Majestic are not Communists. It is
simply their own strength of character that compels them (when friends
and associates fail them) to take a stand against those people who point
the nger without cause and destroy lives without conscience.
Several other lms centred on innocents traumatized by associa-
tion: the children of victims of the witch-hunts. This theme underlies
both John Schlesingers Marathon Man (+y) and Sidney Lumets
Daniel (+8), based on E. L. Doctorows +y+ novel, The Book of
Daniel, which was inspired by the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Lumets Running on Empty (+88), which starred River Phoenix as the
conicted son of Vietnam-era radical activists Christine Lahti and Judd
Hirsch, was, in eect, his companion piece to Daniel. Yet it is worth
noting that a moral contradiction underlies many of these ostensibly
anti-witch-hunt movies. The moral ground and the accompanying
justiable indignation are simplied by the fact that most of these lms
featured protagonists who were wrongly accused of being Communists.
These lms condemned the practice and the impact of wrongful
+
accusation, but consequently they failed to address the rights and
wrongs of whether governments and industries are justied in persecu-
tion of individuals who actually do hold beliefs which are inimical to the
status quo.
As such, these were not radical movies. Instead, they were still
securely anchored within the realms of Hollywoods liberal consensus.
Herbert Bibermans embattled Salt of the Earth (+j), a proto feminist
and pro-labour paean to striking Mexican-American miners, made
mostly by blacklisted personnel, and defying Hollywood conservatives,
right-wing union leaders, mobsters and local armed vigilantes, was a
truly rare creature.
Likewise, Warren Beattys epic Reds (+8+), which romanticized the
love aair of radical journalist John Reed (Beatty) and his wife Louise
Bryant (Diane Keaton) within the turbulent context of the Russian
Revolution, was a Zhivagooey attempt to reclaim the US Communists
of the +:os as classically American idealists. This expensive and over-
long eort left most American moviegoers as cold as the frozen wastes
of the Steppes and not just because the +8os was the era of Ronald
Reagan, with his rhetoric about the Soviets Evil Empire. Most Ameri -
cans had no interest at any time in a motion picture which portrayed
even home-grown Communists as unsung romantic heroes. Commu-
nism was, after all, widely perceived as an alien, godless, totally un-
American ideology which was to be resisted at all costs, particularly if
it set foot on US soil. This was precisely the scenario of John Miliuss
Reaganesque Red Dawn (+8) not so much a right-wing guerrilla
fantasy as a paramilitary wet dream, in which resolute, resilient,
resourceful American teenagers kicked Soviet and Cuban asses all over
Colorado. Joe McCarthy would have been proud of them, and no doubt
he would have loved the lm.
Senator Joe McCarthy and the Witch-Hunts
One man became synonymous with the anti-Communist crusade of the
early +jos. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy cheapened a serious
national security issue for his own personal publicity and aggrandize-
ment, and his lasting legacy was a new word in the US political lexicon.
McCarthyism, the relentless, vindictive persecution of opponents and
dissidents, consists of low political practices such as reckless, ground-
+j
less defamation of character and intimidation; and, surely, McCarthys
remorseless bullying and mudslinging have irrevocably linked such
behaviour with his name. Ann Coulter, twenty-rst-century Americas
self-styled high priestess of conservatism, has embarked on a campaign
to instate McCarthy in the pantheon of national heroes.
Half a century
after his death, Joe McCarthy remains one of the most controversial of
American politicians. The intervening decades have scarcely mitigated
the erce passions, pro and con, that his name provokes.
George Clooneys Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj) provided a
snapshot of the McCarthy era. Taking its title from the legendary
broadcaster Ed Murrows customary sign-o, this focused on Murrows
most courageous show on the controversial CBS current aairs pro -
gramme See It Now. On March +j Murrow turned his spot light
on McCarthy, whose anti-Red demagoguery had been grabbing head-
lines for four years. Yet that act of courage on television had found no
explicit parallel in contemporary US cinema.
In the early +jos criticism of McCarthyism on screen was largely
the preserve of safe, ostensibly conservative genres (e.g., the Western,
the war lm and the Biblical epic). When home-grown demagogues
appeared in +jos political movies, they were apt to be country boys
with colossal egos (A Lion Is In the Streets, +j; A Face in the Crowd,
+jy), rather than readily recognizable equivalents of Senator Joe
McCarthy. One sure sign of Hollywoods timidity was that the rst lm
version of The Crucible, Arthur Millers dramatic anti-McCarthy alle-
gory, was actually a French project, co-written by Miller and Jean-Paul
Sartre, which premiered in Europe in +jy.
That same year, McCarthy died. Hollywood was still in no rush to
chronicle the ugly phenomenon that bore his name. Then, in +:, c-
titious senators reputedly based on McCarthy appeared in Advise and
Consent (George Grizzards Fred Van Ackerman) and The Manchurian
Candidate (James Gregorys John Iselin). These turned McCarthys
anti-Communist zeal on its head, with Advise and Consent presenting
him as a pro-Soviet appeaser and The Manchurian Candidate as a per-
haps unwitting (and certainly witless) dupe.
Yet the man who gave the scariest, most realistic performance as
Joe McCarthy in a +os lm was . . . Joe McCarthy. Shortly after Ed
Murrow had exposed McCarthy on See It Now, the Senator had opened
up another front in his war against alleged subversives in government.
The result was the ArmyMcCarthy hearings. For eight weeks in the
+
summer of +j, these rst live televised Congressional hearings com-
manded the attention of 8o million Americans and the culmination
was catastrophic for McCarthy. A puckish Boston lawyer named Joseph
N. Welch, weary of the reckless accusations, smears and bullying which
were McCarthys trademarks, nally shamed him, demanding: Have
you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Ed Murrows See It Now
broadcast had certainly wounded McCarthy, but it was Joseph N. Welch
who buried him. Welch later played the presiding judge in Otto Prem -
ingers courtroom saga Anatomy of a Murder (+j). Then, a decade
after the ArmyMcCarthy hearings, the documentary lm-maker Emile
de Antonio edited the days and +8y hours of broadcast footage into
Point of Order (+), a o-minute feature for theatrical release; and so
a new generation of Americans had their chance to see McCarthy for
the odious bully he was: whining, cajoling, intimidating and altogether
condemned by his own actions.
Two high-quality television lms, made fteen years apart, each did
a superlative job of highlighting Joe McCarthys reign of terror. Jud
Taylors Tail Gunner Joe (+yy), featured a virtuoso star turn by Peter
Boyle as McCarthy, with Patricia Neal as the anti-McCarthy Republi-
can Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the real-life former blacklist
victim Burgess Meredith (James Madison in Magnicent Doll, and also
the Whittaker Chambers equivalent in Advise and Consent) as Joseph
Welch. In Frank Piersons Citizen Cohn (+:), Joe Don Baker co-
starred as the boorish, boozy, whining McCarthy. Yet the real empha-
sis in this HBO presentation was on his sinister acolyte, Roy Marcus
Cohn ( James Woods), a terrifying American original. Monumental in
his hypocrisy, Roy Cohn was an anti-Semitic gay-hater who was both
Jewish and homosexual. Based on the biography by Nicholas von Ho-
man, Citizen Cohn is framed in episodic ashbacks (evidently, both the
title and the structure are homages to Citizen Kane) as various ghosts
from the past haunt the AIDS-stricken Cohn on his deathbed.
Joe McCarthy exploited an aggressive and aggrieved strand of patriot-
ism when he alleged that some of Americas greatest enemies were ac-
tually among her most privileged citizens, and close to the pinnacle of
power. The historian Richard Hofstadter observed: [I]n the minds of
the status-driven it is no special virtue to be more American than the
Rosenbergs, but it is really something to be more American than Dean
Acheson or John Foster Dulles or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
j
By
accusing American statesmen such as Acheson and General George
Marshall of treacherous participation in a conspiracy so immense,
McCarthy not only pandered to populist paranoia. By declaring that
men at the heart of government were actively working against the best
interests of the United States, Joe McCarthy also anticipated a major
trend of the American political movie by two decades.
+y
+8
The political lms of the early +os were essentially hymns to con-
sensus which reassured Americans that, whatever crises threatened the
United States, wise and sincere patriots would somehow guide the
Republic back to safe harbour. Even The Manchurian Candidate and
Seven Days in May closed with reassertions of the political status quo.
Yet these two lms were the progenitors of the political thrillers
evolution during the +yos. The edgy paranoia that had tugged at
Bennett Marcos subconscious in The Manchurian Candidate became
the dominant ethos of the +yos political lm. Even then, however, a
belief in American Exceptionalism was at work. America was conceived
as a new nation, free from the chicanery, intrigue and treachery of the
Old World. Similarly, the American political lm had, like many other
Holly wood genres, long represented the United States as a nation of
extraordinary destiny. This had been implicit in the rhetoric and
imagery of Mr Smith, the Lincoln lms of the +os and the unilateral
imposition of global disarmament in Gabriel Over the White House.
That corruption should rise and triumph in the USA, of all places, was
itself a betrayal of the Dream. If liberty and democracy could be
betrayed or subverted in America, they could be destroyed anywhere.
America the Beautiful, Land of the Free and Shining City on a Hill, was
morphing into Conspiracy Central.
Stuart Rosenbergs WUSA (+yo), based on Robert Stones +y
novel, A Hall of Mirrors, plays like a Nixon-era Day of the Locust, as
three lost souls brush against one anothers lives prior to a conagration.
Alcoholic failed musician Rheinhardt (Paul Newman), sweet- natured
drifter Geraldine (Joanne Woodward) and intense young liberal Morgan
Rainey (Anthony Perkins) arrive in New Orleans, its airwaves dom -
cn+r+ra y
Conspiracy Central
Who are those guys?
Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(directed by George Roy Hill, +)
+
inated by the right-wing radio station WUSA (Voice of the Ameri cans
America), which is headed by the crypto-fascistic Matthew T. Binga-
mon (Pat Hingle). Rheinhardt is cool, cynical and the ultimate survivor.
Despite his own liberal politics, this self-declared communicator be-
comes a DJ and broadcaster for WUSA (The future of America is up
to you is his customary sign-o). When a colleague informs him,
Theyre all delighted upstairs. They must have big things in store for
you, Rheinhardt replies neutrally but shrewdly: Yeah, theyre very
sweet. I think they got big things in store for everybody. Geraldine is
vulnerable, lonely and facially scarred by a previous lover. Unable to
nd work as a waitress, she moves in with Rheinhardt but she is
searching for a warmth and a salvation he is not emotionally equipped
to provide. Their neighbour, Rainey, has done Peace Corps-style work
in Venezuela, and he suered a mental breakdown thereafter. He is now
gathering data about Blacks on welfare relief, but he is incensed when
he learns that his work is sponsored by Bingamon and WUSA to push
poor Blacks o welfare.
Matters come to a head at a Patriotic Revival a mass rally spon-
sored by WUSA. There is an old Western lm star on the platform (a
John Wayne-type gure?), played here by Waynes frequent co-star
Bruce Cabot, who referees a staged gunght. There is a bogus
preacher, Farley, who foreshadows the rise of Christian fundamental-
ism as a powerful force on the American Right. The fact that he is
played by Laurence Harvey is both ironically and iconically signicant.
At this rally designed to evoke memories of a heroic, John Wayne-style
American past, Harveys presence here as an ersatz Southerner not only
recalls his characterizations in Summer and Smoke (++) and Walk on
the Wild Side (+:), but also mischievously subverts his most heroic
American role, as Colonel Travis in Waynes The Alamo (+o). In ad-
dition, Harveys presence at this mass rally, where a potential assassin
lurks, inevitably evokes memories of The Manchurian Candidate. Some-
times there is a weird, serendipitous synchronicity about lm history
and lm iconography. In +j, eight years before Frank Sinatra pur-
sued would-be assassin Laurence Harvey at a Presidential Convention
in The Manchurian Candidate, Sinatra himself played a gunman hired
to assassinate the US president in Lewis Allens Suddenly. In WUSA,
lmed eight years after The Manchurian Candidate, Harvey attends a
grand political rally where, in a scene reminiscent of the Iselins
deaths, one of the seated VIP guests will be shot.
+yo
In case we have failed to grasp the true ideological intent of the
WUSA radio station, a plethora of balloons at the rally bear the legend
White Power. Outside the rally, in a scene clearly reminiscent of the
+8 Democratic Convention in Chicago (only two years before the
lm, but one year after the publication of Robert Stones novel), furi-
ous Black demonstrators are on the verge of rioting. This is an obvious
representation of America as a simmering cauldron, divided between
white haves and Black have-nots. Chaos erupts when Rainey tries to
shoot Bingamon but, instead, kills the man next to him. Earlier,
Rheinhardt had observed: The only beast in the arena is the crowd.
Now the crowd beats Rainey to death. Geraldine is arrested for posses-
sion of marijuana. Faced with the prospect of fteen years in jail, she
hangs herself with a chain in her cell. Farley advises Rheinhardt to leave
town soon, Or youll nd yourself in someones conspiracy theory.
Rheinhardt, though saddened by Geraldines death, remains a survivor.
But WUSA is still very much in operation. Raineys assassination
attempt has done nothing to derail Bingamons plans, and he and his
radio station may yet have a future in American political life.
There was no clearly delineated conspiracy in WUSA, but the lm
was remarkably prophetic in its anticipation of the controversial and, at
times, virulent shock jocks who would rise to national prominence
courtesy of talk radio in the +8os and os. Yet WUSAcertainly sug-
gested that the democratic process was being wrested from the control
of the American people, and this same sense of helplessness was
apparent in non-conspiracy political lms of the +yos. Procedural
political narratives such as Michael Ritchies The Candidate (+y:) and
Jerry Schatzbergs The Seduction of Joe Tynan (+y) featured liberal
heroes working within the system (Robert Redford and Alan Alda, res -
pectively) who realize that their prestige as senators does not include the
power to initiate lasting or signicant change. The Candidates cynical
snort and Joe Tynans impotent sigh both lament democratic politics
as an exercise in futility. Even the most acclaimed lm of the decade,
Francis Ford Coppolas The Godfather (+y:), depicted the Maa as
inextricably linked to US political and economic power structures.
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) tells Kay Adams (Diane Keaton): My
fathers no dierent than any other powerful man. Any man whos
res ponsible for other people. Like a senator, or a president. Kay says:
You know how nave you sound? . . . senators and presidents dont have
men killed. Michael responds: Whos being nave, Kay? The action of
+y+
The Godfather unfolds during the Truman and Eisenhower administra-
tions, but the movie version (and its scepticism about politicians) is
unequi vocally a product of the Nixon era.
Michael Corleone believed that presidents would be capable of
having men killed. But who would kill a president? That was the ques-
tion at the heart of David Millers Executive Action, scripted by Dalton
Trumbo (perhaps the most talented of the Hollywood Ten) and
released November +y thus coinciding with the tenth anniversary
of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Executive Action ad-
vances the hypothesis that a group of rich, right-wing Texans conspired
to arrange the murder of Americas thirty-fth President, headed by
former CIA agent James Farrington (Burt Lancaster), chilly ultra-
rightist ideologue Robert Foster (Robert Ryan) and crafty old oil baron
Harold Ferguson (Will Geer). This shady alliterative trio, ctitious
albeit symbolic, are appalled by the prospect of the Kennedy dynasty
occupying the White House for an entire generation ( John Kennedy
until +, Bobby Kennedy until +yy, Teddy Kennedy until +8j).
When, in June +, an associate predicts that over the next few months
President Kennedy will spearhead the drive for Civil Rights, champion
a nuclear-test-ban treaty and withdraw from Vietnam, in eect handing
Asia over to the Communists, Farrington and Foster begin to lay the
groundwork for Kennedys assassination. Ferguson is initially reluctant
to join them, and he is sceptical about the prospect of Asia being lost so
easily. The American public would never stand for that, he says. An-
other associate remarks: Come on, Harold. The American public will
stand for what it has to stand for. What its told to stand for. Or what its
educated to stand for.
Using a slide show to examine both successful and failed attempts on
the lives of US presidents, Farrington informs them: In Europe, heads
of state always die at the hands of conspirators. Our Presidents are
killed by madmen. The pattern is remarkably consistent . . . In no case
was the killer an expert marksman. In every case, the Secret Service
was unprepared. And in every case the assassin was a political fanatic
willing to die to get the President. Thus the plan is to engineer JFKs
death by conspiracy, and then blame it all on a lone nut. The fatal shots
will actually be red by three riemen (ex-CIA agents or anti-Castro
Cubans) who will catch the President in a triangulated range. Ferguson
is basically a hard-nosed pragmatist. I understand these things, he
says. I just dont like em. Theyre tolerable only if theyre necessary
+y:
and permissible only if they work. Gradually, however, he becomes
convinced of the necessity of their plan.
Foster is the most ruthless and Olympian of the conspirators, a white
supremacist with a Hitlerian agenda. He tells Farrington:
In a few decades, there will be seven billion human beings on this
planet. Most of them brown, yellow or black. All of them hungry
all of them determined to love, and swarm out of their breed-
ing-grounds into Europe and North America. Hence Vietnam.
An all-out eort there will give us control of South Asia for
decades to come; and with proper planning we can reduce the
population to ve hundred and fty million by the end of the
century. I know Ive seen the data.
We sound rather like gods reading the Doomsday Book, says Farring-
ton. Someone has to do it, Foster replies. Not only will the nations
aected be better o, but the techniques developed there can be used to
reduce our own excess population Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-
Americans, poverty-prone whites, and so forth.
Behind this crude Social Darwinian/Malthusian assessment, all that
is missing is the swastika. And what techniques is he talking about? No
one had heard of AIDS back in +y, but were the makers of this movie
suggesting that the US Government might be complicit in experi ments
which might have a lethal eect on millions of Americans?
Farringtons remark about the Doomsday Book hints that he is
neither as ruthless nor as fanatical as Foster; and, without doubt,
Foster picks up on this hesitancy. There is a clever inversion of screen
personalities at work here. In Lancasters and Ryans earlier screen
teamings, in the Westerns The Professionals (+) and Lawman (+y+),
Lancaster was the resolute, unstoppable protagonist and Ryans char-
acters were relatively weak gures. Here, Lancaster is the man with
doubts and Ryan is the true believer who will let nothing, including the
illusion of friendship, stand in his way. Every so often we have seen
Farrington taking tablets, but we are given no inkling of what his health
complaint might be. Still, he makes a fatal error when he tells Foster
that he intends that this plot against Kennedy should be his nal oper-
ation. Foster appears to be sympathetic, saying: We all have our failures
of nerve. Even this seemingly amiable response is signicant, however.
It shows Foster no longer believes that Farrington can be trusted.
The plan proceeds to its fateful conclusion. Kennedy is assassinated
and, two days later, as he is being transferred from jail, Lee Harvey
Oswald, here depicted as the perfect patsy, is gunned down by Jack
Ruby. Farrington, watching the shooting of Oswald on TV, is clad in a
dressing gown and looks decidedly unwell. Later that night, as Foster
and some of the other conspirators shoot pool, the telephone rings.
Foster instructs the caller: Hold the body there. Make arrangements in
the morning. He returns to the pool table, the other conspirators
obviously wondering who has died. Tersely, Foster informs them: James
Farrington. Heart attack. Parkland Hospital. (That same hospital,
coincidentally, to which both Kennedy and Oswald were admitted.)
And, as Foster takes his shot, a little smile curls on his face and we hear
the satis fying crack of one pool ball hitting another one more ball
pocketed, one more potential problem solved and in that one subtle
twitch of his lip, we just know that he has arranged his so-called friends
demise. The screen goes black, and it is then lled with the photographs
of eighteen real-life material witnesses who had died in the rst three
years and three months since John F. Kennedys murder only two of
them from natural causes. As Randy Edelmans haunting theme plays
in the background, the narrator informs us: An actuary, engaged by
the London Sunday Times, concluded that on November ::nd, +,
the odds against these witnesses being dead by February, +y, were
one hundred thousand trillion to one.
Executive Action is a well-made yet sadly underrated lm. It was not
a popular or critical success, and perhaps the impact of Kennedys
assassination was, after only ten years, still too raw and too recent to be
assessed coolly and dispassionately. It is also, it must be admitted, one
of the most depressing lms ever made. It merits revival, however,
making its point in under half the running time of Oliver Stones
better-known but seemingly interminable JFK (++). Executive Action
features newsreel footage of Kennedy, underscoring the poignancy of
his loss, but we are spared the teary-eyed histrionics that would later
characterize Kevin Costners performance as Jim Garrison. If Executive
Action belongs to any one actor, it is Robert Ryan. Ryan was dying of
cancer during the making of the lm, and he died before its release. It
was one of his last performances, and one of his nest. In one scene,
Farrington and Foster discuss last-minute arrangements before the
assassination. Foster, in a moment of melancholy which takes Farring-
ton by surprise, observes, Ah, well. Soon be over. Then therell be ,
+y
and he launches into a few lines from Richard II: nothing we can call
our own but death that small model of the barren earth, which serves
as paste and cover to our bones. For Gods sake, let us sit upon the
ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. On one level, this
implies that even Foster feels some regret for his part in the murder of
the President. Yet it is Robert Ryan, rather than the character of
Foster, who gives this scene its weight, depth and resonance.
No one could portray a bigoted heavy with the same intensity and
meanness as Robert Ryan. He was anti-Semitic in Crossre (+y),
which ran into trouble with the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, anti-Japanese in Bad Day at Black Rock (+j) and anti-Black
in Odds Against Tomorrow (+j); but Ryans performance as Foster sur-
passed all his previous prejudiced villains in intense, if quietly under-
stated, racial hatred. Yet, in real life, Robert Ryan was a passionate
liberal, a supporter of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,
and a member of the Congress of Racial Equality. He was also, during
the era of the blacklist, one of the most fearlessly outspoken critics of
the witch-hunts. Though never a star of the rst magnitude, Ryan
spoke out against McCarthyite excesses with no apparent concern for
potentially adverse professional consequences. When asked why he was
unafraid of the witch-hunters, he replied that he was a Catholic and an
ex-Marine, and he believed not even J. Edgar Hoover would tackle
that combination. Robert Ryan was a superb actor and a brave man.
Executive Action was his last monument in a ne if too frequently under -
appreciated career.
Alan J. Pakulas The Parallax View (+y) was another assassination-
themed conspiracy thriller and it picked up exactly where Executive
Action had left o. Specically, The Parallax View concerned the more-
than-coincidental demise of material witnesses to an assassination. US
Senator Charles Carroll (Bill Joyce) automatically has his sincere
patriotic credentials established not only by his last words (Sometimes
Ive been called too independent for my own good), but also by the (no
doubt deliberate) fact that he is named after one of the signatories of
the Declaration of Independence, Maryland delegate Charles Carroll
of Carrollton. When Senator Carroll is publicly gunned down on
Independence Day in a sequence strongly reminiscent of the murder
of Robert Kennedy, the ocial verdict, delivered by a seven-man
committee in a darkened chamber (clearly suggesting a Warren-style
Commission), is that the putative assassin had acted entirely alone,
+y
motivated by a misguided sense of patriotism and a psychotic desire for
public recognition. The tribunal proclaims that there is no evidence of
any wider conspiracy. No evidence whatsoever. Yet we, the audience,
have already seen a second gunman escape unnoticed.
Three years after Carrolls murder, six material witnesses have died.
Broadcaster Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), who was there that day, is
terried that her own days are numbered. She seeks help from an ex-
lover, journalist Joe Frady (Warren Beatty). Frady originally had his
suspicions, but he has come to accept the ocials verdict: Every time
you turned around, some nut was knockin o one of the best men in
the country.
However, shortly thereafter Lee is found dead, supposedly full of
drink and drugs. Joe decides to probe further. His investigations even-
tually lead to the shadowy Parallax Corporation. The most impressive
and disturbing scene in the entire lm is the Parallax visual test, in
which Joe is bombarded with a series of political, emotional, sexual and
violent images used to gauge ideological and psychopathic tendencies.
Joe attempts to inltrate the Parallax Corporation, having deduced,
+yj
The assassin of a Senator, about to fall to his death in Alan J. Pakulas classic paranoid
thriller The Parallax View (+y).
Whoevers behind this is in the business of recruiting assassins. Yet,
frankly, he is out of his league. He trails one of the Parallax thugs, only
to witness another political assassination. Mistaken for the killer, Joe
attempts to ee the scene and is blasted to death by a shotgun. The
movie ends with another seven-man committee in another darkened
chamber, declaring their verdict that Joe Frady had been obsessed with
the Carroll murder; and, believing that the presidential aspirant George
Hammond (Jim Davis, later Jock Ewing in the TV series Dallas) had
been involved in Carrolls death, Frady had acted alone in assassinating
Hammond.
+
Democratic debate is silenced as the committees
spokesman utters the lms last line: There will be no questions.
The Parallax View was a paradigm +yos conspiracy thriller, its
noirish gloom underscored by the chiaroscuro photography of Gordon
Willis (who conveyed the same sense of darkness, both visible and spiri -
tual, in The Godfather and, later, in Pakulas All the Presidents Men,
+y). The gnawing sense of paranoia was reinforced by an archetypal
+yos ending: the protagonist murdered and retroactively set up as a
fall guy. Yet Parallax was not quite as clever as it aspired to be. In cer-
tain respects, it is actually frustrating. Some of the action set-pieces (a
bar-room brawl, Frady stealing a police car, an explosion on a boat) seem
more like footage from a third-rate +yos TV cop show. Even more
annoying is the fact that, like Frady, we never get to piece the conspiracy
together. It is not clear whether Carroll and Hammond were liberals or
conservatives (as movie types, it is likely that Carroll was liberal and
Hammond conservative), so we are never sure why anyone should want
to kill them both; or who, in fact, paid for the bullets; or whether the
Parallax Corporation (creepily subtitled Division of Human Engineer-
ing) had its own overarching ideological agenda and was plotting to
put a particular politician in the White House; or if, instead, Parallax
was just a corporate collection of psychopathic hired guns working for
the highest bidder. Admittedly, however, some of the lms most
ardent champions might argue that all these unanswered questions were
integral contributions to both the paranoia and the sophistication of
the narrative.
Executive Action and The Parallax View were both awed but fasci-
nating. In any event, they were innitely superior to the last assassina-
tion-themed lm of the +yos, William Richerts Winter Kills (+y),
based on a novel by Richard Condon. This was a tawdry hotchpotch
with Je Bridges as the brother of a slain Kennedyesque president,
+y
searching for the true motivation behind his assassination. The
mastermind turns out to be the late Presidents own father (portrayed
in typically gargantuan fashion by John Huston). Implicitly a scathing
(and scurrilous) posthumous attack on Joseph P. Kennedy, Winter Kills
was a ludicrous anti-climax to the decade in which the conspiracy
thriller was at its peak. Not content to assert that Americans could no
longer trust big business or their own government, this star-studded
but inept piece of nonsense slyly suggested that, ultimately, they could
not even trust their own families. That is the central premise of many
classical tragedies, but, in the +yos, the Godfather epics did it better.
Winter Kills aspired to a satirical swipe at US power structures, but it
ended by being inconsequential.
The Parallax View was, of course, not just an assassination movie,
but also a Watergate-era movie. The spectre of Watergate pervaded
many of the nest thrillers of the +yos. In Francis Ford Coppolas The
Conversation (+y), an audio-surveillance expert (Gene Hackman)
eavesdrops on two lovers and becomes convinced that murder is on the
cards. The wire-tapper is drawn into the web of intrigue but is ulti-
mately unable to prevent the murder yet it is not the victim he
expected. The plot twist hinges on the inection of a single word (Hed
kill us if he got the chance). The movie ends with Hackman lost, lonely
and demented, having stripped his own apartment to shreds for fear
that he, too, is being bugged. In Roman Polanskis Chinatown (+y), a
private eye ( Jack Nicholson) investigates a water commissioners death
in late +os Los Angeles. The motive is revealed as a high-stakes utili -
ties scam, in which powerful businessmen plan to divert Los Angeless
precious water supply into their own desert lands. The mastermind
behind the conspiracy is the dead mans business partner and father-in-
law, Noah Cross (John Huston), the most monstrous gure in the con-
spiracy sub-genre since Eleanor Shaw Iselin (and, like her, a practitioner
of parentchild incest). Both Peter Finch in Sidney Lumets Network
(+y) and Jack Lemmon in James Bridgess The China Syndrome
(+y) played faithful company men whose crises of conscience
prompt them to expose nefarious corporate practices in TV broadcast-
ing and the nuclear industry, respectively. For each, the decision proves
fatal. Although these movies stressed corporate treachery rather than
explicitly political themes, they were part of that same downbeat,
paranoia-drenched conspiracy cycle so prominent in American lms of
the (post-)Watergate era.
+yy
Watergate certainly made its mark in mid-+yos political lms. The
most obvious instance was, of course, All the Presidents Men (see the
section on Richard Nixon in chapter Three). Still, another Robert Red-
ford lm addressed the disturbing hypothesis of extra-legal operations
conducted by a government within the government. In Sydney Pol-
lacks Three Days of the Condor (+yj), Redfords Joe Turner is a CIA
reader-researcher who has narrowly escaped being murdered along with
his colleagues. He appeals to his superiors to bring him in, but it soon
becomes apparent that they would sooner the assassin had achieved a
clean sweep. Turner is pursued by the professional killer Joubert (Max
von Sydow) the name conjures up memories of Inspector Javert, Jean
Valjeans dogged nemesis in Victor Hugos Les Misrables. Meanwhile,
the CIAs morally compromised role in mid-+yos American politics is
highlighted during an exchange between the New York oces Deputy
Director Higgins (Cli Robertson, PT s Jack Kennedy and The Best
Mans Joe Cantwell) and his superior, Mr Wabash ( John Houseman).
Wabash tells Higgins that his own career in American intelligence goes
right back to ten years after the Great War, as we used to call it. Before
we knew enough to number them. Higgins asks: You miss that kind of
action, sir? Wabash responds: No. I miss that kind of clarity.
Finally, Turner perceives the sordid truth: This whole damn thing
was about oil, wasnt it? In his routine reading, he had unwittingly
stumbled across the scenario for an unauthorized CIA operation in the
Middle East. He had led a report and thus had inadvertently alerted
the chief perpetrator, who had reacted to this sudden threat to his
operation by ordering the massacre in Turners oce. This high-ranking
rogue operative is subsequently killed by Joubert, a consummate pro-
fessional who would have been at home in the Parallax Corporation.
Joubert is a freelance assassin, and his re-employment by the CIA to
neutralize their embarrassment thus supersedes and nullies that pre-
vious assignment to murder Turner. Joubert actually warns Turner
about future attempts to kill him, and suggests that he seek refuge in
Europe. Our All-American hero responds: I was born in the United
States, Joubert. I miss it when Im away too long. Turner chooses to
remain in America and risk being murdered rather than live as a man
without a country.
Yet Turners last confrontation is with Higgins, who admits that part
of the CIAs responsibility is to consider logistical possibilities, for
example, in the event of an invasion of the Middle East. The now -
+y8
deceased rogue agent had intended to realize the game in a renegade
operation. Higgins tells Turner: Fact is, there was nothing wrong with
the plan. Oh, the plan was all right. The plan would have worked.
Turners reply is heavy with contemporary resonance, so soon after
Watergate: Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting
caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth? But Higginss
rationale is coldly pragmatic, and eerily prescient of that Project for
the New American Century agenda championed by neo-conservatives
a generation later. The seeds of the current tragedy in Iraq were anti -
cipated by this exchange from a lm made in +yj:
HIGGINS: Its simple economics. Today its oil, right? In ten or
fteen years, food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now,
what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
TURNER: Ask them.
HIGGINS: Not now. Then. Ask them when theyre running out.
Ask them when theres no heat in their homes and theyre cold.
Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people whove
never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know some-
thing? They wont want us to ask them. Theyll just want us to get
it for them.
Turner has given the whole story to the New York Times. You poor
dumb son-of-a-bitch, says Higgins. Youve done more damage than
you know. However, the truth-seeker and truth-teller, however, is likely
to be outanked by the master of both institutional and geopolitical
pragmatism, and the lm ends on an uncertain and literally discordant
note, haunted by Higginss condent query: Hey, Turner how do you
know theyll print it?
General Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) is another truth-seeker and
truth-teller. The protagonist of Robert Aldrichs Twilights Last Gleam-
ing (+yy) is surely one of the strangest heroes ever to feature in a
mainstream American movie. Five years as a prisoner of the Viet Cong
radicalized Dells perception of the US Governments conduct of the
Vietnam War. Following his return to America, Dells outspoken criti-
cism of this policy led to him being framed by the military for murder
and then railroaded into prison. Dell escapes, hijacks a Strategic Air
Command silo in Montana and presents his demands to the US Govern-
ment: +o million dollars; passage out of the country on Air Force One,
+y
with the President as hostage; and, most crucially, full public disclosure
of a secret National Security Council document revealing the true
rationale behind Americas involvement in Vietnam (a ctional equi -
valent of the Pentagon Papers). According to Twilights Last Gleaming,
America had waged war in Vietnam to prove to the Soviets that, no
matter how terrible, bloody and protracted the conict might become,
the United States would have the guts and the will to see it through.
Americas involvement in Vietnam was thus both a war of attrition and
a Pyrrhic exercise in global realpolitik. If his demands are not met, Dell
will launch the nine Titan missiles in the silo against Russia, thus trig-
gering World War III.
Dell is essentially an honest man, but his obsessive passion for the
truth has transformed him from a misguided idealist into an unbalanced
fanatic. Remember the famous justication in the Vietnam War, It
became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it? That is the
mentality Dell is railing against, but it is also the solution he is propos-
ing. If the truth is not permitted to set the world free, then the world
will be cleansed in a nuclear inferno. Yet, were it not for this threat,
Dell might even be considered an innocent abroad. While it certainly
stretches credibility to believe that a senior military ocer who had
been imprisoned by the Viet Cong could remain so nave about human
nature, with his faith in the all-vanquishing power of truth, Dell is a
blood-brother to Jeerson Smith.
Dells right-hand man in this doomed quest is fellow escapee Willis
Powell (Paul Wineld), a Black convict who tells the General: For a
man that broke out of the joint to steal ten million dollars, you sure talk
a lot about God and Country. Powell is hard-nosed and streetwise, and
his life experience has left him unable to relate to the patriotic, almost
evangelical sense of mission that motivates Dell. Twilights Last Gleam-
ing is the tragedy of an idealist surrounded by pragmatists. The real
villain is the most pragmatic character of all, CINSAC (Commander-
in-Chief of Strategic Air Command) General Martin MacKenzie
(Richard Widmark). In + Lancasters Air Force General in Seven
Days in May was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was coldly pre-
pared to subvert and overthrow the US Government for self-aggran-
dizement. In James B. Harriss The Bedford Incident (+j), Widmarks
Naval Captains political obsessions provoked a nuclear catastrophe. But
in Twilights Last Gleaming, the earlier roles of these real-life liberals
were reversed, with Widmark now representing the power of the
+8o
Pentagon and Lancaster playing the fanatic with his nger on the
nuclear trigger. MacKenzie calls his renegade ex-colleague a lunatic
son-of-a-bitch. Yet Dells response suggests a history of personal
betrayal as well as political grievance:
Lunatic, in my book, is dened as someone who buries the truth.
I intend to hold it up to the world and let them see what its
really like, for a change . . . You had your chance. A hundred times
I begged you to go upstairs to tell the truth but, No. You sent
my memos to the shredder, and when I wouldnt trade what I
believed in for a star, you sent me to the shredder.
In a +jos or early +os lm, MacKenzie would have been the hero:
the sane, responsible soldier who must defuse the crisis. Yet the decid-
edly left-wing viewpoint of Twilights Last Gleaming and of star Lan-
caster and director Aldrich meant that the US military establishment
was nothing less than the enemy in this particular narrative. The full
extent of MacKenzies treachery will only become apparent in the last
few minutes of the lm. All Dell is looking for is one honest man who
will listen to him, believe him and tell the truth to the American
people. While Dell retains that almost childlike, quasi-redemptive faith,
he knows that MacKenzie is not a man to be trusted.
Dells last, best hope is the incumbent president, David Stevens
(Charles Durning), a practical, plain-speaking man. When the Secre-
tary of State (Joseph Cotten) protests, The United States government
cant do business with murderers, Stevens shrewdly responds: Thats
not true, Arthur, and it never has been true. When its to our advan-
tage, we have the most cordial relations with a wide variety of undesir-
ables. By telephone link-up, Dell states his case to the President: I
believe the time has come for you to restore the condence of the Ameri-
can people in their government by disclosing the true reasons why
this country was made to endure a war that cost over fty thousand
American lives, and twenty times that many South-east Asians, all for
nothing. Stevens observes: With that rhetoric, he could be elected
Governor in ten States.
As Dell had hoped, Stevens is horried by the contents of NSC docu-
ment yj. Several of his principal advisers are adamant that the truth
cannot be disclosed. Stevens tries to negotiate with Dell, now oering
million dollars and guaranteeing safe transit to any country in the
+8+
world. But when Stevens baulks at going public with NSC document
yj, Dell asserts his position frankly and unequivocally in a language
which, three decades later, has tragically lost none of its pertinence:
The doctrine of presidential credibility, by which I mean the
licence to lie at home and abroad, killed hundreds of thousands
of people in a war that should never have been fought. This doc-
trine of credibility single-handedly destroyed the real credibility of
our country. Instead of making us stronger, it presented us as
incompetent, indecisive, helpless, to say nothing of dishonest. Mr
President, the devastation of Indochina, the countless deaths and
suerings of an innite number of people, the dissent and unrest
of our own people here at home These events, born out of a
policy of secrecy, were the result of the treacherous doctrine of
credibility. I insist that the time is past due to eradicate this poison,
which is killing our people and our country . . . [T]he mothers
and fathers of boys who died for credibility are gonna rise up in
fury. This purge is unavoidable, and it must come now, before its
too late. Im sorry, Mr President, but this item is non-negotiable.
Back in the White House, Stevens and his advisers discuss the
controversial NSC document yj, in which a previous, unnamed
president recognized that the objective of the war in Vietnam was to
demonstrate to the Russians a brutal national will. That we have the
willingness to inict and suer untold punishment. And, no matter
what the cost in American blood, we would perpetuate a theatrical holo-
caust. Because nuclear war was unthinkable, Stevenss advisers explain,
the Soviets had to be convinced that America would never inch from
limited warfare. Now, ultimately, the choice facing Stevens is whether
America should enjoy open government or continue to be run by the
Imperial Presidency and the National Security state. Stevens must go
to Montana to meet Dell. The authorities plan to kill Dell, but Stevens
is also fearful for his own life. He, too, wants the American people to be
told the truth. In the event of his death, Stevens wants Secretary of
Defence Zachariah Guthrie (Melvyn Douglas) to go on television to
tell the truth about document yj. Guthrie gives him his word of
honour. The President and his entourage y to Montana.
At the silo, Dell and Powell await the Presidents arrival. A throw-
away line from Powell about the Air Force and the Maa being all the
+8:
same company implies, as clearly as the Godfather movies, that
government and organized crime are in bed together. Moments later,
Powell gives Dell a hard lesson in the realities of power politics:
POWELL: We are up against the real power! Man, dont you under-
stand? You are messin with the brains of this country.
DELL: But were not going out there alone. The Presidentll be
right between us!
POWELL: You really are pitiful.
DELL: What the hell are you trying to say?
POWELL: Im saying they do not give a shit about the President of
the United States. They will kill us all before they let that poor
bastard make that speech on television. Man, dont you know they
will never let him blow their gig! You declared war. But they got the
muscle and they are gonna keep it! And Stevens is expendable.
Dell realizes that Powell is right, so he decides to launch the nine
Titans, anyway. But he needs Powell to turn the second key simult -
aneously, and Powell will not do it. When Dell says, They have no
intentions of honouring their commitments, Powell calmly, wearily
tells him: Grow up, General. Nobody honours nothin. Thats no
reason to blow up the whole world. Their only hope now is to escape
with the President as their hostage on board Air Force One. Stevens
arrives and ventures into the silo to meet Dell and Powell and agrees to
disclose document yj. As they leave the silo, Dell tells Stevens: Id
like you to know, sir, for the rst time since Nam, I feel Ive really
come home.
Yet it is Powell, the hard-bitten realist with no political ideals or
illusions, who is proved tragically correct. As the three make for Air
Force One, they are all gunned down. Dell and Powell are killed
instantly. Stevens lies dying, and most of the military brass stand idly
on the tarmac. MacKenzies nal order to the snipers certainly sup-
ports the conclusion that Stevens has been killed deliberately. And there
is one last moment of ambiguity. With his dying breath, Stevens asks
Guthrie if he will keep his word and go on television to tell the
American people about document yj. He dies with his question
unanswered, and Guthrie walks away in silence probably to remain
silent. Again, as with several of the other great +yos conspiracy
movies, it is a bleak, fatalistic ending.
+8
In a decade in which the genre was dominated by conspiracy sce-
narios relating to assassinations or Watergate, Twilights Last Gleaming
chose to address the Vietnam War, that other great corrosive political
issue of recent American history, not only as a tragedy but as both a
conspiracy and an atrocity. Director Robert Aldrich had long stood on
the liberal to moderate left of the political spectrum.
:
The presence of
Burt Lancaster gave the lm an additional iconographic weight, in-
evitably evoking memories of Seven Days in May. Seven Days, at the
dawn of the Vietnam era, had sounded a warning about the military-in-
dustrial complex as a potential threat to the democratic process.
Twilights Last Gleaming, lmed after the war in Vietnam had been at
long last lost, asserted that while the nation had been mired for a decade
in an unwinnable conict overseas, the military had achieved this
sinister goal at home by the back door. Twilights Last Gleaming was an
uneasy mix of techno-thriller and left-wing political discourse. At the
box oce, audiences just did not want to know. But it was an adult,
sophisticated and valiant movie at a time when Hollywood cinema was
just about to become dominated by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas
and juvenilia. Another American tragedy.
The +yos was the golden age of the political conspiracy lm. In
the +8os, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, politically themed
movies tended to be coloured by chauvinism rather than paranoia, al-
though the two coexisted uneasily in John Miliuss Red Dawn (+8). It
was only in ++ that paranoia and conspiracy eetingly resumed their
centrality within the political genre, as Oliver Stones JFK outlined a
conspiracy involving anti-Castro Cubans, the military-industrial com-
plex and even (implicitly) Lyndon Johnson in the assassination of John
Kennedy. Yet the mythic momentum of Stones lm was compromised
by his fast-and-loose conation of ctional supposition with the docu -
mentary record.
Conspiracy movies enjoyed a brief resurgence in the late +os.
Several of these were essentially formulaic thrillers (Clint Eastwoods
Absolute Power, Richard Donners Conspiracy Theory and Dwight H.
Littles Murder at , all +y, and Tony Scotts Enemy of the State,
+8). Both Absolute Power and Enemy of the State allowed Gene
Hackman to deliver variations on previous performances. In Roger
Donaldsons No Way Out (+8y), Hackman had played a lascivious and
brutal Secretary of Defense frantically trying to cover up the murder of
his mistress. As the US President in Absolute Power, Hackman was again
+8
hell-bent on concealing the facts behind his mistresss violent demise.
By the same token, his maestro of surveillance in Enemy of the State is
an older, wiser, more psychologically balanced version of his lone and
lonely wire-tapper from Francis Ford Coppolas The Conversation.
A few others, while resonant in their own right, harked back in theme
and/or style to classics from earlier times. Edward Zwicks The Siege
(+8) and Mark Pellingtons Arlington Road (+), lmed after
Oklahoma City but before /++, addressed the threat of terrorism on
American soil.
In The Siege, the seizure of a Bin Laden-type sheikh (presumably
by the US) prompts Middle Eastern militants to demand his release.
When their demands are not met, they wage an ever-escalating terror-
ist campaign against New York. From our own post-/++ perspective,
The Siege is tragically, disturbingly prescient. Amid mounting hysteria,
there comes the clamour for martial law, but General William Devereaux
(Bruce Willis) urges restraint: The Army is a broad sword, not a scalpel.
Trust me, Senator, you do not want the Army in an American city . . .
No card-carrying member of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties
Union] is more dead set against it than I am. Which is why I urge you
I implore you do not consider this as an option.
He sounds as responsible and as dedicated to civilian control as
Jiggs Casey in Seven Days in May and Fail-Safes Generals Black and
Bogan. So if martial law becomes necessary, surely Devereaux is pre-
cisely the type of soldier who should be entrusted with command? That
is the perception he is counting on, because, secretly, he is cut from the
same cloth as General Scott in Seven Days in May. Devereaux had
arranged the abduction of the sheikh in a rogue operation and he has
been holding him incommunicado while the situation deteriorates. In
due course, he is assigned to enforce martial law (as he had hoped all
along); and the crackdown begins. Arab-Americans are indiscriminately
+8j
Bruce Willis strays
into Seven Days
in May territory
as the self-serving
General Devereaux
of Edward Zwicks
The Siege (+8).
rounded up and placed in detention camps behind barbed wire.
Devereaux even considers the torture and murder of a terrorist suspect
to be within his purview. His plans are nally derailed when FBI agent
Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) challenges him directly. In an
implausible climactic scene FBI agents and US soldiers face each other
with guns drawn, poised for a blood-bath, which is only averted
because Devereaux blinks rst (Hubbard calls his blu: Make mur -
derers out of these young kids). Outside, Americans of every colour
and creed demonstrate against Devereauxs heavy-handed policies,
chanting No Fear! and denouncing the blanket demonization of
innocent citizens. The Siege was a pre-/++, pre-Patriot Act warning
that terrorism does not justify all-powerful government.
Despite its terrifying premise, The Siege concludes with US demo -
cracy intact and the natural order restored, an optimistic resoution rem-
i niscent of several of the early +os classics. Yet Arlington Road hurtled
relentlessly towards a far bleaker ending. History professor Michael
Faraday ( Je Bridges) befriends new neighbours Oliver and Cheryl
Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) after he comes to the aid of their
son, who has been badly injured while playing with reworks. Faraday
is still trying to recover from the death of his wife, an FBI agent killed
during a botched operation on an anti-government activists property
in Copper Creek, West Virginia (modelled on the tragic siege at Ruby
Ridge, Idaho, in August +:).
This tragedy haunts his life and his work. Faraday teaches a course
on domestic terrorism at Washington University. In one sequence, he
takes his students on a eld trip to the scene of his wifes death, where
he displays signs of emotional disturbance. He also holds forth on the
recent bombing of a government building in St Louis clearly a paral -
lel for the real-life atrocity in Oklahoma City on + April +j. Yet he
doubts that the mist blamed for St Louis acted alone, even though that
was the ocial government verdict. Faraday begins to seem like an ob-
sessive; and, when a series of circumstantial irregularities convince him
that Oliver Lang is actually an ultra-rightist involved in a bomb plot,
neither his girlfriend nor his late wifes partner at the Bureau are in-
clined to believe him. This reluctance ultimately proves a fatal mistake
for them both. Faraday is on the right track; but, like the similarly
named Frady in The Parallax View, he is in over his head and no
match for Oliver Lang and his associates. Faraday, increasingly manic
and dishevelled, races frantically to the FBI headquarters to try to
+8
prevent a catastrophic explosion, but he has been tricked. The bomb is
actually in the car he has been driving. Faraday is one of almost two
hundred people killed in the blast and, like Joe Frady in The Parallax
View, he is judged to be the lone nut perpetrator. News reports feature
interviews with Faradays ex-students, who attest to his obsessive,
unstable behaviour. Back on Arlington Road, the Langs put their house
up for sale and await relocation to another city to plan for the right-
wing undergrounds next target. The ending is as grim and as relent-
lessly fatalistic as any of the conspiracy thrillers of the Watergate era.
The premise of The Siege harked back to the attempted military
coup of Seven Days in May in +. The ironic, sinister ending of
Arlington Road recalled the paranoia and hopelessness of The Parallax
View in +y. Yet the most sophisticated conspiracy lm of the late
+os was not a thriller with its roots in bygone decades, but a razor-
sharp satire, which is likely to become ever more timely as the twenty-
rst century progresses.
Barry Levinsons Wag the Dog (+y) was based on Larry Beinharts
+ novel American Hero, which hypothesized that the ++ Gulf War
was manufactured to bolster George H. W. Bushs ratings in the polls.
By +y even that issue appeared pass (albeit temporarily). Wag the
Dog was contemporary with a vengeance. The principal photography
was completed in : days, with the crisis facing the White House
changed from an uncharismatic, ineectual president to one too charis-
matic for his own good. As a sex scandal threatens the (ctional)
Presidents re-election, a spin-doctor enrols a Hollywood producer to
manufacture the illusion of a foreign crisis and a brief but glorious war,
hence diverting attention from the illicit liaison and boosting the
embattled President to victory.
Wag the Dog was released as the Lewinsky scandal began to break
(and, suddenly, Bill Clinton was threatening to send US warships into
the Persian Gulf ). The photograph of Wag the Dogs president greet-
ing the Firey Girl, with whom he has been accused of sexual impro-
prieties, is posed to evoke that famous footage of Clinton embracing
Monica Lewinsky. But this is, above all, a lm about power retained by
a conspiracy of illusion.
Top White House troubleshooter Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro)
enlists the aid of movie producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Homan) to
salvage the Presidents faltering, scandal-plagued re-election campaign.
Motss, a consummate showman, intuits that nothing gets the American
+8y
+88
people rallying round the ag faster than a war. He conceives of a
crisis, completely confected and conveyed by the apparatus of Hol-
lywood. Rumours are planted of a volatile situation in Albania. Why
Albania? Why not? The brave peasant girl eeing from the bombs
annihilating her village is in fact an aspiring actress (Kirsten Dunst),
suitably costumed and screaming her way through a studio set. The
devastated village in the background is added courtesy of computer-
generated imagery. The cat she clutches as she runs for cover is a CGI
gment, superimposed over a bag of potato chips.
Motss sets trusted showbiz contacts to work on the Albanian war
phenomenon. Country singer Johnny Dean (Willie Nelson), his very
name an echo of the Watergate era, composes patriotic, sentimental and
uplifting songs appropriate for every twist of the drama. The Fad
King (Denis Leary) dreams up commercial spin-os related to the
war. But when the Presidents opponent gets wind of the fact that the
crisis is faked, he outanks Breans team by unilaterally announcing an
end to the hostilities. Suddenly, with the election still at stake, they need
a second act. The war is over, but now Brean and Motss concoct a
story of a heroic American soldier left behind, discarded like an old
shoe. So they must nd a hero who might conceivably have been
nicknamed Old Shoe, on account of his dependability; and Sergeant
William Schumann (Woody Harrelson) sounds ideal until he is
An actress (Kirsten Dunst) and a bag of potato chips about to be transformed into
a refugee girl and her cat for the sake of a fabricated war, with Dustin Homan as
the Hollywood master of illusion in Barry Levinsons brilliantly scathing Wag the
Dog (+y).
released into their custody, and they learn he is a psychopath with a
penchant for rape, which eventually gets him killed. Now they need a
third act, so they contrive a heros funeral, complete with a ctitious
regiment and the rousing Ballad of the o (its theme clearly derived
from The Ballad of the Green Berets). The Presidents approval rat-
ings are sky-high and the election is in the bag, but Motss is unhappy.
Despite Breans constant warnings that their masterpiece of illusion
must forever remain top secret, Motss wants public credit for this, his
best-ever work. Brean is compelled to have Motss disposed of, exactly
as Foster had taken care of James Farrington in Executive Action, with
a conveniently arranged heart attack.
Just over a year after Wag the Dogs release, America was at war in
Kosovo. And, as the twentieth century drew to its close, the United
States stood unsuspecting before the abyss of other tumultuous events.
The conspiracy sub-genre will surely spawn countless scenarios for the
future. So far, however, only a few lms of note have sought to come to
grips with the milieu of American politics in the early twenty-rst
century a political landscape so recently yet so signicantly altered.
+8
+o
Political lms have, occasionally, espoused an ethos that anticipates
political actuality in American society. For example, JFK (++) and
Bob Roberts (+:) were essentially Clinton-era lms made before Bill
Clinton was elected President. Similarly, the rst lm of the George
W. Bush era preceded his tenure of the White House by more than a
year and preceded his election to the presidency by ve. Rod Luries
Deterrence received its world premiere in Toronto on +o September
+, exactly two years and one day before /++, and it reads like a neo-
conservatives most fervent fantasy. Walter Emerson (Kevin Pollak) is
an unelected President, rst appointed to the vice-presidency and then
succeeding to the Oval Oce on the death of his predecessor. Emerson
and his entourage are stranded at a diner in Colorado during a snow-
storm. Suddenly, an already tense international situation between the
US and North Korea is further complicated when Iraq (led by Saddam
Husseins son) reinvades Kuwait, killing American soldiers. Emerson
issues an ultimatum. Unless the Iraqis withdraw and surrender their
weapons of mass destruction, he will drop a nuclear warhead on Bagh-
dad. While the claustrophobic immediacy of the crisis recalls Fail-Safe,
this President is no Henry Fonda. As the clock ticks down towards the
deadline, Emerson seems perfectly willing and eager to drop the bomb
on Baghdad; and, in the end, he does. Yet there is no global nuclear
conagration, for Emerson has known all along that the atomic weapons
on which Iraq had been relying were defective and thus harmless.
Emersons rationale is pre-emptive defence but it sounds more like
mass murder, committed with impunity. Deterrence is a truly loathsome
little lm, apparently indierent to any moral boundaries which distin-
guish national and global security from war crimes.
Conclusion
Twilights Last Gleaming?
This used to be a helluva good country. I cant understand whats gone
wrong with it.
George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in Easy Rider (directed by Dennis Hopper, +)
++
The real-life events of the rst few years of the twenty-rst century
might well have strained the imaginative power of the most ambitious
yarn-spinner. But the political genre had already foretold several of the
most fantastic developments of our era. When the presidential election
of :ooo degenerated into a protracted wrangle over the legitimacy of
hanging chads, who remembered Daniel Manns Ada (++), in which a
slippery Southern politico attempted to subvert the will of the people
by rigging voting machines? When thousands of innocents were slaugh-
tered on /++ and the Patriot Act (already in the pipeline) was passed
soon thereafter, that ill-conceived legislation ignored the message of
Edward Zwicks grimly prophetic The Siege: that the liberties of law-
abiding citizens are not safeguarded by being curtailed. George W.
Bushs glib conation of Iraq with al-Qaeda implied Iraqi responsi -
bility for /++, thus recalling the purposely stage-managed conict of
Wag the Dog and also those erroneous verdicts of The Parallax View
and Arlington Road, which permitted the true perpetrators to escape
unpunished. When Bush hectored the world into war on the speciously
urgent pretext of weapons of mass destruction, disgracefully abetted in
this atrocity by his fawning acolyte in Downing Street, this was a du-
plicity as shameless as Walter Emersons in Deterrence. The hubris per-
vading current US policy in the Middle East was evident as far back as
+yj, courtesy of Three Days of the Condor, while the unaccountability
of self-styled Olympians had been a major concern of Executive Action
and Twilights Last Gleaming. As the conicts in Afghanistan and Iraq
drag on with no end in sight, military veterans and anti-war activists of
the Vietnam era might reect sceptically that they have heard all the
politicians rhetoric before. Certainly, political movies have predicted
all these nightmare scenarios before.
Many of the greatest American political lms have carried a warn-
ing: to beware those self-righteous, self-proclaimed messiahs who pos-
ture as saviours of the Republic all the while covertly undermining its
liberties. Meet John Does D. B. Norton, Willie Stark, Lonesome
Rhodes, Eleanor and John Iselin, General James Mattoon Scott, Joe
Cantwell, WUSAs Matthew Bingamon, The Dead Zones Greg Still-
son, and Bob Roberts have all stalked the genre as they have stalked
these pages each of them a celluloid spectre made esh, warning
Americans to be wary of fanatical super-patriots and to look instead for
the agendas beneath all the ag-waving. In view of that strong thread
running through the genre, perhaps a man who attained the presidency
+:
by dubious means, whose complacency resulted in a national tragedy,
whose subsequent waving of the bloody shirt provoked an unjustiable
war, and whose Patriot Act still threatens the hard-won liberties of
Americans perhaps such a man was made to order for the political
lm. Conceivably, this was exactly the kind of politician the genre had
been sounding warning bells about since the +os.
Indeed, the historian Robert S. McElvaine has even posted an arti-
cle on the OpEdNews website which draws distinct, authoritarian and
extrtemely unfavourable parallels between George W. Bush and his
lmic predecessor, the messianic and dictatorial President Judd Ham-
mond (Walter Huston) in Gregory La Cavas Gabriel Over the White
House (+).
+
However, I would suggest that Bill Russells condemna-
tion of Joe Cantwell at the end of The Best Man seems particularly re-
verberant in this instance: no sense of responsibility toward anybody
or anything. And that is a tragedy in a man and it is a disaster in a
President.
As the election of :oo loomed, several movie-makers seemed to
think so. The political lms of :oo represented the most conscious,
concerted eort to inuence the outcome of a presidential election since
Seven Days in May, The Best Man, Dr Strangelove and Fail-Safe had
pitched in for Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater in +.
At rst blush, Niels Muellers The Assassination of Richard Nixon was
not about politics at all. Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn) is a latter-day Willy
Loman, a perennial striver whose idealism and integrity are sharply at
odds with the compromises and demands of his job as a salesman. As
his life goes into meltdown he is rejected by his estranged wife and
frustrated in his desire to become an independent entrepreneur Bicke
decides someone has to pay for the death of his American Dream. It is
+y, and he hijacks a plane with the intention of crashing it into the
White House and killing President Richard Nixon. This was a true
story, largely forgotten because the attempt had failed, although direc-
tor Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader possibly had Bicke
in mind when they christened Taxi Drivers anti-hero and would-be
assassin Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). In the post-/++ era, however,
this scenario of a mist attempting to crash a plane into the White
House inevitably had a disturbing contemporary resonance.
Michael Moores Fahrenheit / raised a multitude of questions
about George W. Bushs victory in :ooo, the governmental incompe-
tence that resulted in /++, the Bush familys intricate, long-term
+
relationship with Middle Eastern dynasties, the rush to war in Iraq, and
the stealthy haemorrhaging of civil liberties under the USA Patriot Act.
Bush partisans naturally condemned Fahrenheit /, but Moores docu-
mentary enjoyed a box-oce success usually reserved for feature lms.
Fahrenheit / was polished, entertaining and informative without
being preachy, and it enjoyed worldwide popularity; but it was still
not enough to stop Bush winning the White House in :oo this time,
ostensibly, in his own right.
John Sayless Silver City was an all-star political melodrama which
could not quite decide if it was a satire or a thriller. A photo-op for
Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) is
thrown into disarray due to the sudden appearance of a corpse. Danny
OBrien (Danny Huston), a former radical journalist turned investiga-
tor, is hired by the Pilager dynasty to protect their interests, but he
begins nosing around and gradually he uncovers a complex web of
crooked politicians, lucrative land developments, illegal immigrants and
environmental abuse. It suggested a combination of Roman Polanskis
Chinatown (+y) and Sayless own Lone Star (+). The casting rein-
forced the connection to those lms. Both Cooper and Kris Kristoer-
son had appeared in Lone Star, and there was certainly a delicious
iconographic irony in the fact that the hero probing this intricate
utilities-cum-environmental scam in Silver City was portrayed by the
real-life son of John Huston, who as Noah Cross had been the mon-
strous mastermind behind a similar conspiracy in Chinatown.
Yet as a thriller, Silver City had too many irons in the re. It had
greater potential as a satire. The Pilager dynasty (a wonderful name,
suggestive of ruthless plunderers) is clearly meant to evoke the
Bushes. Dickies father, Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy), is not an
Samuel J. Bicke
(Sean Penn)
reaches the end of
the line in Niels
Muellers The
Assassination of
Richard Nixon
(:oo).
+
ex-President but a senator. Murphy had played the third-party candi-
date Hal Phillip Walkers advance man in Robert Altmans Nashville
(+yj) and presidential hopeful Jack Tanner in Altmans +88 TV
mocku mentary Tanner . Here he is an elder statesman with no illus -
ions about his sons intelligence, but Dickie is bolstered by corporate
backers who are delighted that he is so user-friendly. Richard Drey-
fusss bald, bespectacled, intense campaign supremo Chuck Raven is,
even down to his name, clearly meant to suggest George W. Bushs top
political strategist, Karl Rove. Inevitably, however, it will be Chris
Coopers performance as Dickie Pilager that stays in the memory. A
vacuous mouthpiece for big business and right-wing platitudes, Dickie
Pilager can hardly string a sentence together without nding both feet
in his mouth. Silver Citys sidelong swipes at Dickie Pilagers real-life
counterpart struck their target, but the overall tale of corporate intrigue
and environmental devastation ultimately lacked clarity. Nevertheless,
the nal shot of the movie was grimly, grotesquely ironic. America the
Beautiful swells on the soundtrack, and we are presented with the ulti -
mate casualties of the Pilagers Silver City: the silver corpses of thou-
sands of sh, glittering lifelessly atop the water, as the lyrics resonate,
And crowned thy good with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea.
Jonathan Demmes The Manchurian Candidate was not simply a
remake of John Frankenheimers +: masterpiece, but an updated
version which addressed new political realities. Instead of Korea, the ill-
fated patrol is now captured and brainwashed during the Gulf War of
++. This is curiously apposite, since the great tragedy of +os Ameri-
ca became conict in Asia, whereas the great tragedy of early twenty-
rst-century America has become the war in the Middle East. Denzel
Washington plays Bennett Marco, the old Frank Sinatra role. He helps
Chris Coopers
second-generation
politico and
Richard Dreyfusss
tough campaign
manager in John
Sayless Silver
City (:oo) are
generally thought
to have been based
on George W.
Bush and Karl
Rove respectively.
rescue America from conspirators, as he had in Alan J. Pakulas The
Pelican Brief (+) and Edward Zwicks The Siege (+8). In this same
context, it is worth noting that another Black actor, Forest Whitaker,
played the Kirk Douglas role in the inferior TV remake of Seven Days
in May, Jonathan Darbys The Enemy Within (+). These actors tted
eortlessly into roles previously essayed by Caucasian stars. Signi -
ficantly, African-American patriotism is regularly emphasized by hav-
ing Black characters at the forefront of the struggle to save the Republic
from sinister plotters; they are rarely, if ever, cast on the side of the
conspirators.
Liev Schreiber plays Raymond Shaw with the same chilly precision
that Laurence Harvey brought to the role and he even looks eerily like
Harvey. Yet, without doubt, the most electrifying performance comes
from Meryl Streep as Eleanor Shaw: one scary mother, and one with
particular resonance for :oo. Unlike Angela Lansbury in the original
lm, rather than lurking behind the throne, this Eleanor has thrust her-
self into the political limelight. A ferociously gutsy Senator (part Hillary
Clinton?) who has fortied her power base via a shrewd political mar-
riage (part Teresa Heinz Kerry?), Eleanor is also Jocasta to Raymonds
Oedipus. Despite such nuances, as with Fahrenheit / and Silver City,
this new Manchurian Candidate was a vote against the present incum-
bent. Senator Thomas Jordan ( Jon Voight) is here the liberal choice for
vice-president (and, like the Democratic nominee of :oo, John Kerry,
a genuine war hero). Raymond Shaw, in this remake elevated to Con-
gressional status, is the preferred VP candidate of the conservative wing
of the party.
As in most political movies, the liberals are the good guys. Yet in the
post-Cold War era, the masterminds behind the dastardly plot are not
Russian and Chinese Communists, but a US corporation called Man -
churian Global (a name obviously contrived to retain the title of the
original classic with some continuing pertinence). Manchurian Glob-
al is surely designed to suggest a hybrid between Halliburton and the
Carlyle Group, although why a cabal of corporate fat-cats should feel
compelled to instigate a nefarious campaign of brainwashing and
assassination to install one of their own as vice-president is never su-
ciently explained, especially since, by :oo, the actuality of the Bush-
Cheney White House must have rendered such shenanigans redundant.
Peppered throughout the movie, running low on the soundtrack, are
news bulletins warning of the slow, steady erosion of US civil liberties.
+j
And the banner of the pro-Shaw forces depicts a st smashing through
the American ag, accompanied by the caption: Secure Tomorrow. It
seems an implicitly fascist clarion call, reminiscent of Bob Robertss
Retake America. As before, the :oo version of The Manchurian Can-
didate is the tale of a weak son who is catastrophically controlled by a
powerful parent but, in :oo, the son himself is the candidate for high
oce. However, there was no sign in the new movie of the vacuous,
demagogic Senator Iselin from Condons novel and the +: lm. Pre-
sumably that was because no one in this day and age would ever believe
such a man could become President of the United States.
The political movies of :oo were impressive, but they failed to
achieve their intended eect. Film-makers scrutiny of political issues
and events has not abated in Bushs second term, however. George
Clooneys Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj) starred David Strathairn
as Ed Murrow, who helped halt the menace of Joe McCarthy through
his current aairs show See It Now. Good Night, and Good Luck at-
tempted to go behind the scenes of a television station in the same way
that All the Presidents Men had sought to get at the printers ink under
the ngernails at the Washington Post. Yet it was only partially success-
ful, marred at times by Altmanesque overlapping dialogue and diver-
sionary blues songs that did not so much comment on the action as
break it up. That same year, Clooney also appeared in an Oscar -winning
supporting role in Stephen Gaghans Syriana (:ooj), a blistering con-
demnation of the unholy machinations of governments and corporations
that sacrice the interests of citizens and the environment in pursuit of
the great god, Oil.
Conventional political thrillers continue to be produced (Sydney
Pollacks The Interpreter, :ooj; Clark Johnsons The Sentinel, :oo), but
+
Two generations of
a political dynasty
poised to secure
tomorrow for
corporate fascism:
Meryl Streep and
Liev Schreiber in
Jonathan Demmes
:oo remake of
The Manchurian
Candidate.
the American political lm remains an ideal genre for ambitious lm-
makers who have their hearts set on grandiose sagas and important
statements. :oo saw the release of: a new version of All the Kings Men,
directed by Steven Zaillian and featuring Sean Penn as Willie Stark;
Emilio Estevezs Bobby, an Altmanesque ensemble piece set in and
around the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at the time of Robert
Kennedys assassination on the premises; and Robert De Niros The
Good Shepherd, an epic saga of the early days of the CIA. The Good
Shepherds inspirational template is, reputedly, The Godfather in this
context, a template perhaps reminiscent of that Michael Corleone/
Willis Powell (of Twilights Last Gleaming) assertion, that governments
and organized crime sip out of the same cup?
In their discussion of Robert Aldrichs late-career political master-
piece, Twilights Last Gleaming, writers Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene
L. Miller referred to the title (taken, of course, from Francis Scott
Keys The Star-Spangled Banner) as designed to reect a lm about
endings, the fading of light, the passing of hope.
:
It was in this frame
of mind that I chose that same phrase as the title for my conclusion to
this book but, crucially, with a question mark attached, in the hope
that it might not be too late. The election of :oo8 has brought forth the
possibility of the rst Black President (Barack Obama), or the rst
female President (Hillary Clinton), or a Republican who is refreshingly
free of neo-conservative fanaticism and a genuine war hero ( John
McCain). Yet the United States currently faces a critical challenge,
which is by no means on the wane.
/++ was, without doubt, the dening moment of George W.
Bushs presidency, as surely as the hostage crisis in Iran had been Jimmy
Carters. /++ has altered the political landscape irrevocably, and not
only in the United States. An American tragedy was recongured as a
neo-conservative opportunity, and thereafter seized on by politicians
on both sides of the Atlantic to push through legislation that would
subtly yet surely erode individual and civil liberties. Scaremongering
is the tactic, and centralization of information to control the populace
is the aim. Whether movie-makers will address these issues, only time
will tell. Meanwhile, it is signicant and perhaps understandable that
the lms dealing with /++ to date have focused on the heroism of
Americans in crisis (Paul Greengrasss United and Oliver Stones
World Trade Center, both :oo), rather than on the negligence that
allowed this tragedy to occur. Still, an alternative version of events has
+y
+8
been watched by hundreds of thousands on the Internet. Dylan Averys
controversial :oo documentary Loose Change is questioning the ocial
version of /++, providing impetus to conspiracy theorists everywhere
and, possibly, paving the way for the future evolution of movie entertain-
ment, if computers should ever supplant cinemas for a lms rst run.
Certainly, the Internet has already supplanted the American politi-
cal movie as the natural home for conspiracy theories. It has also
become home to a million lm critics. Contemporary critical reception
is no longer limited to newspapers and magazines. Now, anyone with a
computer can oer an opinion, as valid as anyone elses, and it is there
for all the world to see. The Internet Movie Database has democratized
movie criticism, and the more recent the lm, the more comments there
tend to be (they frequently run into the hundreds). Furthermore,
exchanges on IMDB threads can run to enormous lengths. When the
subject is an American political lm, it is not uncommon for discussion
to degenerate into a spitting-match between liberal and conservative
partisans. Political movie debate in cyberspace is raucous, and it often
consists of re-ghting old historical and ideological battles.
One of the tragedies of real-life US politics is that old battles are
still very much on contemporary ideological agendas. Much of the presi-
dential election of :oo revolved around the candidates respective
records (or lack thereof) in a war that had been over for thirty years.
The scar of Vietnam still lies deep across the American consciousness.
Yet, John Waynes The Green Berets (+8) aside, American lm -makers
did not fully address that divisive conict until it was consigned to
history. Perhaps the same will be true of the war in Iraq, which has
assumed the hallmark of a hubristic tragedy on the scale of Vietnam.
If the Imperial Presidency began under Franklin D. Roosevelt, then
George W. Bush is Americas twelfth Caesar. For the :oo election, Bush
assembled a potentially lethal coalition of aggressive hyper-patriotism,
corporate fascism and Christian fundamentalism (this last poli tical
issue largely untouched by Hollywood, save for those two great classics
of +o, Richard Brookss Elmer Gantry and Stanley Kramers Inherit
the Wind). That unholy trinity will not simply disappear on the eve of
the :oo8 election. It is a force to be reckoned with, and the nest of
American political lms, which have always privileged intelligence over
intolerance, should be ideally placed to resist its momentum. In Donald
Wryes bleak TV masterpiece Amerika (+8y), which imagined the
Soviet takeover of a defeated USA, sapped by materialism and apathy,
Sam Neills Russian Colonel observes: You lost your country before
we ever got here. The underlying message was akin to President Dwight
D. Eisenhowers famous warning, Only Americans can hurt America.
Hollywood has played a crucial, indeed, vital, role in exporting the
greatest of American ideals to the world. Throughout the history of the
United States and throughout the history of Hollywood, statesmen and
lm-makers alike have proclaimed that the price of liberty is vigilance.
Americans must now and always beware those opportunistic fear -
mongers, long vilied by the political movie, who would have them
believe that the price of vigilance is liberty.
+
:oo
Introduction: Once Upon A Nation: The Ideology of
American Political Films
+ See http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/greatestamerican/greatest -
american.html (accessed + October :ooy).
: Previous books that have focused broadly on the American political movie
include: Terry Christensen, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from
Birth of a Nation to Platoon (New York, +8y); Brian Neve, Film and
Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London, +:); Gary Crowdus, ed.,
The Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL, +); Ian Scott,
American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh, :ooo); Peter C. Rollins
and John E. OConnor, eds, Hollywood s White House: The American
Presidency in Film and History (Lexington, KY, :oo); Mark Wheeler,
Hollywood: Politics and Society (London, :oo); and Harry Keyishian,
Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies (Lanham, MD, :oo).
This is actually a small number of books compared to the substantial body
of literature available on many other film genres.
For a superb study of the role of mythology in the construction of Americas
pantheon of national heroes, see Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America: A
Chronicle of Hero-Worship (Ann Arbor, MI, ++; reprinted +).
See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, ed., The Almanac of American History (New
York, +8), pp. +o+:.
j Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from
World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, +), p. ix.
See, for example, Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, .,.,.,,.
(London, +o), pp. +:y.
References
:o+
Chapter +: American Politics, American Movies: Movie
America, Movie History
+ Characters in three other films of +o, all set in the +:os, repudiated
anti-Catholic bigotry: John McIntire (shocked) in Richard Brookss Elmer
Gantry, Spencer Tracy (rhetorically) in Stanley Kramers Inherit the Wind,
and Robert Preston (with colourful indignation) in Delbert Manns The
Dark at the Top of the Stairs. It is entirely reasonable to read McIntires
rebuke of Edward Andrewss negative comments about a Catholic (Al
Smith) running for president and, certainly, Prestons ridicule of sister-in-
law Eve Ardens bizarre anti-Catholic fantasies as implicit cinematic votes
for Kennedy in that years imminent presidential election.
: See Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies
(Reading, MA, +y8), pp. :o, :o8.
On the impact of the footage of the young Bill Clinton meeting President
Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden, see Luc Herman, Bestowing
Knighthood: The Visual Aspects of Bill Clintons Camelot Legacy, in
Hollywoods White House: The American Presidency in Film and History,
ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. OConnor (Lexington, KY, :oo),
pp. o+.
Chapter :: Hail to the Chiefs: White House and Silver
Screen
+ Both Henabery and Walsh also assisted Griffith in the editing of The Birth
of a Nation.
: See Lincoln, the Great Heart, from Robert Lang, The Birth of a
Nation: History, Ideology, Narrative Form, in The Birth of a Nation:
D. W. Griffith, Director, ed. Lang (New Brunswick, NJ, +), pp. :o:.
Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley, CA, +y8), pp. y:. They cut
it out: this is a vague reference to studio executives at :oth Century Fox.
The force to be reckoned with at Fox which undoubtedly had power
to overrule Ford was Darryl F. Zanuck, who supervised production of
several of Fords greatest films (Lincoln; The Grapes of Wrath, +o; How
Green Was My Valley, ++; My Darling Clementine, +).
Eight years later, Huston would occupy the other moral extreme as the
satanic Mr Scratch, pitted against upright senator Daniel Webster (Edward
Arnold), in William Dieterles All That Money Can Buy (++), based on
Stephen Vincent Bents folk opera of +, The Devil and Daniel Webster.
By that time Arnold was also counter-cast. More used to playing villains
than heroes, he registered strongly as power-hungry ogres in the Frank
Capra classics Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+) and Meet John Doe (++).
j This unsettling juxtaposition actually had a genuine historical precedent
in the tradition of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil
:o:
War, and also in the Communist leader Earl Browders annexation of
Lincoln for his own ideological cause. For confirmation of the latter, see
Getting Right with Lincoln, in David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered:
Essays on the Civil War Era, :nd edn (New York, ++), p. +y.
Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. +j.
y For a comprehensive treatment of Teddy Roosevelts relationship to the
new medium of film, see J. Tillapaugh, Theodore Roosevelt and the
Rough Riders: A Century of Leadership in Film, in Hollywoods White
House: The American Presidency in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins
and John E. OConnor (Lexington, KY, :oo), pp. ++.
8 Blackmer subsequently appeared as TR in The Monroe Doctrine (+),
Teddy the Rough Rider (+o), March On, America! (+:), In Old Oklahoma
(+), Buffalo Bill (+) and My Girl Tisa (+8).
For an in-depth production history of Zanucks epic, see Thomas J.
Knock, History with Lightning: The Forgotten Film Wilson (+), in
Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, ed. Peter C.
Rollins (Lexington, KY, +8), pp. 88+o8.
+o The real Wilson, a fervent Confederate boy during the Civil War, would
have loathed this association.
Chapter : Modern Presidential Parables: John Kennedy,
Richard Nixon and Beyond
+ E. G. Marshall was one of those distinguished Hollywood stalwarts who,
as with James Whitmore, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook and Rip Torn, was
cast time and again as a president, factual or fictional, or another member
of the US power elite. Besides his role in +8 as Joseph Kennedy,
Marshall essayed: Harry Truman in Collision Course: Truman vs. MacArthur
(+y); John Foster Dulles in Eleanor, First Lady of the World (+8:);
Eisenhower in the +8 TV production, Ike (not to be confused with the
+y mini-series starring Robert Duvall), and again in the mini-series War
and Remembrance (+88); as U. S. Grant in Emma: Queen of the South Seas
(+88); and as John Mitchell in Oliver Stones Nixon (+j). In addition,
Marshall played Senator Joseph Paine (the Claude Rains role) in Tom
Laughlins +yy reworking of Mr Smith, titled Billy Jack Goes to Washington;
The President in Richard Lesters Superman II (+8o); the Senate Chair-
man in Miss Evers Boys (+y); and other DC dignitaries in Roger Youngs
Under Siege (+8), Sidney Lumets Power (+8) and Clint Eastwoods
Absolute Power (+y). Not a bad Washington insider track record.
: Ronald Reagan has, on occasion, been claimed as an ex-Catholic. Reagans
father was a Catholic, but the principal religious influence in his boyhood
was his mother. At the age of eleven he opted to be baptized into the First
Christian Church, of which his mother was a member.
:o
See The JFK Debate: Reactions and Commentaries, in Oliver Stone and
Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film: The Documented Screenplay
(New York, +:), pp. +8yj:.
See Michael Singer, Interview with Oliver Stone, in Nixon: An Oliver
Stone Film, ed. Eric Hamburg (London, +), p. xviii.
Chapter : Country Boys and City Slickers
+ The opening credits for State of the Union misspelled Katharine Hepburn
as Katherine.
: Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley, CA, +8),
p. :88.
John F. Kennedys victory over Richard Nixon in the presidential election
of +o was wafer-thin, with a majority of just around +oo,ooo. The
televised debates were crucial factors in securing Kennedys triumph. A
majority of people who heard the first debate on radio thought that Nixon
had won the argument, but a majority of those who saw that debate on
television believed that Kennedy had come out on top.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, ed., The Almanac of American History (New York,
+8), p. yo.
j William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of
America, .,:.,,: (London, +yj), p. ++y.
See Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men [+] (London, +y), p. viii.
y Broderick Crawford had won acclaim for his portrayal of two thuggish
political tyrants in the mid-twentieth century. The first, of course, was
Willie Stark in All the Kings Men; the second was as a bullying, authori-
tarian scrap-metal dealer who plans to bend Washington to his will in
George Cukors classic comedy Born Yesterday (+jo). Intriguingly, in
Luis Mandokis + remake of Born Yesterday, John Goodman essayed
this role two years before playing Huey Long, the real-life prototype for
Willie Stark, in Kingfish. Goodman as our modern-day Broderick Crawford,
anyone?
8 Another member of Louisianas Long dynasty, US Senator Russell B.
Long (Hueys son), was played by Walter Matthau in an unbilled cameo
appearance in Oliver Stones JFK (++).
Gore Vidal, Barry Goldwater: A Chat, Life ( June ++); reprinted in
Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, .,,:.,,: [+] (London, +),
p. 8+.
:o
Chapter j: The Brief, Shining Moment: Political Movies
in the American Camelot
+ For stimulating analyses of the pervasive ideology of consensus in Holly-
wood films, see Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and
the Ideology of Consensus (Metuchen, NJ, +8), passim, and Peter Biskind,
Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love
the Fifties (London, +8), passim.
: I am indebted to my old friend and former colleague Professor James
Chapman, now of the University of Leicester, for his insight that the quasi-
courtroom semblance of Advise and Consent is given an extra iconographic
resonance thanks to both Fondas association with that genre in .: Angry
Men and Laughtons in Witness for the Prosecution.
Allen Drury, A Senate Journal, .,,.,,, (New York, +), pp. :y, ;
for Van Ackermans character, see Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (New
York, +j), pp. :jyo, j, j:.
See Greil Marcus, The Manchurian Candidate, BFI Film Classics (London,
:oo:), pp. yo.
j The classic literary indictment of Momism in American society is, of
course, Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York, +:).
For a thorough analysis of the historical and political contexts of Seven
Days in May as both novel and film, see Michael Coyne, Seven Days in
May: History, Prophecy and Propaganda, in Windows on the Sixties:
Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture, ed. Anthony Aldgate, James
Chapman and Arthur Marwick (London, :ooo), pp. yoo.
y See Fred J. Cook, The Warfare State (New York, +:), passim.
8 Barry M. Goldwater, With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs
of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater (New York, +y), p. +.
Gore Vidal, Political Melodramas, in Vidal, United States: Essays,
.,,:.,,: [+] (London, +), p. 8j:; and see Vidals Richard Nixon:
Not The Best Mans Best Man, in the same volume, p. oo.
+o This characters name is spelled Groteschele in the novel, but
Groeteschele in the cast list of the film.
++ In the contemporaneous Dr Strangelove, it is Air Force General Buck
Turgidson (George C. Scott) who proposes converting the crisis into a
first-strike opportunity. Yet the real military madman in Dr Strangelove is
General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), whose paranoia has launched
the nuclear crisis in the first place.
+: Drury, Advise and Consent, p. +.
Chapter : Enemies Within: White Hoods, Red Scares,
Black Lists
+ Geoffrey Gorer, The Americans: A Study in National Character (London,
+8), p. +j; the overall thrust of Gorers chapter, More Equal Than
Others, pp. +y+, is especially pertinent in precisely this context.
: See, for example, two television movies of +88 with very similar plots:
Karen Arthurs Evil in Clear River, starring Lindsay Wagner as the mother
who does battle with Randy Quaids charismatic high school teacher who is
filling his pupils heads with an anti-Semitic revisionist version of Holo-
caust history; and Anthony Pages Scandal in a Small Town, with Raquel
Welch fighting exactly the same good fight against Ronny Cox.
The pairing of Hackmans Anderson and Dafoes Ward conforms per-
fectly to the hero types of conservative and corporate liberal, outlined in
Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop
Worrying and Love the Fifties (London, +8), passim; and also to the
outlaw hero and official hero, as outlined in Robert B. Rays A Certain
Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, .,c.,Sc (Princeton, NJ, +8j), passim.
See Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War
on Terrorism (New York, :oo), and in particular, Chapter Four: The
Indispensable Joe McCarthy, pp. jjy:.
j Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
(London, +), p. +.
Chapter y: Conspiracy Central
+ The spokesman at the end of The Parallax View refers to George Hammond,
but an earlier scene shows a newspaper picture of this character, accompan -
ied by the caption John Hammond. Intriguingly, Hammond was, of course,
also the name of the president who arrogated dictatorial powers to himself
in Gabriel Over the White House (+).
: Aldrich had severed all ties with his cousin, Nelson A. (for Aldrich)
Rockefeller, who, as the Republican Governor of New York, had adopted
a heavy-handed approach to the Attica State Prison riots in +y+, an event
allegorized in Aldrichs violent whites vs. Indians Western Ulzanas Raid
(+y:), which had also starred Burt Lancaster.
The federal officer killed at Ruby Ridge, US Marshal William F. Degan,
Jr, was, at the time of his death, the most decorated officer in the history
of the United States Marshals. The siege, which lasted from :+ to +
August +:, was the subject of a + TV film, The Siege at Ruby Ridge,
directed by Roger Young.
There is another homage to an earlier classic political film in Wag the Dog:
the unseen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Scott, inevitably
:oj
evokes memories of Burt Lancasters Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Scott, in Seven Days in May.
Conclusion: Twilights Last Gleaming?
+ See Robert S. McElvaine, Gabriel Over the White House The Remake,
:+ October :oo, OpEdNews website, www.opednews.com/mcelvaine_
+o:+o_gabriel.htm (accessed + March :oo8).
: Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene L. Miller, Jr, The Films and Career of Robert
Aldrich (Knoxville, TN, +8), p. +y.
:o
:oy
Adair, Gilbert, Hollywoods Vietnam: From The Green Berets to Full Metal
Jacket (London, +8)
Aldgate, Anthony, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick, eds, Windows on the
Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture (London, :ooo)
Arnold, Edwin T., and Eugene L. Miller, Jr, The Films and Career of Robert
Aldrich (Knoxville, TX, +8)
Beinhart, Larry, American Hero (London, +)
Berecz, John, All the Presidents Women: An Examination of Sexual Styles of
Presidents Truman through Clinton (Atlanta, GA, +)
Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward, All the Presidents Men (New York, +yj)
Biskind, Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex n Drugs n Rock n Roll
Generation Saved Hollywood (London, +8)
, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love
the Fifties (London, +8)
Black, Gregory D., The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, .,,c.,,,
(Cambridge, +8)
Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford (Berkeley, CA, +y8)
Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner, Blacklisted: The Film Lovers Guide to the
Hollywood Blacklist (New York, :oo)
, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television,
.,,c:cc: (New York, :oo)
, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind Americas Favorite Movies
(New York, :oo:)
Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray, Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs,
Violence, Rock n Roll and Politics (New York, +8)
Carnes, Mark C., ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (London,
+)
Carney, Raymond, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge,
+8)
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in
the Film Community, .,c.,6c [+8] (Urbana and Chicago, :oo)
Select Bibliography
:o8
Chester, Lewis, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama:
The Presidential Campaign of .,6S (London, +)
Christensen, Terry, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a
Nation to Platoon (New York, +8y)
Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate (London, +o)
Cook, Fred J., The Warfare State (New York, +:)
Coulter, Ann, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on
Terrorism (New York, :oo)
Coyne, Michael, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the
Hollywood Western (London, +y)
Cripps, Thomas, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from
World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, +)
Crowdus, Gary, ed., The Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL,
+)
Crowther, Bruce, Hollywood Faction: Reality and Myth in the Movies (London,
+8)
Cunliffe, Marcus, American Presidents and the Presidency (London, +y:)
Dallek, Robert, John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life (London, :oo)
Davies, Philip John, and Paul Wells, eds, American Film and Politics from
Reagan to Bush Jr (Manchester, :oo:)
Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds, From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam
War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ, +o)
Donald, David, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, :nd edn
(New York, ++)
Dooley, Roger, From Scarface to Scarlett: American Films in the .,cs (New
York, +8+)
Drury, Allen, Advise and Consent (Garden City, NY, +j)
, A Senate Journal, .,,.,,, (New York, +)
Dugger, Ronnie, On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (New York, +8)
Edwards, Anne, Early Reagan: The Rise of an American Hero (London, +8y)
Elsaesser, Thomas, Alexander Horwath and Noel King, The Last Great American
Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the .,,cs (Amsterdam, :oo)
Engelhardt, Tom, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the
Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, +j)
Flynn, John T., As We Go Marching [+] (New York, +y)
Foner, Eric, The Story of American Freedom (New York, +8)
Friedrich, Otto, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the .,,cs (London,
+8y)
Gabler, Neal, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New
York, +88)
Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and his Films (Berkeley, CA, +8)
Girgus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of
Ford, Capra and Kazan (Cambridge, +8)
Goldwater, Barry M., With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of
United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater (New York, +y)
:o
Gorer, Geoffrey, The Americans: A Study in National Character (London,
+8)
Habe, Hans, Anatomy of Hatred: The Wounded Land (London, +)
Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (New York, +y:)
, The Fifties (New York, +)
Hamburg, Eric, ed., Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film (London, +)
Hamilton, Ian, Writers in Hollywood, .,.,.,,. (London, +o)
Heale, M. J., American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within,
.Sc.,,c (Baltimore, MD, +o)
, Twentieth-Century America: Politics and Power in the United States,
.,cc:ccc (London, :oo)
Hersh, Seymour, The Dark Side of Camelot (London, +8)
Hoberman, J., The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties
(New York, :oo)
Hodgson, Godfrey, America in our Time: From World War II to Nixon What
Happened and Why (New York, +y8)
Hoffman, Nicholas von, Citizen Cohn (London, +88)
Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
(London, +)
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, and Gaspar Gonzlez, What Have they Built You to
Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (Minneapolis, ,
:oo)
Johnson, Chalmers, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(London, :oo)
Jones, Maldwyn A., The Limits of Liberty: American History, .6c,.,Sc (Oxford,
+8)
Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Oliver Stone (Oxford, +j)
Kanfer, Stefan, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York, +y)
Kennedy, John F., Profiles in Courage [Memorial Edition] (London, +)
Ketchum, Richard M., The Borrowed Years, .,S.,,.: America on the Way to
War (New York, +8)
Keyishian, Harry, Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies (Lanham,
MD, :oo)
LaFeber, Walter, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and
Abroad since .,,c (New York, +8)
Lang, Robert, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New
Brunswick, NJ, +)
Levi, Ross D., The Celluloid Courtroom: A History of Legal Cinema (Westport,
CT, :ooj)
Lee, Spike, with Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and
Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X . . . (London, +)
Lokos, Lionel, Hysteria 1964: The Fear Campaign Against Barry Goldwater
(New Rochelle, v, +y)
McBride, Joseph, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York, +:)
, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York, :oo+)
:+o
McCrisken, Trevor B., and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary
Hollywood Film (Edinburgh, :ooj)
Maltby, Richard, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of
Consensus (Metuchen, NJ, +8)
, Hollywood Cinema, :nd edn (Malden, MA, :oo)
Manchester, William, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America,
.,:.,,: (London, +yj)
Marcus, Greil, The Manchurian Candidate, urr Film Classics (London, :oo:)
Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and
the United States, c. .,,Sc. .,,, (Oxford, +8)
May, Lary, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way
(Chicago, IL, :ooo)
, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War
(Chicago, IL, +8)
Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven, CT, :oo)
Navasky, Victor S., Naming Names (New York, +8o)
Neve, Brian, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London, +:)
Noonan, Peggy, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan
Era (New York, +o)
Oates, Stephen B., With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(New York, +8j)
OConnor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson, American History / American Film:
Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York, ++)
Parmet, Herbert S., Richard Nixon and his America (Boston, MA, +o)
Parrish, Robert, Growing Up in Hollywood (London, +y)
Patterson, James T., Grand Expectations: The United States, .,,,.,,,
(New York, +)
Pells, Richard H., The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals
in the .,,cs and .,,cs, :nd edn (Middletown, CT, +8)
Pitts, Michael R., Hollywood and American History: A Filmography of Over :,c
Motion Pictures Depicting US History (Jefferson, NC, +8)
Pratley, Gerald, The Cinema of John Frankenheimer (New York, +)
Quart, Leonard, and Albert Auster, American Film and Society since .,,,
(London, +8)
Rampell, Ed, Progressive Hollywood: A Peoples Film History of the United
States (New York, :ooj)
Ray, Robert B., A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, .,c.,Sc
(Princeton, NJ, +8j)
Reagan, Ronald, An American Life (London, +o)
Reed, Joseph W., American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre (Middletown,
CT, +8)
Reeves, Thomas C., A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy
(London, ++)
Richards, Jeffrey, Visions of Yesterday (London, +y)
:++
Ridgeway, James, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi
Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture (New York, ++)
Riordan, James, Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical
Filmmaker (London, +)
Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness,
Despair and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington, IN, +8+)
Rogin, Michael Paul, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political
Demonology (Berkeley, CA, +8y)
Rollins, Peter C., ed., The Columbia Companion to American History on Film:
How the Movies have Portrayed the American Past (New York, :oo)
, ed., Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington,
KY, +8)
, and John E. OConnor, eds, Hollywoods White House: The American
Presidency in Film and History (Lexington, KY, :oo)
, eds, The West Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama (Syracuse,
v, :oo)
Ross, Shelley, Washington Babylon: Sex, Scandal and Corruption in American
Politics from .,c: to the Present (London, +8)
Salewicz, Chris, Oliver Stone: The Making of his Movies (London, +y)
Salisbury, Harrison E., The Many Americas Shall be One (London, +y+)
Sardar, Ziauddin, and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why do People Hate America?
(Cambridge, :oo:)
Sayre, Nora, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York, +8:)
Shindler, Colin, Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, .,:,.,,
(London, +)
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr, ed., The Almanac of American History (New York,
+8)
, The Cycles of American History (Boston, MA, +8)
, The Imperial Presidency (Boston, MA, +y)
, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (London, +j)
Scott, Ian, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh, :ooo)
Segal, Ronald, Americas Receding Future: The Collision of Creed and Reality
(London, +8)
Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies
(New York, +yj)
Smith, Hedrick, The Power Game: How Washington Works (Glasgow, +88)
Stone, Oliver, and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film: The Documented
Screenplay (New York, +:)
Stormer, John A., None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO, +)
Suid, Lawrence H., Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading,
MA, +y8)
Toplin, Robert Brent, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American
Past (Urbana, IL, +)
, ed., Oliver Stones USA: Film, History and Controversy (Lawrence, KA,
:ooo)
:+:
Vidal, Gore, United States: Essays, .,,:.,,: [+] (London, +)
Wade, Wyn Craig, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York,
+88)
Warren, Robert Penn, All the Kings Men [+] ( London, +y)
Webster, Duncan, Looka Yonder!: The Imaginary America of Populist Culture
(London, +88)
Wecter, Dixon, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship (Ann Arbor,
MI, ++; reprinted +)
Weinstein, Allen, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (London, +y8)
Whale, John, The Half-Shut Eye: Television and Politics in Britain and America
(London, +yo)
Wheeler, Mark, Hollywood: Politics and Society (London, :oo)
White, Theodore H., America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President,
.,,6.,Sc (London, +8)
, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York, +yj)
, The Making of the President, .,6c (New York, ++)
Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, ++)
Wills, Garry, The Kennedys: A Shattered Illusion (London, +8)
, Reagans America: Innocents at Home (London, +88)
Wood, Robin, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, revd edn
(New York, :oo)
Woodward, Bob, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York,
+)
, and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York, +y)
Wylie, Philip, Generation of Vipers (New York, +:)
Zinn, Howard, A Peoples History of the United States (London, +8o)
:+
Features Released in Theatres
++j The Birth of a Nation (directed by D. W. Griffith)
+: America (D. W. Griffith)
The Dramatic Life ofAbraham Lincoln (Phil Rosen)
The Iron Horse ( John Ford)
+o Abraham Lincoln (D. W. Griffith)
+: The Dark Horse (Alfred E. Green)
The Phantom President (Norman Taurog)
Washington Masquerade (Charles Brabin)
Washington Merry-Go-Round ( James Cruze)
+ Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory La Cava)
+ Judge Priest ( John Ford)
+j Thanks a Million (Roy Del Ruth)
+ The Gorgeous Hussy (Clarence Brown)
The Prisoner of Shark Island ( John Ford)
+y Black Legion (Archie L. Mayo)
This is My Affair (William A. Seiter)
+8 Of Human Hearts (Clarence Brown)
+ Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra)
Young Mr Lincoln ( John Ford)
+o Abe Lincoln in Illinois (a.k.a. Spirit of the People) ( John Cromwell)
The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges)
++ Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
Louisiana Purchase (Irving Cummings)
Meet John Doe (Frank Capra)
+: Keeper of the Flame (George Cukor)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz)
+ Tennessee Johnson (William Dieterle)
+ Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges)
Wilson (Henry King)
Filmography
:+
+j Strange Holiday (Arch Oboler)
+ Magnificent Doll (Frank Borzage)
+y The Farmers Daughter (H. C. Potter)
The Senator was Indiscreet (George S. Kaufman)
+8 State of the Union (Frank Capra)
+ All the Kings Men (Robert Rossen)
+jo Born Yesterday (George Cukor)
The Magnificent Yankee ( John Sturges)
No Way Out ( Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
+j+ Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler)
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann)
The Whip Hand (William Cameron Menzies)
+j: Big Jim McLain (Edward Ludwig)
Lone Star (Vincent Sherman)
My Son John (Leo McCarey)
+j A Lion is in the Streets (Raoul Walsh)
The Presidents Lady (Henry Levin)
The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford)
+j Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman)
Suddenly (Lewis Allen)
+j Giant (George Stevens)
Storm Center (Daniel Taradash)
+jy Beau James (Melville Shavelson)
A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan)
+j8 The Buccaneer (Anthony Quinn)
The Last Hurrah (John Ford)
+j On the Beach (Stanley Kramer)
+o Ice Palace (Vincent Sherman)
Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer)
Primary (Robert Drew) [documentary]
Sunrise at Campobello (Vincent J. Donehue)
Wild River (Elia Kazan)
++ Ada (Daniel Mann)
The Intruder (Roger Corman)
+: Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ( John Ford)
The Manchurian Candidate ( John Frankenheimer)
Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan)
+ PT .c, (Leslie H. Martinson)
+ The Best Man (Franklin Schaffner)
Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(Stanley Kubrick)
Fail-Safe (Sidney Lumet)
Four Days in November (Mel Stuart) [documentary]
Kisses for My President (Curtis Bernhardt)
:+j
Point of Order (Emile de Antonio) [documentary]
Seven Days in May ( John Frankenheimer)
+j The Bedford Incident ( James B. Harris)
+ John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums (Bruce Herschen-
sohn) [documentary]
+8 America Is Hard to See (Emile de Antonio) [documentary]
Wild in the Streets (Barry Shear)
+ Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper)
Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler)
+yo Joe ( John G. Avildsen)
King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis (Sidney Lumet and
Joseph L. Mankiewicz) [documentary]
The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagman)
WUSA (Stuart Rosenberg)
+y+ Millhouse: A White Comedy (Emile de Antonio) [documentary]
+y: The Candidate (Michael Ritchie)
The Man ( Joseph Sargent)
.,,6 (Peter H. Hunt)
+y Executive Action (David Miller)
The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack)
+y Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola)
Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis) [documentary]
The Klansman (Terence Young)
The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula)
+yj Give Em Hell, Harry! (Steve Binder and Peter H. Hunt)
Nashville (Robert Altman)
Shampoo (Hal Ashby)
Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack)
The Wind and the Lion ( John Milius)
+y All the Presidents Men (Alan J. Pakula)
Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby)
The Front (Martin Ritt)
Marathon Man ( John Schlesinger)
Network (Sidney Lumet)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
+yy The Domino Principle (Stanley Kramer)
The Lincoln Conspiracy ( James L. Conway)
MacArthur, the Rebel General ( Joseph Sargent)
Nasty Habits (Michael Lindsay-Hogg)
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Larry Cohen)
Telefon (Don Siegel)
Twilights Last Gleaming (Robert Aldrich)
+y8 Born Again (Irving Rapper)
Bully: An Adventure with Teddy Roosevelt (Peter H. Hunt)
Coming Home (Hal Ashby)
:+
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino)
F.I.S.T. (Norman Jewison)
The Greek Tycoon ( J. Lee Thompson)
+y . . . And Justice For All (Norman Jewison)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
Being There (Hal Ashby)
The China Syndrome ( James Bridges)
The Seduction of Joe Tynan ( Jerry Schatzberg)
Winter Kills (William Richert)
+8o Heavens Gate (Michael Cimino)
The Kidnapping of the President (George Mendeluk)
Return of the Secaucus Seven ( John Sayles)
+8+ Blow Out (Brian De Palma)
First Monday in October (Ronald Neame)
Ragtime (Milos Forman)
Reds (Warren Beatty)
+8: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Colin Higgins)
Frances (Graeme Clifford)
Missing (Costa-Gavras)
+8 Daniel (Sidney Lumet)
The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg)
The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman)
Silkwood (Mike Nichols)
Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode)
+8 Flashpoint (William Tannen)
The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah)
Red Dawn ( John Milius)
Secret Honor (Robert Altman)
+8j The Falcon and the Snowman ( John Schlesinger)
Invasion USA ( Joseph Zito)
Marie (Roger Donaldson)
Revolution (Hugh Hudson)
+8 Platoon (Oliver Stone)
Power (Sidney Lumet)
Salvador (Oliver Stone)
+8y Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick)
Gardens of Stone (Francis Ford Coppola)
Matewan ( John Sayles)
No Way Out (Roger Donaldson)
Walker (Alex Cox)
Wall Street (Oliver Stone)
+88 Betrayed (Costa-Gavras)
Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker)
Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet)
+8 Blaze (Ron Shelton)
Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone)
:+y
++ Guilty by Suspicion (Irwin Winkler)
JFK (Oliver Stone)
True Colors (Herbert Ross)
+: Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins)
Chaplin (Richard Attenborough)
The Distinguished Gentleman ( Jonathan Lynn)
Hoffa (Danny DeVito)
Love Field ( Jonathan Kaplan)
Malcolm X (Spike Lee)
Ruby ( John MacKenzie)
+ Born Yesterday (Luis Mandoki)
Dave (Ivan Reitman)
Heaven and Earth (Oliver Stone)
In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Petersen)
The Pelican Brief (Alan J. Pakula)
The War Room (Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker) [documentary]
+ Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis)
Guarding Tess (Hugh Wilson)
Legends of the Fall (Edward Zwick)
+j The American President (Rob Reiner)
Higher Learning ( John Singleton)
The Last Supper (Stacy Title)
Jefferson in Paris ( James Ivory)
Nick of Time ( John Badham)
Nixon (Oliver Stone)
+ The Chamber ( James Foley)
City Hall (Harold Becker)
The Crucible (Nicholas Hytner)
Ghosts of Mississippi (Rob Reiner)
Independence Day (Roland Emmerich)
Lone Star ( John Sayles)
The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman)
A Time to Kill ( Joel Schumacher)
+y Absolute Power (Clint Eastwood)
Air Force One (Wolfgang Petersen)
Amistad (Steven Spielberg)
Conspiracy Theory (Richard Donner)
Murder at .6cc (Dwight H. Little)
Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson)
+8 American History X (Tony Kaye)
Bulworth (Warren Beatty)
Deep Impact (Mimi Leder)
Enemy of the State (Tony Scott)
Pleasantville (Gary Ross)
Primary Colors (Mike Nichols)
The Siege (Edward Zwick)
:+8
+ Arlington Road (Mark Pellington)
The Big Brass Ring (George Hickenlooper)
Cradle Will Rock (Tim Robbins)
Deterrence (Rod Lurie)
Dick (Andrew Fleming)
:ooo The Contender (Rod Lurie)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? ( Joel Coen)
The Patriot (Roland Emmerich)
Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson)
:oo+ Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott)
The Majestic (Frank Darabont)
Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay)
:oo: Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore) [documentary]
:oo Elephant (Gus Van Sant)
The Fog of War (Errol Morris) [documentary]
:oo The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller)
The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)
Fahrenheit ,/.. (Michael Moore) [documentary]
The Manchurian Candidate ( Jonathan Demme)
Silver City ( John Sayles)
Team America: World Police (Trey Parker)
:ooj Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney)
The Interpreter (Sydney Pollack)
Syriana (Stephen Gaghan)
:oo All the Kings Men (Steven Zaillian)
Bobby (Emilio Estevez)
The Good Shepherd (Robert De Niro)
The Sentinel (Clark Johnson)
United , (Paul Greengrass)
World Trade Center (Oliver Stone)
:ooy Choose Connor (Luke Eberl)
Productions Made for Television
Key: F = Film made for TV; M= Mini-Series; S = Series or Serial;
D = Documentary
+8 Shadow on the Land (directed by Richard C. Sarafian) [S]
+yo The Unfinished Journey of Robert Kennedy (Mel Stuart) [D]
+y+ Vanished (Buzz Kulik) [M]
+y The Missiles of October (Anthony Page) [F]
+yj Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan (Marvin J. Chomsky)
[M]
Fear on Trial (Lamont Johnson) [F]
:+
+y The Adams Chronicles (Paul Bogart, Anthony Page, et al.) [S]
Captains and the Kings (Douglas Heyes) [M]
Collision Course: Truman vs. MacArthur (Anthony Page) [F]
Eleanor and Franklin (Daniel Petrie) [M]
Harry S. Truman: Plain Speaking (Daniel Petrie) [F]
+yy Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (Daniel Petrie) [F]
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Gilbert Cates) [F]
The Life and Assassination of the Kingfish (Robert E. Collins) [F]
Tail Gunner Joe ( Jud Taylor) [F]
The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (Gordon Davidson and David
Greene) [M]
Washington: Behind Closed Doors (Gary Nelson) [M]
Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy (Richard T. Heffron) [F]
+y8 The Bastard (Lee H. Katzin) [M]
King (Abby Mann) [M]
Ruby and Oswald (Mel Stuart) [F]
+y Backstairs at the White House (Michael OHerlihy) [M]
Blind Ambition (George Schaefer) [M]
Friendly Fire (David Greene) [F]
Ike (Boris Sagal and Melville Shavelson) [M]
The Rebels (Russ Mayberry) [M]
+8o FDR: The Last Year (Anthony Page) [F]
+8+ Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Steve Gethers) [F]
Skokie (Herbert Wise) [F]
+8: The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen) [M]
Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (Robert Lieberman) [F]
+8 Blood Feud (Mike Newell) [M]
Chiefs ( Jerry London) [M]
The Day After (Nicholas Meyer) [F]
Kennedy ( Jim Goddard) [M]
Special Bulletin (Edward Zwick) [F]
The Winds of War (Dan Curtis) [M]
+8 Concealed Enemies ( Jeff Bleckner) [M]
George Washington (Buzz Kulik) [M]
+8j North and South (Richard T. Heffron) [M]
+8 George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (William A. Graham)
[M]
North and South, Book II (Kevin Connor) [M]
Under Siege (Roger Young) [F]
+8y Amerika (Donald Wrye) [M]
The Betty Ford Story (David Greene) [F]
J. Edgar Hoover (Robert E. Collins) [F]
Into the Homeland (Lesli Linka Glatter) [F]
LBJ: The Early Years (Peter Werner) [F]
+88 Inherit the Wind (David Greene) [F]
Lincoln (Lamont Johnson) [M]
::o
Tanner SS (Robert Altman) [M]
To Heal a Nation (Michael Pressman) [F]
War and Remembrance (Dan Curtis) [M]
+8 Cross of Fire (Paul Wendkos) [M]
The Final Days (Richard Pearce) [F]
+o Murder in Mississippi (Roger Young) [F]
Running Against Time (Bruce Seth Green) [F]
So Proudly we Hail (Lionel Chetwynd) [F]
++ Darrow ( John David Coles) [F]
A Woman named Jackie (Larry Peerce) [M]
+: Citizen Cohn (Frank Pierson) [F]
+ And the Band Played On (Roger Spottiswoode) [F]
+ The Enemy Within ( Jonathan Darby) [F]
+j Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (Thomas Schlamme) [F]
Kissinger and Nixon (Daniel Petrie) [F]
Truman (Frank Pierson) [F]
+ The Siege at Ruby Ridge (Roger Young) [M]
+y George Wallace ( John Frankenheimer) [F]
Rough Riders ( John Milius) [M]
+ Inherit the Wind (Daniel Petrie) [F]
The West Wing (created by Aaron Sorkin) [S, +:oo]
:ooo Fail Safe (directed by Stephen Frears) [F, Live Broadcast]
:oo+ The Day Reagan was Shot (Cyrus Nowrasteh) [F]
Jackie, Ethel and Joan: The Women of Camelot (Larry Shaw) [F]
Thats My Bush! (created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone) [S]
:, (created by Joel Surnow, Robert Cochran, Howard Gordon and
Brian Grazer) [S, :oo+present]
:oo: Path to War (directed by John Frankenheimer) [F]
:oo Angels in America (Mike Nichols) [M]
Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor (Mikael Salomon) [F]
DC ,/..: Time of Crisis (Brian Trenchard-Smith) [F]
The Pentagon Papers (Rod Holcomb) [F]
The Reagans (Robert Allan Ackerman) [F]
Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story (Robert Dornhelm) [F]
:oo Ike: Countdown to D-Day (Robert Harmon) [F]
:ooj Commander-in-Chief (created by Rod Lurie) [S, :oojpresent]
The Plot to Kill Nixon (directed by Paul Sauer) [F]
Warm Springs (Joseph Sargent) [F]
:oo Death of a President (Gabriel Range) [F]
::+
In the course of writing this book, many people have helped in inestimable ways,
and I should like to thank the following:
Mr Owen Dudley Edwards, Honorary Fellow in History at the University of
Edinburgh, was the first to give intellectual substance and direction to my
enthusiasm for American history and culture. Over the years I have enjoyed many
conversations with him about the films discussed in this book, and so it is
particularly appropriate, I think, that Hollywood Goes to Washington is dedicated
to my old teacher and mentor.
I am indebted also to Professor Jeffrey Richards of Lancaster University;
Michael Heale, Emeritus Professor of American History at Lancaster University;
Mr Philip French of The Observer; and Professor Sir Christopher Frayling of
the Royal College of Art. Ive been extremely fortunate to talk with each of these
gentlemen about American political films. I am most grateful for their wisdom,
encouragement and, above all, their friendship.
My thanks to Vivian Constantinopoulos, Harry Gilonis and Martha Jay at
Reaktion Books, for all their valued support throughout the development of this
project.
I must thank a number of friends for diverse means of moral support. In
alphabetical order: Rowana Agajanian; Prof. Tony Aldgate of The Open
University; Marianita Bailey; John Beattie; Anne Bullman; Maggie and Trevor
Byrne; Prof. James Chapman of the University of Leicester; Julia and John
Curran; Jim Dunnigan; Rab Fairgrieve; Andrew Ferguson; John Gilhooly;
Kathleen Gilhooly; Valerie Humphrey; Prof. Tony Lentin of The Open
University; Joseph McBride; John McGinty; John Menzies; David Morgan; Dr
K. P. Onn; Jim Rafferty; Catherine de Satg; Wojtek Szeliga; David Todd; Dr Jill
Turner; Dr Bernard Waites of The Open University; and Lindsay Wilson.
My deepest and most lasting debt is to my family: to Desmond and Pamela
Coyne, my brother and sister-in-law; to Sarah Elizabeth Coyne, my niece; to
Daniel Michael Coyne, my nephew; and, above all, to my parents, Elma and
Michael Coyne, for all their love, encouragement and unwavering moral support.
Acknowledgements
:::
Photo Acknowledgements
Anhelo/Appian Way: p. +; Avenue Pictures/Home Box Office: p. yj; Central
Independent Television: p. yo; Cinecom Pictures: p. 8o; Cinergi: pp. , y, 8:,
8; Columbia: pp. +y, ::, :y, 8y, :, +o, +:o, +:, +:y, +:, +8, +, +jo, +j+,
+j:; Columbia/Universal: p. 88; DreamWorks: p. 8; Epoch Producing Corpo-
ration: p. ; The Finnegan-Pinchuk Company: p. j+; Home Box Office/Spring
Creek: p. j; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: pp. , y; NBC Entertainment: p. +j;
New Line Cinema: pp. y, ++; New Line Cinema/Tribeca: p. +88; Newmarket
Films/Columbia TriStar: p. +; Paramount: pp. :8, +o, +oj, +y, ++, +,
+yj, +; Paramount/Rank/Miramax/Working Title: pp. ++y, ++8, +:+; RKO
Radio: pp. ++, ++o; Samuels Film Company: p. 8+; Touchstone/Buena Vista:
p. j; :oth Century-Fox: p. :, , jj, :, +8j; United Artists: pp. :+, :, , j,
jo, +:, +; Universal: p. 8; Warner Bros: pp. +, :, +, y8, , ++j; Warner
Bros Television: p. +j.
::
.: Angry Men , +o:, +:, +:j, +:, +
Abe Lincoln in Illinois, :, , y, 8, j+,
jj, jy, , +j, +8
Abraham Lincoln (+o), :o, :., , , ,,,
,,, , +8
Absolute Power y, 8, o, +8j
Ada ++
Adams, John +, j+, j, j, y
Adams, John Quincy j, j, +
Advise and Consent , +, +j, :y, :,, :, 8y,
j, +oo, +o:, +:, +:j +, .:6, .:,, .:,,
+:, +, +, +j +, +j:, +j, +jj, +j,
+
Air Force One 8, 8
Alamo, The (+o) +
Alda, Alan +, 8, +yo
Aldrich, Robert +j, +, 88, +j, +y, +8+,
+8, +y
All the Kings Men (+) 8, ++, +, :, :,,
, +oy, +o8+:, .c,, ++, ++, ++, +y
All the Kings Men (:oo) o, + ++, +y
All the Presidents Men 8, +, ., :, yy8,
,S, 8:, +:, +j:, +y, +y8, +
Allen, Joan , S:, 8, 8, +j
Altman, Robert o, y+, 8+, +oo, ++8, +,
+, +y
American History X .6., ++:
American President, The , y, y+, SS, 8,
+j, +j
Amerika (+8y) jo, +8
Amistad j, j
Arlington Road +j, , ++, +8j, +8y, ++
Arthur, Jean :
Ashby, Hal 8
Asner, Edward y:, ++
Assassination of Richard Nixon, The o, 8,
++, +:, .,
Ayres, Lew +:8
Backstairs at the White House j, o, j
Bailey, Charles W., II ++, +y
Baker, Joe Don +
Balsam, Martin ., y8, +8
Barrymore, Lionel jj, j, jy
Bates, Kathy 8
Beatty, Warren o, , 8, 8, 8, , +oo,
+, +yj
Bedford Incident, The :, +:, +8o
Being There y8, 8
Bellamy, Ralph :, j, ,
Berenger, Tom j, +o, ++
Berman, Shelley +
Bernstein, Carl yy, 8:
Bernstein, Walter +jo
Best Man, The , ++, +, +j, +, :y, :, :,
, j, ++, +:, +:j, +:, +8, +,
+j+, +j:, +j, +jj, +j, +, +y8, +:
Betrayed , +o+
Biberman, Herbert +
Big Jim McLain :j, +:
Birth of a Nation, The +, :o, :, ,, +jy
Black Legion +:, +jy
Blaze ++
Blind Ambition j, j, 8o
Blue and the Gray, The j, jo
Bob Roberts +, :, , +, ++::, ..,,
..S, .:., +y, +o, ++, +
Bobby y+, +y
Booth, John Wilkes :, , y8
Index
::
Bostwick, Barry j, j, j
Bouchey, Willis +o
Bowling for Columbine o
Bridges, Jeff , 8, S,, +y, +8
Brown, Blair yo, ,c
Buchman, Sidney +
Bulworth 8, +oo
Burdick, Eugene ++, +, +8, +, +jo
Bush, George H. W. +, , j, 8j, ++8,
++, +8y, +:, +
Bush, George W. y, +, :j, , o, 8,
88, ++, +o, ++, +:, +, +, +j,
+, +y, +8
Cagney, James :j, ++:
Candidate, The +, y8, +oo, ++8, +yo
Capra, Frank ++, +:, +, ::, :, o, yy, 8,
+, , , j, , , +oo, +oj, +j
Captains and the Kings
Carey, Harry :
Carradine, John , +o
Carter, Jimmy o, :, , 8j, +:, +y
Carville, James ++
Chamber, The 8, ++
Chambers, Whittaker 8+, +:, +
China Syndrome, The o, +yy
Chinatown o, +yy, +
Citizen Cohn +
Citizen Kane ++, .., :o, :, 8, j, +o++,
..c, +j, +j, +
Clinton, Bill y, +o, +, :j, , , y, 8, ,
o, y, 8, 8, 8, o, ++, ++, +8y, +o
Clinton, Hillary 8, 8, +j, +y
Clooney, George o, +j, +j, .,,, +j, +
Cohn, Roy M. +
Condon, Richard o, y:, ++, +j, +y, +
Contender, The +:, , 8, S,, +j
Conversation, The +, +yy, +8j
Cook, Fred J. +8
Cooper, Chris +, +, .,,
Cooper, Gary , ,,,
Coppola, Francis Ford , +, +yo, +yy, +8j
Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras) , j,
+o
Costner, Kevin , , y, y, +::, +y
Cotten, Joseph j, ++o, +8+
Coulter, Ann +j
Crawford, Broderick +, :, :,, , +o,
.c,, +++, ++:
Cromwell, John :,
Cronenberg, David y+, ++
Cross of Fire +j8, .,,
Curley, James M. :j, +o+
Daniels, William j
Da Silva, Howard ,
Dave , 8
Day of the Locust, The , +8
Day Reagan Was Shot, The 8j
de Antonio, Emile +
Dead Zone, The y+, +++, ++
Dean, John 8o8+, +88
Demme, Jonathan +, o, +j, +
De Niro, Robert +, +8y, +:, +y
Deterrence +j, +o, ++
Dick 8
Dieterle, William +, , j
Donaldson, Roger , y, +8
Donlevy, Brian
Douglas, Kirk +j, :8, +:j, .,, +8, +,
+j, +j
Douglas, Melvyn y, y, 8, +8:
Douglas, Michael , y, y+, SS, 8, ++8
Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb , :8, 8y,
S,, +:, +:, +8, +jo, .,c, +j+, .,., +:
Dreyfuss, Richard 8j, 8, +j, +, .,,
Dru, Joanne ++o, ++:
Drury, Allen :y, +:j, +:, +:8, +:, +o,
++, +jo, +j:, +j, +j
Duggan, Andrew j
Dunst, Kirsten 8, +88, .SS
Durning, Charles +, 88, +8+
Eastwood, Clint , y, y:, 8, ++, +8
Easy Rider :, +o
Ehrlichman, John y
Eisenhower, Dwight D. +:, :j, :y, j, j,
8, yo, y, +o+, +y, +8, +o, +y+, +
Elmer Gantry , +8
Enemy of the State +8, +8j
Enemy Within, The +j, +j
Esposito, Giancarlo +, +:o, +::
Estevez, Emilio y+, +y
Executive Action o, 8, y:, +y+, +y, +8,
++
Face in the Crowd, A ++, :, , ++, ..,,
+:o, +j
Fahrenheit ,/.. o, ++, +:+, +j
Fail Safe (:ooo) +j, .,,
::j
Fail-Safe (+) , :8, o, :, 8j, 8y, +:,
+:j, ++, +, +:, +8j+, .,S, .,,, +j:,
.,:, +j, +j, +jj, +8j, +o, +:
Farmers Daughter, The +j, :, j, +jy
Faulk, John Henry +, +
Fear on Trial, +
Final Days, The S., 8:
Fitzgerald, Geraldine +, yo
Flanders, Ed , j
Fonda, Henry +j, +, ::, :, :, :y, :,, :,
o, j, ,6, y, 8, , 8y, j, +o:, +:,
+:j, +:, .:,, +:, +, +, +, .,S,
+jo, +o
Fonda, Peter :
Ford, Gerald R. :, y8, ,S, 8j, 88
Ford, Harrison 8, 8
Ford, John ::, :, :j, :, , j, y8,
j, j, 8, , +oo, +o+, +o:, +o, +oj,
+j, +o
Forman, Milos +, , y
Foster, Jodie :
Frankenheimer, John , :y, :8, , ,
yj, 8y, +:, ++, +j, +, +y, +,
+j:, +
From Here to Eternity :j
Front, The +
Gabriel Over the White House :o::, , 8y,
+8, +:
Gambon, Michael y, ,,
Gardner, Ava j, +o
Garrison, Jim , y, +y
Garson, Greer :,
Geer, Will 8, +y+
George Washington j, j+, j, j
Ghosts of Mississippi ++, ++
Give Em Hell, Harry!
Gleason, James
Godfather, The , , +8, +yoy+, +y, +yy,
+8, +y
Godfrey, Arthur ++
Goldman, William yy
Goldwater, Barry M. :, +, +:, +8, +:
Good Night, and Good Luck 8, o, +j, +j,
+
Good Shepherd, The +y
Goodman, John ++
Gore, Albert ++
Gorer, Geoffrey +j
Grant, Ulysses S. j:, j8, yo, y
Great McGinty, The
Green Berets, The +8
Greenwood, Bruce ,, y
Gregory, James , +:, .:, +j, +j
Griffith, Andy :, y, ++, ..,
Griffith, D. W. +, :o, :, , , , j,
+jy
Grizzard, George j, +:y, ++, +j
Guilty by Suspicion , +
Hackman, Gene y, 8, 8, +j, ++,
+yy, +8j
Hagman, Larry 8
Haig, Alexander 8j
Haldeman, H. R. y, 8
Hall, Philip Baker Sc, 8+
Harding, Warren G. :o, o, j, y
Hardwicke, Cedric :
Harvey, Laurence ++, +j, +, +, +j
Hawthorne, Nigel j, j, +
Hayden, Sterling +jo, .,c
Hayward, Susan ,,, j
Heard, John +j8, .,,
Hearst, William R. :o, :, , +o
Hedaya, Dan 8
Heflin, Van +, , j, :
Henabery, Joseph :, ,
Heston, Charlton ,,, j, j8
Hinckley, John W. Jr, :
Hiss, Alger 8+, 8:, +o:, +:, +jo
Hitler, Adolf j8, ++, +j, +o, +y:
Hoffman, Dustin +, ., yy, +8y, .SS
Holbrook, Hal j, joj+, j, yy, y8
Hoover, J. Edgar , , yo, +y
Hopkins, Anthony ,, j, +, yj, ,6, S:, S,
8, ++
Houseman, John j:, +y8
How the West Was Won :, y, jj, j
Hussey, Ruth jy
Huston, Danny +
Huston, John y:, +yy, +
Huston, Walter :o, , ,,, ,,, , +:
Ike j
In the Line of Fire , y:
Independence Day 8
Inherit the Wind +:, +:j, +j, +8
Into the Homeland +j8
Intruder, The ++, +, +j, +j8
Ireland, John ++o, ++:
Iron Horse, The :
::
Jackson, Andrew jj, jy,
Jackson, Glenda y
Jefferson, Thomas y, +:, j, y, +, , .:c,
.:., +::
Jefferson in Paris j, ,,,
JFK 8, , , , y+, y:, yj, yy, 8:, 8,
8j, +::, +y, +y, +8, +o
Johnson, Andrew +, , j8
Johnson, Lamont j, , j+, +
Johnson, Lyndon B. +, :, :, , , y,
8, y:, y, yj, y, y, 88, +o, +:,
+, +8, +8, +:
Jones, Tommy Lee , y:, 8
Judge Priest +oo
Kaufman, Philip y
Kazan, Elia ++, :j, :, ++
Keeper of the Flame :, j, +jy
Keith, Brian j, o
Kennedy j, ,c, yoy+, y
Kennedy, Jacqueline , yo
Kennedy, John F. y, +o, +, :j, :, :y, :8,
:, o, ., , j, , , o, :, j:,
, j, , yy, yj, y, ,6, yy, y, 8o,
8:, 8, 8, 8, +oo, +oj, ++8, ++, +:,
+:j, +:8, +j, +y, +8, +, +o, +y, +jo,
+j, +y+, +y:, +y, +y, +y, +y8, +8
Kennedy, Joseph P. , yo, +yy
Kennedy, Robert F. :8, o, , , yo, y+,
y, 8o, +:o, +j, +, +y+, +y, +y
Kerry, John F. +j
King j,
King, Henry o,
King, Martin Luther, Jr :8, o, j, , ,
+:8, +y
Klein, Joe 8j
Knebel, Fletcher ++, +y
Knox, Alexander +, 6:
Kramer, Stanley :, +:, +j, +8
Kristofferson, Kris +
Kubrick, Stanley , :8, 8y, +:, +8, +jo
La Cava, Gregory :o, , +:
Lancaster, Burt :8, :S, :, +, 8, +:j, .,,
+8, +, .,, +j, +y+, +y:, +y, +8o,
+8+, +8
Langer, William L. +:8
Lansbury, Angela +, ,c, , ,6, +:, .:,
+, +j
Last Hurrah, The :j, +oo, +o+, +o:j, +o,
++, ++, ++
Laughton, Charles j, +o:, +:j, +:y, .:,
Lawford, Peter +:y, +:8
Lee, Spike +, y
Leigh, Janet +j
LeMay, Curtis +
Levinson, Barry 8, +8y
Lewinsky, Monica y, 8, 8, 8, +8y
Lincoln j, , ,., j+:
Lincoln, Abraham y, +o, ++, +:, +, :o, :+,
:., ::, :, :, j, +j:, ,c, j, jj, j,
jy, j8, +, :, , y, yy, y8, +, ,,,
+o:, +::, +:, +, +o, +j, +8
Lincoln, Mary Todd , j:
Lion Is In the Streets, A :j, ++:, +j
Long, Earl K. ++
Long, Huey P. :, :j, +oy, +++, ++:+,
++, ++, +:
Loose Change (:oo) +8
Lumet, Sidney , :8, o, 8y, +, ++:, +:,
+8, +j:, +, +yy
Lurie, Rod +:, , 8, +j, +o
MacArthur, Douglas , +
MacArthur, the Rebel General
McCain, John +y
McCambridge, Mercedes ++o, ++:
McCarey, Leo :j, +:
McCarthy, Joseph R. :j, , ++, +:8, +:,
+:, +j, ++, +, +, +j, +y,
+y, +
McElvaine, Robert S. +:
McGiver, John +, .,
McKinley, William j
MacLaine, Shirley 8
McNamara, Robert S. +8, +
Macready, George +8, ++
Madison, Dolly Payne Todd jj
Madison, James jj, +
Magnificent Doll jj, +
Malcolm X +, .,, y
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The :, j,
jy, +oo, +o+, .c,, .c,, +ojy, +o, +y
Manchurian Candidate, The (+:) 8, , ++,
+j, +, :8, o, , ,c, y:, yj, , +:,
++y, .:, .,, +:, +, +j+, +j:, +j,
+j, +jj, +j, +j, +8, +, +, +j,
+
Manchurian Candidate, The (:oo) +, o,
++, +j, +, .,6
March, Fredric :8, o, 8y, +:j, +8, +,
+o, .,., +:, .,, +jo, +j
::y
Marshall, E. G. , yo
Marvin, Lee +o
Massey, Raymond :, , y, 8, jj
Matthau, Walter :, y, +jo, .,:
Meet John Doe ++, :, , ,,, , ++
Meredith, Burgess j, +:, +, +
Milius, John , j, o, +, +8
Miller, David o, 8, +y+
Missiles of October, The , y+, y
Mississippi Burning +, , , +jo
Moore, Mary Tyler j, ,., j:
Moore, Michael o, +:, +
Mr Smith Goes to Washington, 8, ++, +:, +j,
+, +y, .,, +, ::, ::, :j, :y, o, +,
, +:, ,:, , , j, , 8, , +oo,
+oj, +o, +oy, .:c, +::, +j+, +j:, +j,
+8
Mueller, Niels o, 8, +:
Murphy, Michael ++8, +
Murray, Don +j, +:y, .:,
Murrow, Edward R. +j, +, +j, +, +
My Son John :j, +:
Nashville o, ++8, +
Nasty Habits y
Neal, Patricia ++, ..,, +
Neill, Sam +
Network o, +yy
Newman, Paul ++, +8
Nichols, Mike 8, 8j
Nicholson, Jack y, , 8, +yy, +o
Niven, David jj
Nixon , ,, y, , o, , yj, ,6, S:,
8:, S
Nixon, Pat , 8
Nixon, Richard M. +, :j, o, +, :, ,
j, y, +, , yo, yj8, 8j, 88, +oo,
+o+, +o:, +o, +:j, +:, +8, +o, +y,
+8, +y+, +y8, +:
Nolte, Nick j, ,,
North and South j, j+, y8
Norton, Edward ++, .6., +:
Obama, Barack +y
OBrien, Edmond +8, .,.
OConnor, Edwin +o+, ++
ODonnell, Kenneth y
OHerlihy, Dan , +, .,:
Oldman, Gary , 8
On the Beach :, :8, +:, +:
On the Waterfront :j
Oswald, Lee Harvey y:, ++, +y
Overton, Frank .,,, +jo
Pakula, Alan J. +, +j o, +, yy, +oo, +j,
+y, +j
Parallax View, The +j, o, :, , yy, +oo,
+j:, +j, +y, .,,, +yy, +8, +8y, ++
Parker, Alan +, , +j
Parrish, Leslie +, +
Path to War yj, ,,
Peck, Gregory j, jo, , +o:
Pelican Brief, The +, +j
Pellington, Mark +j, , ++, +8j
Penn, Sean o, 8, +++, +:, .,, +y
Perot, H. Ross +oo, ++
Petersen, Wolfgang , 8, y:, 8
Pidgeon, Walter +:, .:,, +j
Pierson, Frank , +
Point of Order +
Polanski, Roman o, +yy, +
Pollack, Sydney +, +y, +, +y8, +
Pollak, Kevin +o
Power +
Preminger, Otto , :y, 8y, +oo, +:, +:y,
+:8, +:, ++, +j:, +j, +
Presidents Lady, The ,,, j
Primary Colors 8, 8j, S6
Prisoner of Shark Island, The :,
Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, The , ,
y, ++:
Project for the New American Century +y
PT .c,, , 8, 8, +y, +y8
Rains, Claude :, ,:
Rathbone, Basil +o
Raymond, Gene +
Reagan, Nancy , j:, 8j
Reagan, Ronald y, +:, +, :, :, , j,
jo, j:, 8j, 88, ++8, +o, +jy, +j8, +,
+8
Red Dawn , j, +, +8
Redford, Robert +, +, ., yy, 78, y, ++8,
+yo, +y8
Reds , +
Reiner, Rob +, , y+, 8, +j, ++
Rickman, Alan ..,, ++
Right Stuff, The y
Ritchie, Michael y, ++8, +yo
Robards, Jason ., , y8, y8o, +y, +j
Robbins, Tim, +, , , o, +, ++, ++y,
..,, ++, ++, +8
::8
Robertson, Cliff +, :y, :, 8, y, j, +,
+y, +y8
Rogers, Ginger j, +jy
Rogers, Will j, o, +oo, ++
Roosevelt, Eleanor :, , +
Roosevelt, Franklin D. y, +, :o, ::, :j, :,
, j, o, , +, , j, 8, , y,
j, +oy, +:j, +, +o, +jo, +j8, +, +8
Roosevelt, Theodore .., jo,
Rosenberg, Stuart o, +8
Rossen, Robert ++, :, +oy, +o, ++:
Rough Riders j, o
Rove, Karl +
Ryan, Robert 8, +y+, +y:, +y, +y
Salt of the Earth +
Sayles, John , o, +
Scacchi, Greta j, ,,
Schaffner, Franklin , :y, , +:, +, +j:
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr +:, +, +oy
Schreiber, Liev +j, .,6
Schulberg, Budd ++
Scorsese, Martin :, +:
Scott, George C. +jo, .,.
Seconds :y8
Secret Honor Sc, 8+:
Seduction of Joe Tynan, The +, 8, +oo, +yo
See It Now +j, +j, +, +
Sellers, Peter 8y, S,, 8
Senate Journal, .,,.,,,, A +:8
Seven Days in May , ++, +j, :8, :S, :, o,
+, :, 8, yj, y8, 8j, 8y, +:, +:j, ++,
+y, .,, .,., .,, +j, +jo, +j+, +j:,
+j, +j, +jj, +j, +8, +8o, +8, +8j,
+8y, +:, +j
Sheen, Martin j, , yo, ,c, y+, 8o, ++
Sherwood, Robert E. :,
Siege, The +, 8, +j, .S,, +8j, +8y, ++,
+j
Silver City o, ++, +, .,,, +j
Sinatra, Frank +j, :j, :6, +:, +j, +,
+, +
Sinise, Gary , 6,
Sirhan, Sirhan Bishara +j
Sklar, Zachary y
Skokie +j8
Smith, Al :
Smith, Lane S., 8:
Smith, Margaret Chase +, +
Sorkin, Aaron y+
Spartacus +:
Spielberg, Steven , j:, j, +, +8
Spirit of the People (see Abe Lincoln in
Illinois)
Stagecoach ::, +oj
Stanwyck, Barbara j,
State of the Union jy, ,6, ,,, 8
Stevenson, Adlai E. :y, :, , 8y, +, +,
+, +y, +jo
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Strode, Woody :, +o
Sturges, Preston
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Sunrise at Campobello :, , 8
Sydow, Max von +y8
Syriana o, +
Taft, William H. j, o, , j
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Thirteen Days , ,, y
Thompson, Emma 8, 8
Thornton, Billy Bob 8
Three Days of the Condor +, +y, +j:,
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To Kill a Mockingbird 8, +o:, +:
Tone, Franchot 8y, +:j, .:6, .:,
Torn, Rip 8o
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Vidal, Gore :y, j, , j+, ++, +::, ++,
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Voight, Jon +j
Wag the Dog 8, +8y, .SS, ++
Walken, Christopher y+, ++j
Walker, Edwin +, +8, +, ++
Walker, Robert :j, +:
Wall Street , ++8
Walsh, Raoul :j, :, ++:
Wanger, Walter :o
Warden, Jack y8, 8
Warfare State, The +8
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Warren, Earl +8, +y
Warren, Robert Penn :, +oy, +o8, ++
Washington, Denzel +, .,, y, +8, +j
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Welles, Orson ++, .., :o, :, 8, j, +o, ..c
West Wing, The y+, 8o, +j
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Wheeler, Harvey ++, +, +8, +, +jo
Whitmore, James o,
Widmark, Richard +, :, +, +8o
Willis, Bruce +8j, .S,
Willkie, Wendell j
Wilson o, 6:, 8, y+, +:, +j
Wilson, Woodrow o, j
Wind and the Lion, The j, o
Winfield, Paul j, , +8o
Winninger, Charles +oo+, +o:
Winter Kills o, y:, +yy
With No Apologies +:
Witness for the Prosecution +:, +:j, +:
Woods, James 8, S, ++, +
Woodward, Bob yy, 8:
Woodward, Joanne +8
World Trade Center +y
Wrye, Donald , +8
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Zaillian, Steven o, ++, +y
Zanuck, Darryl F. o, +, y+
Zinnemann, Fred :j
Zwick, Edward +, 8, +j, +8j, ++, +j

Hollywood Goes To Washington - American Politics On Screen

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Hollywood Goes

period (+:), a succession of intelligent, prestigious political lms

From Plymouth Rock to

One or more of these paradoxes can be found at the crux of many

Nevertheless, it is true that most politically themed lms

Edited by Foxit Reader

Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stones Nixon (+j).

Edited by Foxit Reader

American lm-makers have been particularly active in exploring the

Joseph Henabery as Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griths controversial epic The Birth

Instead, perhaps the most melancholy (if not actually downbeat)

Following a road accident,

parade in which pro-Communist collaborators marched with red ban-

Wilson was por-

became so associated with FDR in American popular consciousness,

Television lms featuring Dwight D. Eisenhower have alternated

The Missiles of October (+y), a TV lm directed by Anthony Page,

Stone has done history a greater service in making those sources

Other stars considered for the role had included

Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), in despair at Nortons merciless down -

Angela Lansburys performance as the manipulative media magnate Kay Thorndyke

lm is marred by the hero being abruptly gunned down at the end, as

Nonetheless, The Last Hurrah was an elegiac lm rather than a

Columbia Pictures initially wanted a box-oce heavyweight for the

Three decades after this observation, Vidal had his opportunity to

Drury projected McCarthys infamy onto a left-wing demagogue. It

The narrative has certain shortcomings, particularly in the construc-

Whoever was the prototype for Joe Cantwell, it is intriguing to imag-

Signicantly, this saga of racial

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