We borrowed the goofy phrases from our other fictional President......the current loon who rampages through the White House like a three year old on a sugar high.......the POTUS we can only dream is never seen or heard.....
Hollywood studios embraced tongue-in-cheek humor throughout the 60's, but few of them invested in all out satire........you don't see too many films standing along side "Dr.Strangelove" in terms of taking a flamethrower to government chicanery or political madness.
And we're certainly not putting "The President's Analyst" in that league.......overall, it's a slickly produced puffball piece, much closer in spirit to the James Bond spoofs of that era than to any angry attack on societal foibles.
But we always thought of it as a fine, funny time capsule of 1960's
Even with the high gloss studio sheen, writer-director Theodore J. Flicker's movie still maintains the raggedy, slapdash feel of a night at the Improv. Or a quick thumb-through of a Mad Magazine parody of global espionage.
The perfectly cast James Coburn, with his spindly, limber frame and wolfish grin, plays a New York shrink drafted into providing 24/7 couch therapy for the unseen POTUS. This strains his relationship with his pixie-dreamgirl Nan (Joan Delaney, looking like a live prototype of an Anime girl.)..........and also makes him a pawn in the tug-of-war between the country's two Intelligence agencies, the....um....heh,heh.... FBR and CEA. (We did warn you about this being a puffball piece)
His unlimited access to the Prez's innermost thoughts makes Coburn a prime surveillance subject (and kidnap target) for every spy in the world (even his beloved Pixie secretly records him.)
Consumed with legitimate paranoia, Coburn goes on the run......and encounters a variety of standard cardboard pop-up satirical stereotypes......(the right-wing gun nut family, the drug addled hippie musicians, Beatle-ish, mop-topped Brits, and an army of short-stature, dark-suited, conservatively priggish FBR agents. )
The film saves its King Sized Joke for the third act......where Coburn discovers that all the domestic and international agents arrayed against him pale in comparison to U.S.'s most supreme, all powerful entity, TPC.....The Phone Company.
TPC, as imagined here, is a vast, high tech, SPECTRE-like would-be world dominator, led by a cheerful robot (Pat Harrington) who plans to insert miniature phones in everyone's brain....(insuring TPC's ability to secretly monitor the populace and to save wear and tear on phone booths......come to think of it, isn't that what cellular phones have already accomplished?)
A perfect movie to return to this weekend.......and we got an extra laugh comparing it to today's situation........an analyst for the current President? So unnecessary ........since he publicly transmits his every unhinged thought, bright and early at 6 in the morning. We've all been forced to analyze him, whether we like it or not.......and now 70 per cent of us realize he's nuttier than a tub of Skippy's....
So we'll give 3 stars (***) for the gentle, innocent spoofery of this movie........little could its makers ever imagine the real White House horrors that lay ahead for us..........
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