Hollywood Goes to Washington - American Politics on Screen

Hollywood Goesto 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, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. 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 yµ+.¡’¡ôj8’oµy¡ rsu×-+¡: µy8 + 8ô+8µ ¡ô8 o Contents Introduction Once Upon a Nation: The Ideology of American Political Films y Chapter + American Politics, American Movies: Movie America, Movie History +µ Chapter : Hail to the Chiefs: White House and Silver Screen ¡+ Chapter ¡ Modern Presidential Parables: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Beyond ôô Chapter ¡ Country Boys and City Slickers µ+ Chapter j The ‘Brief, Shining Moment’: Political Movies in the American ‘Camelot’ +:¡ Chapter ô Enemies Within: White Hoods, Red Scares, Black Lists +jô Chapter y Conspiracy Central +ô8 Conclusion Twilight’s Last Gleaming? +µo 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, +µy:) ‘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 final ‘Top Twenty-five’ included eight presidents: John Kennedy was ranked sixteenth; Thomas Jefferson, 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. Reagan’s 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 Reagan’s symbolic resonance goes far beyond that. Reagan was uniquely qualified 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 define, 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 culture’s seductive ‘soft power’ has been, undoubtedly, the American film industry. Hollywood has, in effect, 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, +µô¡) 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, reflective of individual and societal aspirations, and – not insignificantly – 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-off in this most wonderful of all possible worlds: Hollywood’s 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 films set centrally and specifically in the milieu of American politics – foregrounding political figures (whether historical or fictional), 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, films as disparate as Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+µ¡µ), All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ), The Manchurian Candidate (+µô:), All the President’s Men (+µyô), JFK (+µµ+) and Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj) have attracted plaudits, controversy and occasionally noto- riety; but despite the enduring social and cultural significance of many political films, there are merely a few books devoted to this topic. : The genre has not yet been subject to that sustained academic attention afforded to, for example, the Western. Ample scope remains for further writing on the American political movie. 8 Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. One reason for the comparative dearth of book-length studies on films foregrounding themes, issues and protagonists specifically rooted in the milieu of US politics may be that these narratives are seldom accorded attention by film scholars as a discrete genre in the manner of, for example, the Western, the war film or the gangster movie. Many classic American films are expressly political in content without being chiefly 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 films 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 film narratives chiefly about American politics. Yet the American political film 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, film noir, ‘whodunnit’ or any one of a dozen ‘crime movie’ scenarios, the political film is essentially fluid. The genre is keenly attuned to the temper of the times, effortlessly 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 films made in the early +µôos. Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (+µô:) is a weighty melo- drama, and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (+µô:) and his Seven Days in May (+µô¡) are conspiracy thrillers. Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man (+µô¡) is a comedy-drama, firmly in ironic mode. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (+µô¡) is a scathingly satirical black comedy – while its straight-faced twin, Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (+µô¡), is as taut a thriller as the two classics directed by Frankenheimer. Advise and Consent and The Best Man are parables of pragmatism, as befits 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 µ period (+µô:–¡), a succession of intelligent, prestigious political films exhibited markedly diverse psychological approaches – and spilled over into several other genres. Thus content (characters, issues, plot details) rather than specific narrative form (melodrama, thriller, satire, morality play) establishes a movie as an American political film. American political films have featured as part of Hollywood’s out- put since the early +µ¡os. The political film 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 films mean the kiss of death at the box office, the genre has proved both protean and durable, reflecting 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 +µôos, the disillusionment and full-blown paranoia of the post- Vietnam, post-Watergate +µyos and the thrillers, satires and bio-pics of the Clinton years to the uneasy new dawn of post-µ/++ America – the political film has kept pace with, chronicled and even helped con- figure the ever-changing American political landscape. In this first 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 +µ¡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 über-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, America’s 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 (defined 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 Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. Prior to the societal tumult of the +µôos, 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 Capra’s Meet John Doe, +µ¡+), overweening megalomaniacs (Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, +µ¡+; Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men), rabble-rousers (Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, +µjy), racists (Roger Corman’s The Intruder, +µô+), strident ideologues (The Manchurian Candidate), sabre-rattlers (Seven Days in May) and gutter- fighters (The Best Man). It is important to realize from the outset that the great majority of American political films are concerned with threats to American ++ Over half a century before Forrest Gump, Orson Welles inserted his fictional protago- nist into newsreel footage with US presidents in his masterpiece Citizen Kane (+µ¡+). Here Kane (Welles) is seen with Theodore Roosevelt. Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. liberties and democracy from within. American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is different from (and, by implication, superior to) all other societies, is discernible beneath the surface of many American political films, 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 effect lasted up until the psychic trauma of µ/++. The dominant mythology of the American political film 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, Jefferson 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 +µôos, 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 difference between the milieu of Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+µ¡µ) and that of Rod Lurie’s 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 fighting the good fight sixty years later. The United States of America remains Earth’s 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 +: Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. j. Materialism versus Idealism ô. 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 film 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 defined) ideology: most American political films are broadly progressive, for example, in sympathy with ‘the little guy’ and down- trodden racial minorities. The film historian Thomas Cripps referred to this vague affiliation as ‘conscience-liberalism’, and it was vague for a reason. j The Hollywood studios stood to lose at the box office if their films 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-à-vis the potential loss of foreign markets, which in +µ¡j had derailed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s plan to film Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, depicting America under fascist rule. ô Nevertheless, it is true that most politically themed films are liberal in principle and orientation, especially when dealing with Civil Rights. Second. Issues of equality in political films, as throughout American culture, inevitably come down to issues of race. Apart from The Birth of a Nation (+µ+j), D. W. Griffith’s epic valentine to the Ku Klux Klan, American films have not been inclined towards unabashed celebrations of white supremacy. Most are in harmony with the Dec- laration of Independence’s central assertion ‘that all men are created equal’. Still, though not overtly prone to white supremacy, Hollywood’s output is often refracted through a prism of white primacy, and cer- tainly white centrality. Most American films 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 Parker’s Mississippi Burning (+µ88) and Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of +¡ Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. Mississippi (+µµô) are viewed primarily from the perspectives of white FBI agents and a white prosecuting attorney respectively. Yet most American political films tend not to address racism or race relations as principal narrative or thematic issues. Significantly, 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 +µô: and +µô¡, when the Civil Rights struggle was at its height. Moreover, very rarely have American films focused on rabid racists as central characters. Such figures are usually represented as dysfunctional personalities (Richard Widmark’s psychotic hoodlum in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out from +µjo, William Shatner’s 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 Forman’s Ragtime, +µ8+) or loyal defenders of democracy (Denzel Washington in Alan J. Pakula’s The Pelican Brief, +µµ¡; Edward Zwick’s The Siege, +µµ8; and in Jonathan Demme’s :oo¡ remake of The Manchurian Can- didate). This representation of Black heroes as occasional saviours of the Republic reaffirms the African-American role as participant and believer in the American way of life. Still, Black characters in political films can be fiercely critical of US society. The most striking example is Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (+µµ:). 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 figure from the ultra-right, such as General Edwin Walker (darling of Dallas’s far-right fringe in the early +µôos) 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 Lee’s Malcolm X (+µµ:). Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. cinema narrative (Westerns, war movies, police thrillers, gangster sagas and horror films are all ultimately concerned with precisely this dyna - mic). The plot structures of political films 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. Pakula’s The Parallax View (+µy¡), Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (+µyy) and Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road (+µµµ), 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. Conflict between conformity and diversity in American political films 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. Jefferson Smith ( James Stewart) in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Katrin Holstrom (Loretta Young) in The Farmer’s Daughter (+µ¡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 films 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 films, 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 Twilight’s 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 films do not make heroes of politicians who sell out for material gain or career advancement. Undoubtedly, the superlative idealists of +j Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. the genre are Henry Fonda’s Lincoln and James Stewart’s Jefferson Smith. By the +µyos, 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 (+µy:) and Alan Alda’s eponymous senator in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (+µyµ) remain attrac - tive, likable figures, but the entire point of these films is their implicit condemnation of those processes by which electoral politics inevitably erode personal integrity. In the Manichaean world-view of American political films, idealism is a non-negotiable demand. The first five paradoxes that Schlesinger identified as central to American history and culture are usually resolved within the American political film in favour of pragmatic and democratic experiment, equal- ity, order, diversity and idealism. Significantly, the great ogres of the genre – Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) in All the King’s Men, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury) in The Manchurian Candidate, Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson) in The Best Man and Tim Robbins as the eponymous demagogue of Bob Roberts (+µµ:), 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, Schlesinger’s sixth and final 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 effect 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 final verse of The Star-Spangled Banner, wrote: ‘may the heav’n rescued land / Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation!’ American Exceptionalism has often been popularly perceived in the United States not as a confluence of geographical, historical, social, economic and political circumstances, but rather as a God-given bequest. It is worth reflecting 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 +ô Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. political culture: America is different, 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 +µyos onwards. The underlying message of such films 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 films 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 Jefferson Smith ( James Stewart) plans to restore idealism to American politics in Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+µ¡µ). Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. dominant trends and the intriguing interrelationship between specific films, 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 films in greater detail. I began this book by quoting the opening line from the film 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 conflict still rages in Afghanistan and Iraq. Certainly, at no time since Vietnam has the United States been so divided. The American political film is presently part of the great debate on the direction of US national destiny. Its vitality and continuing relevance are clearly evident in post-µ/++ America – indeed, as old-time politicos used to say: ‘now, more than ever.’ +8 Since the early +µ¡os, the American political film has constituted an important part of Hollywood’s output. The genre has been quali tatively significant rather than quantitatively substantial, but it has served as a persistent and subtly pervasive mirror for twentieth- and now early twenty-first century American society, reflecting 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 film from the dawn of the sound era has unerringly paralleled America’s 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, µ ⁄++, Iraq and the Patriot Act +µ cn+r+ra + American Politics, American Movies: Movie America, Movie History ‘Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.’ Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (directed by Frank Capra, +µ¡µ) The Mythic / Idealistic Phase: FDR, Celebrations of Democracy, Threats of Fascism The first political films of the sound era emerged from Hollywood while America was still in the throes of the Great Depression. D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (+µ¡o) was a hagiographic treatment of the life of America’s sixteenth president starring Walter Huston. Griffith, master of the sprawling epic in the silent era (The Birth of a Nation, +µ+j; Intolerance, +µ+ô), crammed too much into this, his first sound film, which ran for only µ¡ minutes. The result was an ambitious albeit rather plodding chronicle ranging from Lincoln’s birth in a log cabin to his tragic appointment with destiny at Ford’s Theater. The final shot of the film depicted the Lincoln Memorial bathed in rays of heavenly light. Yet most film-makers in the Depression era preferred a more contemporary focus and, certainly, a less reverential approach. The year +µ¡: 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 films 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 films of +µ¡: 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 (+µ¡¡), 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 Welles’s 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. Huston’s Judd Hammond is a party hack akin to those cronies who had looted Warren Harding’s administration a decade earlier. He owes his position to the party bosses, and his first :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 Lincoln’s). 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 film) 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 profit from America’s ills and, finally, intimi- dates all the other world powers into disarmament before destroying the US fleet, thus proving good faith and guaranteeing equality in a peaceful new global order. Hammond (and, by implication, the film 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 film ends :+ Apotheosis: the end of D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (+µ¡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. Roosevelt’s Inauguration. The film was a hyper-dramatized template for presidential response to dire national emergency. Although FDR’s New Deal reforms were principally concerned with America’s eco- nomic infrastructure rather than with law and order or global security, both Hammond in Gabriel and Roosevelt in actuality provided +µ¡¡ America with the reassurance of swift, decisive, bold – indeed, radical – national leadership. The reformed Hammond also fulfils 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 difference and ensure the triumph of virtue. This faith in one good man was central to two classic films of +µ¡µ, 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 films are, in effect, 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 film as the same year’s Stagecoach was for the Western. These films were career milestones for their directors, and crucial in defining the screen images and cementing the star iconography of their leading actors, who were best friends in real life: James Stewart in Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Henry Fonda in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln. Mr Smith evokes both the Founding Fathers and Lincoln to demonstrate its :: The lone hero battling injustice: Jefferson Smith ( James Stewart) persists in his filibuster despite the indifference of his colleagues in Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+µ¡µ). young hero’s idealism and his determination to combat the ‘special - interest’ corruption he finds in the US Senate (a fictional representation, but one that aroused the fury of many real-life senators). The hero’s very name is an ingenious stroke: ‘Jefferson 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 films of +µ¡:). In convincing Henry Fonda to take the role of Lincoln, John Ford stressed that his film 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. Fonda’s Lincoln is an amiable, self-deprecating country boy with a flair for homespun wit, yet Ford cannot help but present him as virtually a secular saint on the brink of great destiny. A markedly different portrayal appeared in +µ¡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 Curtiz’s Santa Fe Trail, co-starring one Ronald Reagan.) Hollywood films of the +µ¡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, +µ¡µ). 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 Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane (+µ¡+), widely considered to be a thinly disguised bio-pic of the press baron William Randolph Hearst. It was also central to the narratives of Capra’s Meet John Doe (+µ¡+), George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame (+µ¡:) and H. C. Potter’s The Farm - er’s Daughter (+µ¡y). Yet the archetypal saga about domestic fascism was Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ). Based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men reworked the life and career of Huey Long, the dema- gogic Louisianan governor-cum-senator who was assassinated in +µ¡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. Crawford’s 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 Rossen’s All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ). It is worth bearing in mind that explicitly political films have tended to be made in eras dominated either by presidents who projected liberal activism, and whose agendas many film-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 films seemed to be largely in abeyance; and the dominant figure on the political stage in the early +µjos was not the incumbent president. If the +µjos now seem bathed in the warm glow of Dwight Eisen- hower’s grin, that is nostalgia at work. At the time, the first half of the decade was overshadowed by a much less congenial figure. 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 films (From Here to Eternity, Stalag ) and Biblical epics (Quo Vadis?, The Robe), rather than in movies focusing on contemporary politics. Films of the +µjos were bolder in certain respects, e.g., tackling institutional corruption in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (+µj¡) and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (+µj¡). Still, like Mr Smith, these films 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 films. There was a batch of explicitly anti-Communist films, mostly long on ideological intensity but short on overall quality. The most memo- rable were two from +µj:: Edward Ludwig’s Big Jim McLain, in which HUAC agent John Wayne duked it out with Commies in Hawaii; and Leo McCarey’s My Son John, in which an All-American family (named Jefferson, no less) is shocked to find that son Robert Walker is a Red. The later +µjos saw a couple of affectionate portrayals of lovable but devious old-style politicos, with Bob Hope as New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in Beau James (+µjy) and Spencer Tracy’s grand James Michael Curley-type mayor (of Boston in all but name) in John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (+µj8). Yet during the +µjos, the first amoebae of paranoia infected the genre politic. James Cagney as another Huey Long-type demagogue in Raoul Walsh’s A Lion Is In the Streets (+µj¡), Frank :j Sinatra’s chilling assassin in Lewis Allen’s Suddenly (+µj¡), Andy Griffith’s media-created monster Lonesome Rhodes (blood-brother to Willie Stark and, later, Bob Roberts) in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (+µjy) and nuclear holocaust in Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (+µjµ) all prefigured 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 first American political movie of the +µôos was Vincent J. Donehue’s Sunrise at Campobello (+µôo), a roseate valentine to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which Ralph Bellamy repeated his stage triumph as FDR, with Greer Garson portraying Eleanor Roosevelt. The film focused on the pre-presidential FDR’s battle with polio and climaxed with Roosevelt nominating Al Smith for president at the Democratic Convention of +µ:¡. The subtext and contemporary significance of this scene would certainly not have been lost on American audiences in +µôo. Smith had been the very first Catholic to secure a major party’s presidential nomination (unsuccessfully, in +µ: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’. + :ô Frank Sinatra as a gunman hired to assassinate the ts President in Lewis Allen’s chilling Suddenly (+µj¡). Kennedy’s election ushered in the all-too-brief ‘Golden Age’ of the American political film, 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 +µôos were essen- tially ‘procedural’ melodramas – sophisticated morality fables examin- ing the inner workings of American politics. Otto Preminger’s +µô: screen version of Advise and Consent toned down the ‘right-wing good, left-wing bad’ posturing from Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but the senatorial conflict over a controversial nominee for Sec- retary of State (Henry Fonda) was fundamentally a saga of honourable against dishonourable men. Similarly, Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man (+µô¡), based on Gore Vidal’s play of +µôo, pitted Stevensonesque intellectual liberal Henry Fonda vying for the presidential nomination against unscrupulous right-wing gutter-fighter Cliff Robertson. The political morality of these films 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 films of the +µôos, Advise and Consent and The Best Man resembled +µjos narratives, updated to the +µôos by the incorporation of a sensational subplot (in each case, homosexual blackmail) before finally resorting to reassuring resolutions. Other political movies of that decade were, by contrast, less con - fident about the system’s inherent ability to protect America from various doomsday scenarios. The emphasis in these films was not on political procedures, but on paranoia. At this juncture, one director distinguished himself as the American cinema’s foremost purveyor of paranoia. Between +µô: and +µôô John Frankenheimer directed a remarkable trilogy of paranoia. Although Frankenheimer’s Seconds :y A liberal hero for the early +µôos: Henry Fonda in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (+µô:). (+µôô) is not overtly concerned with political events, it is perhaps the most searing indictment of corporate fascism ever filmed. Yet the other two in that trilogy are the twin cornerstones of the conspiracy genre – the films which, more than any other, poured the paranoia into Ameri - can political movies. The Manchurian Candidate (+µô:) was an ingenious, cinematically dazzling, half-serious, half-satirical nightmare about a US military hero unknowingly programmed as an assassin. The film’s assassination plot- line was eerily prophetic, given its release so soon before the murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Frankenheimer’s next exercise in political paranoia, Seven Days in May (+µô¡), 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 films, Frankenheimer sounded warning- bells about self-styled saviours cloaked in the Stars and Stripes. Paranoia in political movies of the +µôos manifested itself in Frankenheimer’s ‘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 Kubrick’s iconoclastic Dr Strangelove (+µô¡), which concluded with the end of the world – and killed off the box-office potential of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (also +µô¡), 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 Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (+µô¡). Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. flying over Moscow and accidentally triggering an all-out nuclear war. The situation is only defused at terrible cost when the President (Henry Fonda) sacrifices New York in return for the accidental bombing of Moscow. Both films were released by Columbia, which returned yet again to the scenario of nuclear catastropher in James B. Harris’s The Bedford Incident (+µôj), as Richard Widmark’s 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 +µô¡. : Barry Goldwater was a man of absolute personal integrity, but he was prone to ill-considered, flamboyant utterances (‘I’d like to lob [a bomb] into the men’s room of the Kremlin’) that unnerved many Americans. The +µô¡ crop of liberal and anti-militaristic politi- cal films were, in part, unquestionably a negative response to his candidacy. Goldwater was nothing like Cliff Robertson’s nasty right- winger in The Best Man, or Walter Matthau’s evil intellectual Groete - schele in Fail-Safe, or Burt Lancaster’s Boulanger-in-waiting in Seven Days in May; but all of these films resoundingly repudiated his decidedly right-wing ideology and each was, in effect, a cinematic vote for Lyndon Johnson. Hence, prior to :oo¡, the year +µô¡ saw the most pronounced example of entertainment films trying to affect the outcome of a presidential election. The Paranoiac Phase: Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and its Aftermath By the end of the +µôos the American political landscape had changed beyond all recognition. That change was reflected in the new style of films, which appealed to the alienated younger generation. The America of Barry Shear’s Wild in the Streets (+µô8) and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (+µôµ) bore little resemblance to the nation of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Smith or even Willie Stark. The moviegoing con - stituency that idolized Peter Fonda as Captain America in Hopper’s film was, culturally and ideologically, light years away from his father’s portrayal of Honest Abe and those earnest Stevensonesque- Kennedyesque liberals he had played in Advise and Consent, The Best Man and Fail-Safe. :µ Yet it was only in the +µyos that paranoia finally became the domi- nant trend within the political genre. By that time, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the unwinnable, interminable and increasingly un- justifiable 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 America’s leaders and institutions. This wide- spread disillusion was a major factor in the election in +µyô 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 films which, for the first 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 films of the +µyos, the equation had changed. Thereafter, the power struc- ture itself was the threat. Thus sinister motives lurked behind grass-roots populism in Stuart Rosenberg’s WUSA (+µyo) and Robert Altman’s Nashville (+µyj), and corporate chicanery prevailed in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (+µy¡), Sidney Lumet’s Network (+µyô) and James Bridges’s The China Syn- drome (+µyµ). Yet it was natural, given recent American history, that most of the +µyos classics of paranoia dealt explicitly with assassina- tions, Vietnam or Watergate. David Miller’s Executive Action (+µy¡), scripted by former black - listee Dalton Trumbo, was a tenth-anniversary, left-wing take on JFK’s assassination, which suggested that this murder had been the work of a right-wing Texan cabal. The film ends with a voice-over, declaring that eighteen material witnesses perished, most of them by violent means, within three and a half years of Kennedy’s death. The elimination of witnesses to an assassination was also the theme of Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (+µy¡), which featured Warren Beatty as a rogue reporter who attempts to infiltrate a shadowy corporation that he suspects is responsible for politically motivated murders. Executive Action and The Parallax View were flawed but fascinating. However, William Richert’s Winter Kills (+µyµ), 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 Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. The paranoid political movie addressed the Vietnam War superbly in Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (+µyy). 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 Pentagon’s 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 America’s role in Vietnam. The result was a cruelly underrated film, and it was Aldrich’s last masterpiece. Watergate’s cultural impact was evident in the decade’s paranoid thrillers, particularly in Francis Ford Coppola’s eerie The Conversation (+µy¡) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (+µyj). Yet the political film that had the greatest impact in the +µyos dealt with Water - gate directly. Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (+µyô) framed the scandal that wrecked Richard Nixon’s presidency as a detective tale, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the reporters who tire- lessly pursue the story of a break-in all the way to the Oval Office. Clan- destine meetings in darkened garages and the palpable fear of campaign workers endowed the film 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 Hoffman, Robert Redford, Martin Balsam and Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (+µyô) (note the caricature of JFK on the shelf behind Robards/Bradlee). Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. a difference. Furthermore, in that year’s election, with Nixon’s hand- picked successor Gerald Ford as the GOP candidate, All the President’s 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 +µô¡. Yet All the President’s Men was the exception to the rule of +µyos 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 Twilight’s 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 film made in +µyô 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 film’s 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 Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (+µyô), one of the most powerful films ever made, is a classic in its own right. Yet it will forever have an additional resonance in American culture because, five years after its release, John Warnock Hinckley, Jr, a disaffected youth from a wealthy family, conflated the film’s assassination attempt with the Jodie Foster plot-line – and sought to impress that young actress by attempting to kill a former film 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 Carter’s era of energy crisis and malaise – and, above all, with j: Americans held hostage in Iran all through the election of +µ8o – 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 ¡: Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. 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 +µ8os, with the Strategic Defense Initiative as his equivalent of yô trombones. During the campaign of +µ8¡ 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 FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. Reagan’s campaign was drenched in folksy populist platitudes, proclaiming morning again in America and ‘you ain’t seen nothin’ yet’, culminating in the GOP Convention’s atrociously saccharine Ronnie ’n’ Nancy featurettes. Reagan became the Pollyanna President from Pacific Palisades, the Popcorn Messiah for America’s Second Gilded Age – the best of all possible rich, white, developed worlds. Yet part of Reagan’s political genius was his ability to evoke the ‘feel- good factor’. This, combined with his engaging personality, nullified much of the potential cultural opposition to Reagan’s brand of conser- vatism. There were still liberal-message movies being made in the +µ8os, but in many instances these condemned societal ills and injustices past or present without any indictment of Reagan. His nickname, ‘the Teflon President’, certainly held good in consideration of the cinematic output of the +µ8os. There was no sense of liberal outrage directed to- wards Reagan, as there had been against Nixon in the paranoiac films of the +µyos, and as there would later be against George W. Bush in a cluster of films from :oo¡ onwards. There were, however, hard-hitting, ambitious films criticizing the US historical record on class politics (Warren Beatty’s Reds, +µ8+); labour relations (John Sayles’s Matewan, +µ8y); foreign policy, notably in Cen- tral and South America (Costa-Gavras’s Missing, +µ8:; Roger Spottis- woode’s Under Fire, +µ8¡; Oliver Stone’s Salvador, +µ8ô; and Alex Cox’s Walker, +µ8y); and racial prejudice (Milos Forman’s Ragtime, +µ8+; Costa- Gavras’s Betrayed, +µ88; and Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, +µ88). Significantly, many of the film-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 +µ8os that one American film-maker established himself as Holly- wood’s foremost liberal critic of national hubris in both domestic and ¡¡ Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. foreign affairs. Oliver Stone chronicled the horror and tragedy of the US involvement in Vietnam in Platoon (+µ8ô), and later in Born on the Fourth of July (+µ8µ) and Heaven and Earth (+µµ¡); he excoriated the era of ‘Greed is good’ in Wall Street (+µ8y), 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 +µµos, JFK (+µµ+) and Nixon (+µµj). Stone’s panoramic visions of +µôos 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 president’s own vision. The sunny side of Main Street, USA, was a world of white picket fences, affluence and self-satisfaction (the downbeat ‘farm trilo- gy’ of +µ8¡, 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 Carter’s presidency. This angst was reflected in a series of films rewriting the outcome of Vietnam (Rambo (+µ8j), complete with famous question, ‘Do we get to win this time?’; Uncommon Valor (+µ8¡); Missing in Action (+µ8j)) or right-wing fantasies of fighting terrorists and Communists on home ground (Invasion USA(+µ8j) and John Milius’s superior but ultimately incon - clusive paean to an American resistance, Red Dawn (+µ8¡)). ¡¡ Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (+µµj). Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. 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 +µ8os, traditional-style political bio-pics had instead become a staple of television and especially of the TV mini-series for- mat first launched in the mid-+µyos. Among the most impressive of the +µyos crop had been two sagas of Nixonian shenanigans, Washing- ton: Behind Closed Doors (+µyy) and Blind Ambition (+µyµ), and King (+µy8), with Paul Winfield as Martin Luther King. Backstairs at the White House (+µyµ) featured top Black stars Leslie Uggams, Olivia Cole and Louis Gossett, Jr (all alumni of the epic Roots) as servants at +ôoo 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, affectionate and anecdotal rather than incisive or particularly revealing; and, in this respect, Backstairs prefigured the ‘Consensus History’-style, often cosy, representations of several presidents in the mini-series of the Reaganite +µ8os. Several +µ8os mini-series featured prominent portrayals of presi- dents, including: Kennedy (+µ8¡), actually a British production (from Central TV), with an impressive performance by Martin Sheen as JFK; Barry Bostwick as George Washington (+µ8¡) and reprising his role for George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (+µ8ô); Gregory Peck was excellent as Lincoln in the otherwise embarrassingly bad The Blue and the Gray (+µ8:); Hal Holbrook as Lincoln in North and South (+µ8j) and North and South, Book II (+µ8ô); and Ralph Bellamy as Franklin D. Roosevelt in The Winds of War (+µ8¡) and War and Remem- brance (+µ88). In addition to these, there was a deluge of similarly themed one-off TV films, including a large number of who-really- killed-JFK movies. Many of these were undistinguished and vacuous, or prettified 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 (+µ88), 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 Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. American political films returned to cinema screens during George H. W. Bush’s term in office. Irwin Winkler’s Guilty by Suspicion (+µµ+) was an intelligent examination of the witch-hunts of the early +µjos, an issue frequently allegorized on screen but rarely chronicled directly. Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (+µµ:) also harked back to the witch- hunts, recalling Chaplin’s clash with J. Edgar Hoover (Kevin Dunn). Tim Robbins directed and starred as Bob Roberts (+µµ:), a smooth operator who could give the populist monsters of All the King’s Men and A Face in the Crowd a run for their money. Yet probably the most significant political film of the Bush I era was the one that helped usher him out of office. Oliver Stone’s JFK(+µµ+) was not a bio-pic of John F. Kennedy, but rather a hyperbolized chron- icle of the efforts of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) to prosecute businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) for the murder of the slain President. Stone’s film not only cre- ated a clamour for the reopening of the investigation into Kennedy’s death, but it also nurtured nostalgia for a Kennedyesque hero – a signi - ficant factor in the election of Bill Clinton in +µµ:. Clinton’s 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 +µô: was a neat historical coincidence and a visualization, in Kennedy’s 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 Clinton’s presidency. Jonathan Kaplan’s Love Field, released late in +µµ: (after Clinton’s election), focused on a Texan woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) whose adoration of Jacqueline Kennedy prompts her pilgrimage to Arlington for JFK’s funeral. Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (+µµ¡) starred Clint Eastwood as a grizzled Secret Service agent haunted by his failure to prevent Kennedy’s assassination. Eastwood’s own A Perfect World (+µµ¡), co-starring Kevin Costner (hero of JFK), was set in Texas in +µô¡ shortly before that fateful trip to Dallas – the last time, according to +µµos movie mythology, that ‘a perfect world’ was pos sible. Nostalgia reigned supreme in the genre around this time, as Clinton’s first term saw the release of several political comedies: Ivan Reitman’s Dave (+µµ¡, feelgood Clinton), Rob Reiner’s The American President (+µµj, romantic Clinton) and Peter Segal’s My Fellow Americans (+µµô), a Grumpy Old ¡ô Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. 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 figures from America’s recent past. In late +µµ: Denzel Washington turned in an electrifying performance in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and Jack Nichol- son surpassed himself in Danny DeVito’s Hoffa, as the infamous Team- sters’ leader. Oliver Stone’s Nixon (+µµj) was, surprisingly, sporadically sympathetic towards its subject, while Milos Forman lionized Amer- ica’s patron saint of pornography in The People vs. Larry Flynt (+µµô). Political movie narratives of light and darkness thus coexisted uneasily during the first half of the +µµos – but the genre would become seriously schizophrenic in Clinton’s second term. The Schizophrenic Phase: Movies in the Age of Oklahoma City and Whitewater The Oklahoma City bombing on +µ April +µµj was a seismic event. The worst terrorist atrocity perpetrated on US soil prior to µ/++, 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 +µµô. 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 Clinton’s own misconduct. The transitional movie, in this respect, was Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power (+µµy), in which a US president’s philandering leads to the death of his mistress and a subsequent cover-up of this scandal by White House staff. The President, as portrayed by Gene Hackman in this film, is a sexually voracious brute, with no resemblance whatsoever to Michael Douglas’s 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 Clinton’s presidency in his second term. Nonetheless, Hackman’s extremely negative character was offset by a couple of he-man chief ¡y Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Corporation,2005-2010 For Evaluation Only. executives. Ex-fighter pilot President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) took to the skies against Martian invaders in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (+µµô), while former military hero-turned-statesman Harrison Ford was a Die Hard-style president laying waste to terrestrial terror- ists on board Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One (+µµy). Ford’s charac- ter, this film 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, +µµ8, was also the year that three corrosively cynical films about US politics went on general release. Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog had premiered in December +µµy, but was given its general release in America on µ January +µµ8. Wag the Dog floated the deliciously witty scenario of a US president who is rescued from sexual scandal by deflecting 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 effect, 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 Nichols’s Primary Colors (+µµ8), 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 +µµ: which had catapulted them into the White House. Yet political movies of the late +µµos were still governed by a broadly liberal ideology. The crop of +µµ8 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 Zwick’s 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 +µµj, and James Foley’s The Chamber (+µµô), 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 Hackman’s 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 film about domestic terrorism, however, was Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road (+µµµ), with Jeff Bridges’s 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. Jeff Bridges, Arlington Road’s tragic hero, was resurrected as the US President in the last fictional political narrative of the Clinton years, Rod Lurie’s The Contender (:ooo). Joan Allen (first-rate as Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s bio-pic of +µµj) played a gifted Senator whose nomina- tion as Vice-President was threatened by Congressional right-wingers (led by Gary Oldman); the film ended with Allen’s confirmation and the caption ‘For Our Daughters’. Yet the very last Clinton-era political film was Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days (:ooo), another slab of JFK hagio - graphy starring Kevin Costner, this time focusing on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Considering the fact that Stone’s JFK, starring Costner, may well have helped Clinton to win the White House in the first place, the Clinton-era political movie had come full circle. The Apocalyptic Phase: Bush II, µ/++, 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 fiction 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 five 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. ¡µ American film-makers have been particularly active in exploring the ramifications of these new political realities. The documentary film- maker Michael Moore has been outspoken against America’s gun cul- ture and George W. Bush’s 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 benefit of the doubt. Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon (:oo¡), John Sayles’s Silver City (:oo¡), George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (:ooj) and the remakes of two great classics, The Manchurian Candidate (directed by Jonathan Demme, :oo¡) and All the King’s Men (directed by Steven Zaillian, :ooô), are markedly wary of various con- servative, corporate and demagogic agendas, past and present. Cultural conservatives like Michael Medved may argue that these films are made by Hollywood liberals who are nurturing personal ideological agendas and are out of step with flag-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 fight. Clearly, at this juncture in US history, the political movie has become one of the crucial battlefields 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 reaffirmed) 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 difference. The presidency itself and the entire presidential election process are part of America’s 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, America’s greatest gift to any citizen, has enjoyed a symbiotic relation- ship with Hollywood movies – America’s greatest gift to the world. In +8oo John Adams, second President of the United States, and the first 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 +µôos, films depicted presidents as wise, honest, incorrupt- ible fatherly figures 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 Lincoln’s 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 Heflin) in Tennessee Johnson (directed by William Dieterle, +µ¡¡) ground, he rose through law practice and one term in Congress to the presidency at the time of America’s greatest crisis. He preserved the Union by presiding over the North’s victory in the Civil War. He exem- plified 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. Unifier. Lincoln is America’s own Christ-like hero, actually assassinated on Good Friday. It is all the stuff of myth, enshrined on screen as early as +µ+j in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Griffith 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 film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Yet its representation of Abraham Lincoln is of a wise, restrained, sympathetic and virtually saintly figure. 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 Stone’s 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 +µ:¡: Phil Rosen’s The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln and John Ford’s The Iron Horse. Ford, especially, would pay tribute to Lincoln and his memory in several films throughout his long directorial career. Apart from The Iron Horse, Lincoln was represented in Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (+µ¡ô), Young Mr Lincoln (+µ¡µ) and his ‘Civil War’ segment of How the West Was Won (+µô:). Ford also referenced Lincoln in two revisionist West- erns of the early +µôos, Sergeant Rutledge (+µôo) and Cheyenne Autumn (+µô¡); and Lincoln’s portrait looms in the background as the Black actor Woody Strode rises in James Stewart’s makeshift schoolroom to recite ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ’ in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (+µô:). The Iron Horse was thus only Ford’s first filmic valentine to Lincoln, but his brief physical appearance in the story is underscored by his heavyweight spiritual significance. Lincoln (played here by Charles Edward Bull) is a ‘guardian angel’ to ¡: the young lovers in their childhood; he is a visionary, applauding the hero’s father’s 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 unification (linking the railways) and national unity (bind- ing the wounds of the Civil War) at picture’s end. The final 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 figure. The same theme con- cludes D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (+µ¡o), Young Mr Lincoln and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (+µ¡o). Lincoln is the only president in American history with his own recurring on-screen signature tune. Lincoln’s cinematic stock was especially high in the +µ¡os, begin- ning with Griffith’s bio-pic of +µ¡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. Griffith’s controversial epic The Birth of a Nation (+µ+j). Johnson’s superior television film Lincoln (+µ88), based on the novel by Gore Vidal, centres on his presidency and the blood-soaked tragedy of the Civil War. The trouble with Griffith’s film is that it attempts to cover all these stages – and in only µ¡ minutes. Consequently, there is little depth to the film, so that it represents history as ‘one damn thing after another’. The effect is akin to flicking 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 fixture of +µ¡os period dramas. The actor Frank McGlynn, Sr, virtually made a career of playing Lincoln (e.g., David Butler’s The Littlest Rebel, +µ¡j; Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plains- man, +µ¡ô; and Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island). John Carradine, often a shady character in Ford’s films (ideal for, but never cast as, John Wilkes Booth), played Lincoln for Clarence Brown’s Of Human Hearts (+µ¡8). Lincoln was also regularly invoked to symbolize the frontier spirit in pre-war epic Westerns (DeMille’s The Plainsman, +µ¡ô; his Union Pacific, +µ¡µ; and Michael Curtiz’s Virginia City, +µ¡o). ¡¡ Walter Huston in D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (+µ¡o). The portrait in the back- ground underscores the spiritual connection between George Washington as Founding Father and Lincoln as America’s Saviour. The year +µ¡µ 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 films which celebrated and sanctified the Lincoln legend. Young Mr Lincoln is one of John Ford’s best-loved films. Henry Fonda became a star of the first rank following his portrayal of Lincoln as a humorous but shrewd young lawyer defending two brothers falsely accused of murder. Ford’s Lincoln is a paean to all the classic grass-roots American virtues: motherhood (in the simple goodness of Alice Brady’s Mrs Clay), patriotism (reverence for the veterans of the Revolution), sincere devotion to morality over legality (Lincoln’s 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 Ford’s movies featuring Will Rogers. Fonda’s 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 Ford’s Theater: Kay Hammond and Walter Huston in Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. Ford’s folksy warmth is the inescapable sense of Lincoln’s 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 significance beyond the remit of the movie’s 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 film 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 +µ¡µ, with war brewing in Europe. The second bio-pic, released in the United States on +: February +µ¡o – Lincoln’s 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 film pos- sesses an eerie quality not readily apparent in Young Mr Lincoln. Ford’s film is essentially bathed in light, whereas Cromwell’s is shrouded in encroaching darkness. Massey’s Lincoln is good-humoured but deeply tortured. Like Griffith’s bio-pic, but unlike Ford’s, Cromwell does not shrink from those emotional torments which drove Lincoln to jilt Mary Todd (Ruth Gordon) on their first arranged wedding day. In another ¡ô Storm clouds gathering: Henry Fonda in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (+µ¡µ). scene, a kitchen-maid says: ‘If they get him back there into Washing- ton, he won’t never come out alive!’, provoking a startled reaction from Lincoln’s wife. Abe Lincoln in Illinois is more concerned with the cut and thrust of political campaigning than Ford’s film; rightly so, centring as it does on the more mature Lincoln. Massey, in finest 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 film 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 final 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 Lincoln’s. So powerful was Massey’s association with the role that, :: years later, Young Mr Lincoln’s 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 first-rank Western star, appeared in the more substantial role of a frontier scout). In any case, Abe Lincoln in Illinois has suffered rather unfair neglect in comparison with Ford’s film, and it surely merits revival and reappraisal. Young Mr Lincoln is certainly more optimistic, warm and suffused with a nostalgic glow, whereas Abe Lincoln in Illinois seems cold and stark by comparison. Significantly, the most ominous scene scripted for Young Mr Lincoln never made it into the final print, as Ford informed Peter Bogdanovich during an interview in +µôô: 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 who’ve failed at everything else. There’s school-teaching – and politics. LINCOLN: I’ll take school-teaching. You go into politics and you may get elected, then you gotta go to the city, and I don’t want none o’ that . . . GRAHAM: What’s your objection to cities, Abe? Y’ever seen one? LINCOLN: Sure. I been down river to New Orleans. D’you know, every minute o’ the time I was there, I was scared? I was scared of people. GRAHAM: Did you imagine that they’d rob you of all your gold and your jewels? LINCOLN: No. I was scared they’d kill me. Fonda’s Lincoln, the courtroom crusader for justice, is conceivably an idealistic and iconic progenitor of Atticus Finch, the heroic small- town lawyer of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird (published in +µôo); Massey’s Lincoln, by contrast, is more akin to Mockingbird’s 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 +µ¡os film was in Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel Over the White House (+µ¡¡). 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 Lincoln’s, for good measure. He opts to use the powers of his office 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 Lincoln’s 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, Lincoln’s spirit hung over his suc cessor in William Dieterle’s Tennessee Johnson (+µ¡¡). Van Heflin’s 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 Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (+µô:), the McCarthyite Senator Iselin ( James Gregory) constantly utilizes Lincolnesque iconography. In one scene Iselin is glimpsed studying himself in the reflection 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 Iselin’s study there is a bust of Lincoln and even a lampshade shaped like Abe’s 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 (+µ8y), directed by Donald Wrye, conceptualized a Soviet takeover of the United States. And perhaps the most chilling scene in the entire production was the ¡µ parade in which pro-Communist collaborators marched with red ban- ners bearing Lincoln’s portrait – next to Lenin’s. j By the +µ8os celluloid representations of America’s political past had shifted largely to television. At first 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 affinity for recasting American history through the roseate prism of Hollywood. So, with a former movie star as president, why weren’t 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 films 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-+µyos onward, politically themed films and mini-series flowed from the networks. Several of these productions featured Abraham Lincoln. Gregory Peck’s cameo as Lincoln was virtually the sole redeeming feature of the atrociously inept The Blue and the Gray (+µ8:). Hal Hol- jo The ostensibly patriotic but secretly treacherous Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury) and her husband are surrounded by Lincolnian iconography in John Frankenheimer’s +µô: classic The Manchurian Candidate. brook had portrayed Sandburg’s Lincoln (+µyj), and he often played US presidents during the +µ8os (fictional characters in The Kidnapping of the President, +µ8o, and Under Siege, +µ8ô, and as John Adams in George Washington, +µ8¡). Holbrook featured prominently as Lincoln in North and South (+µ8j) and North and South, Book II (+µ8ô). Yet the empha- sis therein was as much on bodice-ripping melodrama as on political intricacies. In +µ88, however, a three-hour TV film yielded the finest dramatic portrait of the sixteenth President since the pre-Pearl Harbor paeans of Young Mr Lincoln and Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Lamont Johnson’s Lincoln, based on the novel by Gore Vidal, might conceivably be considered the most accomplished filmic 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 Vidal’s novel Lincoln (dir. Lamont Johnson, +µ88). rivals – and that is in addition to those Southern States in rebellion. Lincoln is exceptionally good in charting the new President’s 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 Winfield Scott, David Leary as General George B. McClellan), with James Gammon’s dependable General (and future President) Ulysses S. Grant a welcome relief from the self-serving inactivity which blighted McClellan’s command of the Union troops. Yet one of President Lincoln’s 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 ( Jeffrey 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 husband’s agreement to Herndon’s request, but Lincoln replies: ‘If you cain’t commit nepotism for an old law partner, what’s 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 +µ8os, 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 fills up this room, and now it’s near to drowning me!’). However, even this impressive TV film 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-fifth 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 films through the decades. We are concerned here with films in which Amer- ican presidents have figured centrally or, at least, significantly. George Washington featured as a supporting character in a number of silent-era epics, including D. W. Griffith’s America (+µ:¡), but he was not appropriately lionized on celluloid until the +µ8os; and, even then, that was on television, rather than in a theatrically released feature. Barry Bostwick portrayed the General in the +µ8¡ mini-series George Washington (first in war) and then reprised the role in the +µ8ô sequel focusing on his years in the White House, George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (first in peace). Other actors have played the role with varying degrees of success. Peter Graves registered authoritatively, albeit briefly, in the +µyµ mini-series The Rebels. However, Kelsey Grammer’s Washington in the :oo¡ TV film Benedict Arnold: A Ques- tion of Honor is often unpleasantly reminiscent of the actor’s 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 final 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 stuff 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 +µj:, and he went on to play several members of the Adams clan throughout the +µyos. He played John Adams in the +µy: musical , then later marked the Bicentennial by portraying John Quincy Adams in the thir- teen-part TV series The Adams Chronicles (+µyô). He was Samuel Adams in the +µy8 mini-series The Bastard, and then played John Adams in the next year’s sequel, The Rebels. (Intriguingly, his very next assignment thereafter was as G. Gordon Liddy in George Schaefer’s j¡ TV mini-series of Blind Ambition, +µyµ). Besides Daniels’s sterling efforts on behalf of the entire family, the Adamses were best served on screen by Hal Holbrook’s cameo as pre-presidential John opposite Bost- wick’s George Washington, and by Anthony Hopkins’s tour de force as post-Presidential John Quincy in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (+µµy) – in which, by contrast, Nigel Hawthorne’s incumbent President Martin Van Buren appears appallingly precious and ineffectual. Third president Thomas Jefferson was an intellectual colossus – but, again, this is not the stuff 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 Jefferson in Paris (+µµj). James Ivory’s film centred on Jefferson’s pre-Presidential career as America’s first ambassador to France, and had more emphasis on his potential and putative love affairs 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, Jefferson is harangued by his own daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) about the injustice and inequity of the ‘peculiar institution’, and the film ends with the future president vowing to give Sally’s restive brother his freedom. Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, was beset by romantic troubles of a different order in Frank Borzage’s lively costume melodrama Magnificent Doll (+µ¡ô). Burgess Meredith’s 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 Madison’s shy admiration, Dolley j¡ Nick Nolte as Thomas Jefferson and Greta Scacchi as Maria Cosway in James Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris (+µµj). 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, Magnificent Doll is Hollywood’s sole memorial to Madi- son – a filmic fate marginally better than that of the fifth President, James Monroe, who has effectively been forgotten by US sound-era cinema. The pre-Lincoln era president who has received the most cinematic attention was the first to be ratified by popular election: Andrew Jack- son. Just as Raymond Massey’s performance as Abe Lincoln in Illinois made him a natural choice to play Lincoln in How the West Was Won, in Jackson’s case two actors portrayed this rambunctious icon of early American history so effectively that each one returned to the role a number of years later. Lionel Barrymore played Old Hickory in Clarence Brown’s The Gor- geous Hussy (+µ¡ô). The central focus was on Jackson’s glamorous, spir- ited young friend Peggy Eaton ( Joan Crawford), whose social ostracism at the hands of the Washington elite prompted Jackson’s 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 (Whitfield Connor) while fighting for the honour of his beloved Rachel (Susan Hayward), in Henry Levin’s The President’s Lady (+µj¡). had hounded his beloved wife Rachel (Beulah Bondi) to death. In +µj: Barrymore’s 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 Sherman’s 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 Levin’s The President’s Lady starred Charlton Heston as a youthful Jackson, falling hard and fighting even harder for the honour of Rachel (Susan Hayward). The film concludes poignantly with Jackson newly inaugurated but personally devastated by Rachel’s recent death, leaving him to go forward and serve his country alone. Heston was to return as Jackson, nicknamed ‘Old Hawk- face’, in Anthony Quinn’s The Buccaneer (+µj8), a remake of the +µ¡8 adventure directed by Quinn’s then father-in-law, Cecil B. DeMille. The top-billed hero of Quinn’s film was Yul Brynner’s swashbuckling pirate, Jean Lafitte, whose aid to Jackson proved crucial to America’s 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 President’s 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 Hawthorne’s effete characterization in Amistad), William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Knox Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Honest Abe’s successor, however, was the subject of a +µ¡¡ bio-pic directed by William Dieterle and starring Van Heflin in perhaps the finest performance of his career. Tennessee Johnson told the tale of Andrew Johnson, a runaway tailor’s 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 filmic ruminations on American history and politics: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (+µô:). Like James Stewart’s earnest young lawyer in Ford’s classic, Heflin’s 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 jô jy champion of law and order – although, whereas Stewart in Valance abhorred the idea of gunplay but finally came round to acknowledge its inevitability (‘When force threatens, talk’s no good any more!’), the biggest mistake of Johnson’s 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 (‘It’s our fish in the stream, our flag on the fort’), Johnson is elected sheriff, 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 fights for the Union in the Civil War; lead Lincoln to choose him as his vice-presidential candidate in +8ô¡; and, finally, catapult him into the White House following Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater. A crucial subplot of Tennessee Johnson, as in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, is the hero’s 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 husband’s innate if untapped potential. Significantly, 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 film. Curiously for this genre, but accurately in this context, the hero of Tennessee Johnson starts out as a political opponent of Lincoln’s. We hear Johnson, as a Jacksonian Democrat, enthusiastically declaring that he hopes Lincoln will be defeated in the +8ôo 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 President’s 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 firm believer in Honest Abe’s goodness and righteousness. The film reinforces its perception of Lincoln as set apart from and implicitly above other men by keeping him off-camera in much the same way as Charlton Heston is allowed to behold the face of Christ in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (+µjµ), 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 Eliza’s encouraging words also attest to the film’s 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 film’s most explicit contemporary parallel. Audiences of +µ¡¡ could easily have compared ‘Tennessee’ Johnson’s description of Emperor Napoleon III with a warning about Hitler: While we were fighting 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 fleets 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 fine, 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 jµ background of many Westerns, such as John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (+µjµ) and his ‘Civil War’ episode of How the West Was Won. Yet no major film has focused on Grant front and centre – despite Ford’s own best efforts to get such a project off the ground, as he told Peter Bogdanovich: ‘I’ve always wanted to do a feature on Grant – I think it’s one of the great American stories – but you can’t do it. You can’t show him as a drunkard, getting kicked out of the Army.’ ô Nor do any bio-pics lionize the lives of that obscure run of late nine- teenth-century presidents: Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison – although twenty-fifth President William McKinley was a secondary but pivotal character (played by Frank Conroy) in the Robert Taylor-Barbara Stanwyck film This Is My Affair (+µ¡y). That very fine actor Brian Keith appeared as McKinley in the mini-series Rough Riders, shortly before his death in +µµy. 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 effect as Theodore Roosevelt in his epic The Wind and the Lion (+µyj). 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 Hollywood’s version of history. This was the man who transformed his hitherto relatively cloistered high office 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 first president to boost his image through significant use of newsreel film and recordings of his voice. y In a life crammed with adventure out West, personal tragedy (he lost his first wife and his mother on the same day), the heroism of San Juan Hill, the drama of acceding to the presidency after McKinley’s 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 first president to appear on film, 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 Keith’s supporting turn in The Wind and the Lion is the high point of Holly- wood’s engagement with Theodore Roosevelt. Sidney Blackmer played TR in This Is My Affair in +µ¡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 Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (+µ¡¡), then essayed the genuine article for the Bob Hope comedy Fancy Pants (+µjo). Teddy’s 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 (+µy8, 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 (:ooô); but that is about it. The John Milius epics of +µyj and +µµy (the latter made for television) are the most ambitious productions to feature the first 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. Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, and the three Repub- lican presidents of the +µ:os, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, received no major celluloid treatment prior to the +µyµ 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 Stone’s 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 à la Theodore Roosevelt. Henry King’s Wilson (+µ¡¡), a labour of love by Twentieth Century- Fox supremo Darryl F. Zanuck, was a sumptuous but soporific paean to America’s twenty-eighth President, filmed in stunning Technicolor in an era when politically themed films 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 conflict in the spring of +µ+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 ratification of the League of Nations. He was ôo ô+ thwarted by a bloc of Republican senators concerned about the over - extension of US blood and treasure in a never-ending flood of far-off foreign wars. Wilson’s nationwide tour campaigning on behalf of the League wrecked his health and he suffered a stroke. Thereafter, his wife Edith (Geraldine Fitzgerald) supervised and limited the President’s administrative workload. The Democrats lost the election of +µ: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 America’s decision to remain aloof from the League had contributed to the outbreak of World War II. His hagiographic salute to Wilson’s doomed idealism effectively 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. µ 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- berg’s 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 floodlit boxing-ring during the +µ: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 flag is not only the flag of America, but the flag of humanity. Wilson’s decency shines through in his pithy exchanges (‘I haven’t thought to consider this war in terms of dollars and cents . . . It’d 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 wouldn’t have to do the fighting’). Yet, when it comes to public speechifying, Knox’s Wil- son (however accurately) is too cold, stiff and preachy to be appealing. The film 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 first wife – and there are the customary invocations of earlier presidential heroes. Just before announcing America’s 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, America’s great Founding Father and her Christ figure. 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, Wilson’s central conflict 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 Heflin’s plebeian hero arouses audi- ence sympathy. Yet the battle between Wilson and Lodge is a conflict ô: Alexander Knox as Woodrow Wilson on the campaign trail in producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s often too-stately hagiography of the :8th President, Wilson (dir. Henry King, +µ¡¡). 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 five, but lost out on Best Director, Best Actor and Best Film to Leo McCarey’s and Bing Crosby’s popular triumph Going My Way (+µ¡¡). Despite lavish production values and enthusiastic reviews, Wilson is not revered or remembered with affection 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 misfired 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 +µ+:: ‘Teddy Roosevelt’s a Harvard man. Bill Taft’s from Yale. And I’d give five 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 affliction with polio to attain the greatest prize in American political life. In FDR’s case, the tragedy of ill health preceded his presidency. Vincent J. Donehue’s Sunrise at Campobello (+µôo) starred Ralph Bellamy (reprising his stage role) as FDR and Greer Garson as Eleanor Roosevelt. Unlike Tennessee Johnson, Wilson or Oliver Stone’s Nixon, but akin to Jefferson in Paris, Young Mr Lincoln, Abe Lincoln in Illinois and John F. Kennedy’s wartime exploits in PT  (+µô¡), Sunrise at Campobello focused not on a president’s term in office 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 FDR’s battle with polio (as did Joseph Sargent’s :ooj television film 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 film’s detriment. Moreover, appearing at the dawn of the ideologically con- tentious +µôos, Sunrise was virtually the last hagiographic presidential bio-pic, followed in this respect solely by PT . Ralph Bellamy ô¡ 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 +µ8os. Franklin D. Roosevelt has been lionized in other high-quality tele- vision productions, most notably Eleanor and Franklin (+µyô) and its sequel Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (+µyy), both directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann in the title roles, and FDR: The Last Year (+µ8o), directed by Anthony Page and starring Jason Robards. FDR also featured as a supporting character in two +µyy movie bio-pics of controversial right- wing icons of the Cold War era. Real-life blacklist victim Howard Da Silva portrayed FDR in Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (with Broderick Crawford as Hoover), while Dan O’Herlihy essayed Roosevelt in Joseph Sargent’s MacArthur, the Rebel General, which starred Gregory Peck in the title role. Ed Flanders portrayed Harry Truman, MacArthur’s nemesis, opposite Peck. Flanders had already played Truman in two television productions of +µyô, George Schaefer’s Truman at Potsdamand Daniel Petrie’s Plain Speaking (and in +µ8: he supplied Truman’s voice for Terence Young’s Inchon, the epic misfire financed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon). E. G. Marshall registered strongly as Truman in Anthony Page’s +µyô TV movie, Collision Course: Truman vs. MacArthur (with Henry Fonda as the General). Truman’s historical stock had risen considerably by the mid-+µyos. 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 Whitmore’s Oscar-nominated one-man show Give ’Em Hell, Harry! (+µyj), directed by Steve Binder and Peter H. Hunt. Essentially a filmed recording of a two-act play, Whitmore’s superbly entertaining tour de force was Oscar-nominated but lost out to Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Still, this little-seen and rarely revived movie afforded a refreshing reminder of the candour and moral character which ought to characterize the occupant of the White House. Twenty years later, Frank Pierson’s superior TV bio-pic Truman (+µµj) echoed that endorsement, with a first-class perform- ance from Gary Sinise (who then went on to play a more abrasive Southern politician in the title role of John Frankenheimer’s George Wallace in +µµy). ô¡ Television films featuring Dwight D. Eisenhower have alternated between the wartime and peacetime phases of his career. The +µyµ mini-series Ike, directed by Boris Sagal and Melville Shavelson, with Robert Duvall, and Robert Harmon’s TV film Ike: Countdown to D- Day (:oo¡), with Tom Selleck, were tributes to the General. Ike, as president, was a supporting fixture in several TV dramas. Andrew Dug- gan played Ike in Jud Taylor’s Tail Gunner Joe (+µyy), Robert E. Collins’s J. Edgar Hoover (+µ8y) and Michael O’Herlihy’s Backstairs at the White House (+µyµ). 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 +µô+. Maggie has died. Lillian decides to retire, having grown old in the service of eight presidents. As she leaves at the end of Eisenhower’s second term, the White House is bathed in sunlight, and the old woman walks away, to the echo of the Inaugural exhortation of America’s new President: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’ ôj The headline that got it wrong: Gary Sinise as Truman (dir. Frank Pierson, +µµj). The era from John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Inauguration to Richard Nixon’s resignation has had an unparalleled hold on the imagination of modern America. The +µôos had initially appeared to herald a new op- timism and idealism, but the pervasive influence of television made Kennedy’s murder an instantaneous global trauma. It was the first act in a national nightmare that lasted a decade. Within a year, race riots had begun to erupt in major US cities, and flames would engulf more than a hundred of them before the +µôos 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 +µô8 – and LBJ was hounded from office, a broken man denounced as a child killer. Yet, far from ‘bringing us together’ as he had promised in the election of +µô8, Johnson’s 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 +µô¡ 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 America’s 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. It’s 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, +µô¡) ôô ôy John Fitzgerald Kennedy: America’s Prince Charming If John Kennedy had not existed, Hollywood might have been hard pressed to invent him. He was the first 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 stuff 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 America’s 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 world’s richest nation. Young war hero who became his era’s greatest hope for peace, but vigilant in America’s 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 JFK’s 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 Kennedy’s list of priorities dur- ing the election of +µôo. 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, Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ and Johnson’s ‘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 sanctified 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 matinée idol – like his Rat Pack friends, the epitome of early +µôos ‘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 +µôos. The celluloid lionization of Kennedy had begun while he was still alive. Cliff Robertson played Lieutenant John F. Kennedy in Leslie H. Martinson’s PT  (+µô¡), based on the Robert J. Donovan book chronicling Kennedy’s 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 Kennedy’s 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 Ford’s naval comedy Mister Roberts (+µjj). In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, two impressive documen- taries were released: Mel Stuart’s Four Days in November (+µô¡) and Bruce Herschensohn’s John F. Kennedy:Years of Lightning, Day of Drums (+µôô). The latter was originally conceived solely for exportation over- seas and not intended for exhibition to US audiences. The next major Kennedy-related feature film did not appear until a full decade after his death. David Miller’s Executive Action (+µy¡) 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 film was (perhaps understandably, with memories still too raw) both a critical and a commercial failure. ô8 ôµ The Missiles of October (+µy¡), a TV film 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 figures, which might render both their CVs and the political genre itself a shade confusing. Da Silva, for example, also played Benjamin Franklin in  (+µy:) and later FDR in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (+µyy). 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 +µyos and ’8os it was chiefly American televi- sion rather than cinema which celebrated the multi-faceted Kennedy mystique. The epic mini-series Captains and the Kings (+µyô), based on the novel by Taylor Caldwell and directed by Douglas Heyes, trans- posed the Kennedy family saga to the nineteenth century. Richard Jordan’s 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 first 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 +µ+:. Gilbert Cates directed Paul Rudd as the young JFK on the road to his first Congressional victory in Johnny, We Hardly KnewYe (+µyy). William Jordan played JFK in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, then reprised the role for Abby Mann’s mini-series King (+µy8), which featured a superb central performance from Paul Winfield as Martin Luther King. James Franciscus’s President James Cassidy was clearly based on JFK in J. Lee Thompson’s film The Greek Tycoon (+µy8), and then in +µ8+ Franciscus reappeared as Kennedy sans pseudonym for Steve Gethers’s TV film Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. One may have imagined the topic of the Kennedys would have been thoroughly exhausted by the early +µ8os – but a new prestige production was just around the corner. Kennedy (+µ8¡) was a five-hour super-production directed by Jim Goddard and produced by Britain’s Central Independent Television station, with Martin Sheen as JFK. This epic spanned the entirety of Kennedy’s presidency, from his wafer-thin victory over Richard Nixon in +µôo 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 conflict in Vietnam – and even JFK’s 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 Sheen’s 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 first-rate: Blair Brown as Jacqueline, John Shea as Bobby and, as JFK’s 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 Nixon’s 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, +µ8¡). y+ Wilson, in Zanuck’s 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 Sheen’s 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 :ô countries on three consecutive nights, :o–:: November +µ8¡, the final episode screening on the twentieth anniversary of the martyred president’s death. Only a month before this had come the movie premiere of David Cronenberg’s compelling psycho-political chiller The Dead Zone (+µ8¡), 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 film was playing as Sheen’s 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 Stone’s JFK(+µµ+), hence evok- ing the memory of his Kennedy credentials from the +µ8¡ mini series. Additionally, Sheen later co-starred as the Chief of Staff to liberal President-as-romantic-hero Michael Douglas in Rob Reiner’s The American President (+µµj), written by Aaron Sorkin; and it is at the centre of Sorkin’s 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 (+µµµ–:ooô), Sheen’s character is liberal, intellectual, witty, charming – and the first ‘officially’ 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 Office, though the appeal of the series unquestion- ably goes far deeper than that. Part of the show’s appeal is that Sheen’s President Bartlet is as close as the world will ever come to getting Jack Kennedy back. Moreover, given that Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez has recently written and directed Bobby (:ooô), a Robert Altmanesque tribute to JFK’s slain brother, whom Sheen had played in The Missiles of October back in +µy¡, the Sheen dynasty’s on-screen association with the Kennedy dynasty has, in effect, come full circle. Nonetheless, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s 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 Richert’s Winter Kills (+µyµ), based on a novel by Richard Condon of Manchurian Candidate renown, was the first cinema feature since Executive Action to enquire into the ultimate responsibility for the crime. The protagonists were fictional, albeit clearly based on the Kennedys, and the final denouement was as shocking as it was implausible: the slain President’s über-rich father (John Huston) financed the killing. Television film hypotheses included The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (+µyy), co-directed by Gordon David- son and David Greene, which imagined Oswald’s survival and the sub- sequent trial proceedings; and Michael Lerner and Frederic Forrest as the leads of Mel Stuart’s Ruby and Oswald (+µy8). On the big screen, the JFK assassination turned out to be the dark secret at the heart of William Tannen’s Flashpoint (+µ8¡); Danny Aiello gave a sympathetic portrayal as the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald in John MacKenzie’s Ruby (+µµ:); and failure to prevent Kennedy’s murder was the back story that haunted Clint Eastwood’s veteran Secret Service agent in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (+µµ¡). Yet, undoubtedly, the most ambitious, and aspiring to be the definitive cinematic take on the assassination, was Oliver Stone’s JFK (+µµ+). 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 difficult to perceive the seams. Some fine 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 Kennedy’s mythology persists that he was a latter-day Great Emanci- pator, his acolytes at the flame 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 prettification of Kennedy’s true role. Stone’s 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 fiasco in +µô+, 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 Johnson’s war was largely an extension, not a betrayal, of Kennedy’s 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 Stone’s 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 film. Bruce Greenwood as President John F. Kennedy in Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days (:ooo). Arguably, JFK’s most significant 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 Clinton’s tarnished administration was drawing its last breath. Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days (:ooo) focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Bruce Greenwood as JFK, Steven Culp as Robert Kennedy (on whose memoir this film was based) and Costner as the presidential aide Kenny O’Donnell. 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 first place, it is hard to guess what this (admittedly well-made) film 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 film in :ooo. Third, the historical reputation being revised upwards here is not Jack Kennedy’s, but Kevin Costner’s, following a string of box - office flops. Here, real-life Republican Costner reprises the persona of his Kennedy devotee from JFK. Again, he’s got the loving, long - suffering wife he doesn’t spend enough time with because he’s politi- cally dedicated. Again, he’s the father who has a cutesy, cloying relation ship with his large brood. And, again, he’s the Kennedy acolyte par excellence, this time with an ersatz Boston accent instead of an ersatz Southern accent. The underlying message of this film 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 Moffat played him as a buffoon in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (+µ8¡). Randy Quaid, who bears an uncanny resem- blance to Johnson, starred in Peter Werner’s TV film LBJ: The Early Years (+µ8y). But the finest performance has come from yet another non- American actor, the Irish Michael Gambon, in John Frankenheimer’s y¡ yj Michael Gambon played Lyndon Baines Johnson in Path to War (:oo:), director John Frankenheimer’s swan-song. Path to War (:oo:). Made for television, it was the final film from the great director of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. While acknowledging LBJ’s 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 Stone’s JFK. Yet Lyndon John- son is, for the foreseeable future, likely to remain perceived in popular culture as a crude and devious usurper – flanked 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 Stone’s Nixon (+µµj), 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 Stone’s JFK– and, significantly, is powerfully suggestive of Nixon’s self-loathing and his deeply engrained inferiority complex. Yet in one respect, this fanciful utterance is way off the mark. Yes, Kennedy gave Americans an idealized image to aspire to; but Richard Nixon did not reflect what the American people truly were, or are. Rather, Nixon’s 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, fit to follow in the footsteps of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. But Nixon changed all that. Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower had been reliable father figures; 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 first 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 office 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 Adams’s hope and Abraham Lincoln’s 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 Office wallowing in the worst kind of profanity (including the Oedipal appel- lation). Film-makers who have lionized Lincoln have been able to yô Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) stands before the portrait of his old rival John Kennedy in a melancholy moment near the end of Oliver Stone’s Nixon (+µµj). 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 first major film about Nixon was not, in the strictest sense, about Nixon at all. Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (+µyô), 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 President’s Men is assuredly the central film in the Wa- ter gate canon, in the same way that JFK is now perceived as the most significant film statement on the Kennedy assassination. Also, like JFK, All the President’s Men consists in large part of long, detailed and often complex conversations concerning the unseen but central figure in the White House. No actor plays Nixon in the film. Instead, the stars are Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Part detective story, part buddy-movie (scripted by William Goldman, who had penned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), All the President’s Men teams the clean-cut All-American WASP Republican (Redford as Woodward) with a pushy, persistent, (semi-)long-haired hustling Jew- ish liberal (Hoffman 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 finally 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 (+µy¡), one of the finest +µyos movies about assassinations, conspiracy and paranoia. All the President’s Men expertly recaptured a kindred sense of oppressive paranoia, not least in Woodward’s 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 Hoffman 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 bird’s-eye perspective, dwarfing our intrepid young heroes until they are little more than specks on the screen. Yet the most significant image in All the President’s Men owed nothing to top- drawer performances or virtuoso camerawork. A televised excerpt from the Republican Convention of +µy: 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 +µy¡, had granted Nixon a full presidential pardon. Ford was the Republican nominee for president in the year of All the President’s Men’s release – and the inclusion of that clip, implicitly linking him to Nixon, surely did Ford no favours on polling day. All the President’s Men’s 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 Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, but Robards’s finest 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 +µy:, declaring Richard Nixon as the Republican presidential nominee. This snippet from Alan J. Pakula’s +µyô film All the President’s Men might have hurt Ford’s own candidacy in that year’s election. Robert Redford is seated off to the right. yµ +µyy witnessed the release of several Watergate-related productions. Even the tyrannical anti-hero of Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover was astounded by Nixon’s hubris and surreptitious ille- galities. Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Nasty Habits, based on Muriel Spark’s satirical novel of +µy¡, The Abbess of Crewe, hilariously recast the Watergate scandal in a convent. Glenda Jackson’s 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 Mercouri’s globe-trotting, peacemaking nun clearly parodied Henry Kissinger. As the movie ends, the disgraced Alexandra leaves America, stoically declaring in true Nixonian fashion: ‘You won’t have Alexandra to kick around any more.’ The finest dramatic reconstruction of Nixon’s presidency, however, was a TV mini-series which rates as one of the greatest political melodramas ever filmed. Washington: Behind Closed Doors (+µyy), directed by Gary Nelson, derived its basic plotline from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman’s lack - lustre novel The Company. The novel’s scenario of a Kennedy protégé CIA director (Cliff 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 first-rate performances, from Robert Vaughn’s scary Halde- manesque hatchet man to Barry Nelson as the nice-guy press secretary who becomes his first victim and Andy Griffith (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 first episode instantly established Anderson as the equivalent of Lyndon Johnson. Yet towering above all the others was one actor and a truly magnificent 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 show’s 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 offered 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 Dean’s memoir Blind Ambition became a six-hour mini-series in +µyµ, 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-substitute’s 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 Altman’s Secret Honor (+µ8¡). 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 (+µy8), which charted the trajectory of Charles Colson (Dean Jones) from Nixon’s hatchet man to born-again Christian. Robert Conrad starred as the protagonist of Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (+µ8:), directed by Robert Lieberman, but the Watergate alumni cycle petered out thereafter. Two very different portrayals of Nixon were aired in +µ8¡. Concealed Enemies (+µ8¡), directed by Jeff 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 Altman’s Secret Honor (+µ8¡) 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 Mob’s use of the war in Vietnam to proliferate their profits from heroin, so he pulled the plug on their operations by blowing the whistle on himself. As a perform- ance, Philip Baker Hall’s tragic, tortured Nixon was a tour de force. As Lane Smith as Richard Nixon in The Final Days (dir. Richard Pearce, +µ8µ). 8: a plausible offertory 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 (+µ8µ), directed by Richard Pearce, starring Lane Smith as Nixon. Based on the acclaimed book by Woodward and Bernstein, The Final Days is, in effect, the sequel to All the President’s Men. Yet, while All the President’s 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 film 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 finely 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 films of the +µµos, Daniel Petrie’s Kissinger and Nixon (+µµj), starring Beau Bridges, and Allan Arkush’s Elvis Meets Nixon (+µµy), with Bob Gunton. Oliver Stone’s mammoth Nixon (+µµj) was not so much a bio-pic as a psychological exploration of one of the most fascinating, enigmatic personalities in US history. Despite Stone’s cloying reverence for Kennedy in his earlier political epic, he was scrupulously fair and, at times, evidently sympathetic to his hero’s old foe. For an entire genera - tion, from the Hiss case in +µ¡µ until his resignation over Watergate in +µy¡, Richard Milhous Nixon had been the bête noire of American liberals. Stone’s Nixon was tortured by past demons, however, rather than driven by a lust for power per se. This was a compelling, if flawed, portrait of a man gifted with the potential for greatness, but finally Sterling support in Stone’s Nixon from Joan Allen as Pat Nixon . . . destroyed by his worst impulses. Especially in the monochrome flash- backs to his youth in Whittier, California, it was a deeply disturbing film (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 Welles’s Citizen Kane (+µ¡+) in its contours, largely eschewing a linear narrative and assuming extensive prior knowledge of Nixon’s life and career. All these factors combined to doom Nixon at the box office; the film was impressive, but not popular. The most accomplished performances came from the superb Joan Allen as Pat Nixon (her hus- band’s worshipful but virtually asexual dependency on this multi - faceted, admirable woman is represented as problematic and troubling); and James Woods as Nixon’s ruthless Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman (‘Eight words back in ’y: – “I covered up. I was wrong. I’m sorry” – and the American public would have forgiven him’). And one intriguing scene, set in Dallas on :+ November +µô¡, 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 +µô¡ presiden- tial election before Nixon during his visit there just prior to Kennedy’s 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. Stone’s film was released just twenty months after Nixon’s death in +µµ¡. 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 +µµô 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 magnificent actor, but he was fundamentally miscast in the title role. Stone justified his casting of Hopkins, declaring in an interview: ‘For over ¡o years, he’s demonstrated his chameleonlike talents over and over again in movies, theater, and television . . . Some of Tony’s 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 Stone’s nose, having already served him superbly in JFK, Heaven and Earth (+µµ¡) and Natural Born Killers (+µµ¡); and, ironically, he was even born on exactly the same day (+j September +µ¡ô) as Oliver Stone: Tommy Lee Jones. In sharp contrast to Stone’s compelling but flawed epic of Shake- spearean hubris, Andrew Fleming’s Dick (+µµµ) is truly wacky. It is literally a shaggy-dog story in which Dan Hedaya’s 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 ‘official pres- idential dog-walkers’ for his beloved (in reality, by then long-deceased) ‘Checkers’. According to this film, 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 film 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 first time around. Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon (:oo¡) was set in +µy¡, 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 America’s religion of material success that he opts to make a name for himself by hijacking a plane and flying 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 filmed in :oo¡, this narra- tive inevitably carried connotations of µ/++. 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 filmic attention; two others charismatic; and one problematic. Josef Sommer played Gerald Ford in David Greene’s +µ8y TV film, 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 film about Nixon’s 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 fine ex-president to be overly concerned. George H. W. Bush appeared in a supporting role, played by Michael Greene, in Cyrus Nowrasteh’s The Day Reagan Was Shot (:oo+), but has otherwise failed to capture film- makers’ imaginations. The Day Reagan Was Shot’s executive producers included Oliver Stone, and the film 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 film was Secretary of State (former General, and former Nixon Chief of Staff) Alexander Haig (Richard Dreyfuss), who, in the wake of the attempt on Reagan’s 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 +µ8+ Ameri- cans stood just a hair’s-breadth from either a coup d’état or a nuclear showdown with the Soviets when, in fact, neither contingency was imminent. Robert Allan Ackerman’s 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 Nichols’s Primary Colors (+µµ8), scripted by Elaine May and based on the novel by the journalist Joe Klein. Initially published anonymously, the book was a juicy exposé of the +µµ: 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 Bates’s character memorably declares: ‘He’s poked his pecker in some sorry trash-bins’). Travolta and Thompson had the film stolen out from under them by Bates and Billy Bob Thornton as their campaign supremos. By the time of the film’s 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 That’s 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-Smith’s stupefyingly bad DC /: Time of Crisis (:oo¡). Yet the most unusual production to ‘feature’ Bush is Gabriel Range’s Death of a President (:ooô). 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 whiff of wishful thinking seems to linger at the heart of this scenario. 8ô John Travolta as the Clintonesque Governor Jack Stanton in Mike Nichols’s Primary Colors (+µµ8). 8y Fictional Presidents: From the +µôos to the +µµos The first major screen portrayal of a fictional president was in the movie Gabriel Over the White House (+µ¡¡). Thereafter, three decades elapsed before movie-makers hypothesized concerning other fictional characters in residence at America’s most famous address. Significantly, the first cinematic indication that presidents might not always be unalloyed idealists came in the portrayal of a fictional Chief Executive. Franchot Tone’s President in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (+µô:) is dying but stubborn – and so intent on having his nominee for Secretary of State confirmed that he allows an honest young senator to be blackmailed to the point of suicide. Overall, however, fictional pres- idents in +µôos movies were honourable and upright. Fredric March in John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May and Henry Fonda in Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (both +µô¡) were honest, idealized, father-figure presidents faced with the respective political nightmares of a domestic military coup and an accidental nuclear war. Spoofing the latter scenario in Stanley Kubrick’s scathingly satirical Dr Strangelove (+µô¡), Peter Sellers sent up liberals of the Adlai Stevenson variety in his role as the ineffectual US President Merkin Muffley. Also in comic vein, Polly Bergen played the first female Chief Executive in Curtis Peter Sellers as the ineffectual President Merkin Muffley in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (+µô¡). Bernhardt’s Kisses for My President (+µô¡), anticipating Geena Davis in television’s 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 +µyos, when one of Hollywood’s 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 Ford’s Vice- President Nelson A. (for Aldrich) Rockefeller, launched a full-frontal attack on the US political and military establishment in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (+µyy). Aldrich’s film 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 fictional President David Stevens (Charles Durning) is himself an honest man who is deeply shocked by the cold-blooded rationale of attrition behind the Vietnam conflict. 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 +µyos, Twilight’ s Last Gleaming’s up-close portrait of a fictional President was the exception rather than the rule. During the Reaganite +µ8os, when big-screen American political films lay relatively dormant, movies seldom featured fictional presidents as protagonists. Perhaps this may have been because the then current President and ex-film star Ronald Reagan filled the bill, and the cultural need, comprehensively. Paradoxically, the American political film has experienced a resurgence in the Bush rr era, but so far movie- makers have resisted the urge to make serious films centred around fictional presidents. This might be because of a liberal antipathy towards 88 Michael Douglas as The American President (dir. Rob Reiner, +µµj). 8µ Jeff Bridges as the president in Rod Lurie’s The Contender (:ooo). Bush – and therefore a reluctance to make films 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 film fan Bill Clinton that movies about fictional 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 JFK’s mythic imagery. Moreover, no other president has fed so many fictional alter egos on film, ranging from the Capraesque Doppelgänger who replaces the incapacitated, self-serving, insensitive president (both played by Kevin Kline) in Ivan Reitman’s whimsical comedy Dave (+µµ¡) and Michael Douglas’s First Widower defending his new romance from prurient conservatives in Rob Reiner’s The American President (+µµj), to Harrison Ford’s ass-kicking Vietnam vet president in Wolf- gang Petersen’s Air Force One (+µµy) and Jeff Bridges’s pro-feminist Chief Exec, who selects Joan Allen as his vice-president in Rod Lurie’s 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 figure, just as there was a darker side to Clinton’s presidency – and this was evinced by both the title and plot of Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power (+µµy), 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 Jefferson 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 office. In life as in film, for better or worse, the character of the man in the White House can and does make a difference. µo Just before the climactic debate in Sidney Lumet’s Power (+µ8ô), the idealistic senatorial candidate Phillip Aarons (Matt Salinger) says: ‘Instead of me trying to impersonate a statesman, when it’s my turn to speak, maybe we should just turn down the lights and run Mr Smith Goes to Washington.’ Frank Capra’s +µ¡µ 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 effectively became a legendary secular saint, Mr Smith glorifies the common man as a potent American icon: a hometown idealist in whose pure breast beats the spirit of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. James Stewart’s Jefferson Smith is the epitome of the innocent abroad, the gentle true believer, the one honest man who faithfully treads the path of righteousness (‘Either I’m dead right or I’m crazy!’). Even his name is equally endowed with patriotic and mythic signi - ficance (Jefferson) and prosaic, unpretentious resonance (Smith). If Abraham Lincoln is American history’s man for all seasons, Jefferson Smith is Movie America’s Everyman for all seasons. So when Aarons makes his suggestion in Power, this certainly testifies 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, Jefferson Smith is appointed to fill his place. He hero-worships his senior colleague, µ+ 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, +µµ:) 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 State’s 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 filibuster. Paine then counters by producing manufactured evidence which suggests Smith is the corrupt politico who has dishonoured the Senate. Paine has him outmanoeuvred and outflanked. 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 mêlée. A sloppier ending to a classic Hollywood movie would be difficult to find. The film simply runs out of steam. µ: The hero’s false idol Senator Paine (Claude Rains) is confronted by his dishevelled, dis - illusioned protégé ( James Stewart) in Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (+µ¡µ). 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 Jefferson Smith serves as a prototype for one of the heroic (and ironically, often anti-heroic) figures of the American political film. If Jefferson Smith is the genre’s prototypical country boy, then Dan McGinty is its prototypical city slicker. Released ten months after Mr Smith, Preston Sturges’s directorial debut The Great McGinty (+µ¡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 first comes to the attention of the corrupt city boss (Akim Tamiroff) 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 boss’s municipal pro- tection rackets, rubbing shoulders with colourful types such as William Demarest’s unnamed politician, who says: ‘If it wasn’t for graft, you’d get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jelly - fish!’ 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, McGinty’s 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 flee the country to avoid a long stretch in the penitentiary. Perhaps because of the Jeffersonian 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 (+µ¡+), 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 film 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 film since +µµ¡). Newly redundant reporter Ann µ¡ Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), in despair at Norton’s merciless down - sizing, invents an imaginary hero, John Doe, who threatens to leap to his death on Christmas Eve (therefore prefiguring the protagonist of Capra’s best-loved movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, +µ¡ô) in protest at the savagery of modern society. This mythical figure 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: ‘We’re coming to a new order of things. There’s 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 Norton’s hard-bitten yet genuinely patriotic editor Connell ( James Gleason) declare to his erstwhile employer: ‘There you are, Norton – The People. Try and lick that!’ µ¡ Gary Cooper as one of Frank Capra’s classic Everyman heroes in Meet John Doe (+µ¡+). His good- hearted American- ism is emphasized by the portraits of Lincoln and Washington, which flank him like guardian angels. Norton would not be the last home-grown fascist in +µ¡os films who tried to ‘lick The People’. The deceased national hero of George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame (+µ¡:) 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. Potter’s The Farmer’s Daughter (+µ¡y). The charge of fascism is also levelled against city über-slicker Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles in his masterpiece Citizen Kane (+µ¡+). 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 final foray into the political genre after World War II with State of the Union (+µ¡8). The real-life prototype for Jefferson Smith had been the isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana (the original model for Lewis R. Foster’s 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 +µ¡o. Capra’s inimitable contribution to the American war effort had been a series of high-quality propaganda films in the Why We Fight documentary series; but now Smith-type idealism and Wheeler’s concomitant isolationism were no longer viable as cine- matic or ideological propositions in the post-war nuclear age. State of the Union’s Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy), a self-made man who intends to translate his business success into political achieve- ment, at first blush seems a more realistic protagonist for a late +µ¡os political film. 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 America’s two political parties within its narrative. Usually (prior to the +µyos, 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 flicts 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 Cliff Robertson in The Best Man). µj State of the Union also marked the culmination of the Capra hero’s bleak trajectory – from James Stewart’s rustic, wide-eyed innocent in Mr Smith, to the transitional figure of Gary Cooper’s Long John Willoughby, who agrees to ‘become’ John Doe but is then repulsed by the power-play he is supposed to endorse, to Tracy’s 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 Jefferson Smith, is not really all that idea l istic in the first place. He is in effect 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 conflicting 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 film’s conclusion is too pat: love and family are the all - important things in life, and the quest for power is a poor substitute. µô Angela Lansbury’s performance as the manipulative media magnate Kay Thorndyke in Frank Capra’s +µ¡8 film State of the Union was, in effect, 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 +µyos 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 Ritchie’s The Candidate (+µy:), is the wry, photogenic, laid-back son of a former governor (the crusty, consistently excellent Melvyn Douglas). Young McKay finds himself invited to run for California’s 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 off a surprise victory. µy 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 +µyos 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 Schatzberg’s The Seduction of Joe Tynan (+µyµ) trod similar ground, but it was essentially a bland little film 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 significant 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 party’s Convention. As the delegates acclaim him, Joe smiles wanly at his long-suffering wife – as if he, like Bill McKay in The Candidate, is being driven and finally 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 Candidate’s. At least State of the Union’s hero made his choice – although it was dramatically implausible. But Joe Tynan does not even have the guts to do that. That same year, +µyµ, Melvyn Douglas co-starred in another politi - cally themed fable. Hal Ashby’s 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 naïf 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 µ8 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 finds himself quoted by the President, fêted by the Washington elite and ultimately touted as a presidential nominee. The Christlike qualities of Capra’s country boy heroes were apparent from Jefferson Smith’s mortification of the flesh (his filibuster in the Senate, culminating in his collapse from physical exhaustion) and Long John Willoughby’s intended and symbolic self- crucifixion as the bells ring out to herald Christ’s birth. Yet Being There is the only American political film 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. Jeff Smith’s boyish idealism was steeped in scouting lore and US history, and the city slickers laughed at him. Chance’s childlike naïveté is the product of a life experience that has never ventured beyond gardening and television shows, and this most innocent of creatures finds himself ensconced among these most so- phis ticated of city slickers; but, ironically, he conquers them inadvertently and effortlessly, with no awareness of his coup. Being There’s Chance took the rustic innocent to the most implaus - ible extreme, but Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (+µµ8) 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 Smith’s 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 finds himself liberated by the prospect of his impending assas- sination – and he starts to tell voters the truth, first through straight talk, then through ‘gangsta’ rap. All of a sudden, he has rediscovered joie de vivre, and now he wants to call off 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. Bulworth’s long dark night of the soul results in his spiritual regeneration, but this funny, generally optimistic µµ film is marred by the hero being abruptly gunned down at the end, as if Beatty were not quite sure how to round the story off. This recalls the bleak, pointless demise of Beatty’s anti-hero at the climax of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller (+µy+) – and, of course, the murder of his journalist on the trail of assassins at the end of Alan J. Pakula’s classic political thriller, The Parallax View (+µy¡). 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 Preminger’s Advise and Consent (+µô:). Yet, by the time of Bulworth’s release, the representation of a US Senator whose first priority was the continuing satisfaction of giant corporate sponsors was virtually taken as read by the public. Back in +µôo John Kennedy and Richard Nixon had each spent around ten million dollars for their respective presiden- tial campaigns. In +µµô, two years before the release of Bulworth, the combined total spent by the Democrats, the Republicans and H. Ross Perot’s Reform Party was approximately $¡j¡ million. US Senatorial and Congressional campaigns also cost stratospheric amounts – and Bulworth was a reflection 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 Capra’s contemporaries, himself a cinematic poet of populism, had exhibited a much shrewder grasp in his own ‘trilogy of old politicians’, filmed between +µj¡ and +µô:. These three films directed by John Ford – The Sun Shines Bright (+µj¡), The Last Hurrah (+µj8) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (+µô:) – are, respectively, a ‘Southern’, a ‘Northeastern’, and one of the greatest Westerns ever made. Ever since She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in +µ¡µ, Ford had been making films about ageing protagonists, with em- phasis on lives well lived, and the implicit inadequacy of the younger generation. Ever since The Quiet Man (+µj:), Ford had been making valedictory films, 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 first of these. Ford had already cast the great American folk hero Will Rogers in the title role of Judge Priest in +µ¡¡, 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 film about old age. As Ford got older, his movies got bleaker. Viewed as an unofficial triptych, we can certainly see that logic at work in the trajectory of these three films. 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 Hurrah’s Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) is the mayor of an un- named New England city. Like the hero of Edwin O’Connor’s 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 Valance’s Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) is a US Senator, previously both the first 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 fingers, could be the next Vice-President of the United States’. Billy Priest retains a childlike goodness of heart throughout his long municipal career, while Skeffington 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 suffered 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 first year of Eisenhower’s presidency, this is an archetypal if undervalued example of +µjos 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 (+µ8ô), Tag Gallagher refers to this character as ‘Nixon-like’. : +o+ True, Nixon had been a nationally prominent figure since the Alger Hiss case in +µ¡µ – but, within the interior world of Ford’s 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 Fonda’s Lincoln and Charles Winninger’s Billy Priest – and this gets to the heart of the scenario. Priest is a Southerner, physically the diametric opposite of Fonda’s 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 Fonda’s Juror No. 8 in  Angry Men, +µjy, and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mock- ingbird, +µô: – and another, later, far more problematic Southern politico, Charles Laughton’s Senator Cooley in Advise and Consent, +µô:). Yet that same innate goodness and simplicity of soul that beat in Lincoln’s breast is alive in Billy Priest’s. He, too, is a secular saint. Even his name, like that of Jefferson 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 fine and dignified funeral for a prostitute, reminding the congregation of the tale of Christ’s 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 fit for the Christ-like Lincoln, if ever there was one. The old man is moved by this outpouring of affection, and the film 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 final moment of triumph, and the foreknowledge that his life will end bathed in the love and the validation of his community. The Last Hurrah’s Frank Skeffington is not so fortunate. Like Billy Priest, Skeffington is aware that he is fighting 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 influence on the world of politics and elections: television. Skeffington 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 Force’s one-time membership of the Ku Klux Klan but also, crucially, from the fact that Skeffington’s mother had, as a young girl in domestic service, been humiliated and branded a thief by Force’s father for taking home some leftover fruit. Skeffington’s 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 director’s 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 O’Hara’s real- life brother) is an amiable but dull young Irish-American championed by the anti-Skeffington forces. McCluskey’s 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 Nixon’s vice-presidential candidacy in +µj:). Skeffing- ton’s 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 father’s death-bed to beg forgiveness, Skeffington grants him absolution as he would a frightened child. McCluskey is ineffectual and Junior Skeffington is inane – but Norman Cass’s son ‘The Commodore’ (O. Z. Whitehead) is jaw - droppingly imbecilic. The most hilarious sequence features Skeffing- ton appointing this :¡-carat incompetent as chief of the city’s Fire Department (which appeals to ‘The Commodore’ because he will get to wear a fire-fighter’s helmet). The manoeuvre is designed solely to prove politically embarrassing to Skeffington’s 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 Skeffington. It is devious, mis- chievous and perhaps even wicked; but it is also witty, purposeful and designed to achieve a beneficial end. The movie lionizes Skeffington 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. Skeffington is perfectly capable of hijacking the funeral of a ne’er-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 husband’s popularity was far greater than she knew. Skeffington relishes the rough-and-tumble of big city politics and believes the end justifies 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. Skeffington is defeated, the consummate political pragmatist unseated by a no-account novice. Even the Cardinal (Donald Crisp), himself a long-time critic of the Mayor’s, is appalled that a man of Skeffington’s stature can be brought down by a nincompoop like McCluskey. As Skeffington trudges his lonely road home following his defeat, he suffers a heart attack, and the rest of the film 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 Hurrah’s 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 Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (). Ford revered, would win the greatest political prize of all – and John Kennedy’s victory would be partially due to the impact of television. ¡ Nonetheless, The Last Hurrah was an elegiac film rather than a prophetic one. Billy Priest is an exemplary country boy and Frank Skeffington 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 films 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 +µ¡µ John Wayne and James Stewart each shot to stardom, in Ford’s Stagecoach and Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington respectively. Now, in +µô:, we see the archetypes they established cross paths, mature and confront the deterioration of their dreams. At the end of Stagecoach, Wayne’s Ringo Kid heads off to settle on his ranch with the woman he loves. Here +oj In John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (+µô:), James Stewart’s 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). Wayne’s 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 Jefferson Smith grown old and gone sour. Ironically, the sleek, white-haired Senator Stoddard resembles Smith’s 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 flashback forming the main corpus of the tale concludes with the revelation that, contrary to the legend which launched Stoddard’s 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 first sight, this tale seems to be Doniphon’s tragedy. But it is also Stoddard’s tragedy. He is basically a decent man who aspires only to do good. He begins by teaching (traditionally a woman’s 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), Doniphon’s 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 puffed up by achieve- ment. Doniphon’s action may have saved Stoddard’s 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 film 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 film’s last line of dialogue reinforces this tortured predicament, as an obsequious railwayman remarks: ‘Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.’ The most shameful +oô 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, Jefferson Smith had no place left to go. The line of heroes from the uncomplicated idealist Jefferson 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 figure 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 figure, too, has been immortalized as a celluloid archetype. The film that launched the demagogue as a star-spangled monster was Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ). Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, first published in +µ¡ô, All the King’s 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 assassin’s bullet in September +µ¡j. During the early +µ¡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 FDR’s 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- lin’s 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 Pelley’s 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 +µ¡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 Kingfish’, 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 Louisiana’s 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 fiefdom, 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 opponent’s campaign by claiming the man’s 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 +µ¡ô. Personal fortunes would be limited to $j million, with an annual income ceiling of $+.8 million and a floor of $:,ooo. Long stood poised to reap perhaps six million votes in the presidential election of +µ¡ô. 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 Long’s bodyguards; Weiss had been the son-in-law of Judge Benjamin Pavy, who was set to lose his seat due to Long’s 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 different.’ j Long’s legend continued to grow beyond his lifetime. He was the prototype for Chuck Crawford, the demagogue in John Dos Passos’s novel Number One (+µ¡¡). Yet it was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men which recast the myth-legend of Huey Long as The Great +o8 +oµ American Overreacher. Warren had lived in Louisiana during the final year of the regime of ‘The Kingfish’. His fictional Governor Willie Stark was a consummate re-creation of Huey Long, whom Warren recalled in the +µyos 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.’ ô Columbia Pictures initially wanted a box-office heavyweight for the film of All the King’s Men, so the role of Willie Stark was originally offered 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 +µ¡os were topped and tailed by two classic films about the corrosive influence of power on a man’s soul: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (+µ¡+) and Rossen’s All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ). 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 Rossen’s All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ) (note the uniformed armed guard in the fore- ground). for – mass electoral love. Kane’s political campaign is derailed by adultery. The married Stark’s affairs, first 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 Kissinger’s 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 Stark’s 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 Ireland’s Jack Bur- den), each of whom sporadically acts as the great man’s 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 (+µ¡+), largely based on the personality of media baron William Randolph Hearst. power and money can fix any problems, especially their own. When Stark’s adopted son Tom (John Derek) goes off the rails and causes a car crash that results in a girlfriend’s death, the boy admits to drunken driving and is willing to face the consequences. Stark, instead, attempts to buy the girl’s father off; 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 hero’s white suit) to a Kane- type ogre drunk on power (dressed, when he tries to bribe the dead girl’s 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 Burden’s life. He believes she would make a wife fit 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 Stark’s Attorney- General, who had later resigned in protest at the corruption of his regime. Stark tries to head off the judge’s public opposition with black- mail (the film never reveals the details of his ancient sin), but the judge kills himself. The State legislature deliberates on Stark’s 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 fulfilling that right and that will, I’ll break him. I’ll 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 Long’s, is a doctor with a family grudge. Adam Stanton (Shepperd Strudwick), Anne’s brother and the late Judge’s nephew, has never been a believer in the force of nature that was Willie Stark. Ironically, when they first met, the sceptical doctor wished to ask a question and Stark said, ‘Shoot.’ Now, unhinged equally by his uncle’s suicide and his sister’s +++ affair with the man who caused it, Dr Stanton does exactly that – and is himself killed by Stark’s 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 +µ¡µ. Crawford and McCambridge briefly attained late-career heights of movie demonology in the +µyos. Crawford played another political ogre in the title role of The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (+µyy). Mercedes McCambridge went one better, furnishing the voice of the Devil for The Exorcist (+µy¡). All the King’s 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 Stark’s 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 Ireland’s real-life wife Joanne Dru (so fetching in the great late +µ¡os Westerns Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master) struck a discordant note as the aristocratic Anne Stanton, Burden’s 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 King’s Men was an ambitious but ulti- mately flawed film, with its portentous warning about the corruption of power and the dangers of home-grown fascism. All the King’s 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 figure of the country boy cor- rupted by power has retained a strong mythic resonance within Amer- ican culture. In Raoul Walsh’s A Lion Is In the Streets (+µj¡), James Cagney’s 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 King’s Men in +µj8, with Neville Brand as Willie Stark. Edward Asner played Long in Robert E. Collins’s The Life and Assassination of the Kingfish (+µyy). In +µµj John Good- man took his turn in Thomas Schlamme’s Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long. y On the subject of Long bio-pics, honourable mention must go to Ron Shelton’s good-hearted comedy Blaze (+µ8µ). Paul Newman plays another Governor Long of Louisiana – Huey’s brother Earl, who, near the end of his term of office, embarked on a passionate affair with the flame-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 Tracy’s grand old man in The Last Hurrah, Earl wins his last election (this time to the US Congress). But, like Skeffington, 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. :ooô saw the release of a new cinema version of All the King’s Men directed by Steven Zaillian (the screenwriter of Schindler’s 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 first come to national prominence as Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in +µµ:, and who has since established himself as a leading liberal spokesman on American television. Penn has been one of Hollywood’s most high-profile 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 misfired. Zaillian’s film refocused the narrative, shifting the principal emphasis away from Stark’s mate- rial rise and moral decline towards Jack Burden’s dilemma of personal integrity versus his political commitment to Stark. Granted, this was a major concern of the book, but existential angst seldom pays off at the box office. 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, Penn’s supposedly authentic Louisianan accent was so mangled and difficult to understand that this might be the first American film to require subtitles. Furthermore, instead of the Depression-wrought +µ¡os, the narrative was relocated to the +µjos. While that decade had its own demagogue in Joe McCarthy, the socio- political circumstances were markedly different. The anxieties of the +µ¡os, which gave rise to Huey Long and his slogan ‘Every Man a King’, sprang from poverty and despair. The anxieties of the +µjos were those of an affluent 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 +µ¡os scenario to the +µjos 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 flourish in the early twenty-first century? This listless new version of All the King’s Men missed the chance to explore that hypothesis. Beyond All the King’s 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 Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (+µjy), based on Budd Schulberg’s short story ‘Your Arkansas Traveler’, traced the rise of a folksy television star, Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith), whose cornball patter and cracker-barrel philosophy mask a truly megalomaniac personality. Like several central figures in films examined here, Rhodes was reputedly based on a real-life proto- type (chiefly 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 Jeffries (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 flick of a switch. The most terrifying of all the movie demagogues was perhaps Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson in David Cronenberg’s compelling The ++¡ Dead Zone (+µ8¡), 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 find that he is cursed with the power to see a person’s 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 candidate’s 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 fires at Stillson from the balcony, but his first 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 Stillson’s thuggish henchman. As Johnny topples from the balcony, in the confusion a photographer flees 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 Jeffries (Patricia Neal) discovers Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith), the hick headed for stardom – but with an ambitious secret agenda – in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (+µjy). and demands to know who was behind the assassination attempt, Johnny touches Stillson’s 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 finished. The hand on the gun is Still- son’s. 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 horrific 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 magnificent 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 difficult 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. µ Three decades after this observation, Vidal had his opportunity to underscore the dangers of demagoguery as a co-star in Tim Robbins’s Bob Roberts (+µµ:). 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 +µµo. Bob Roberts is framed as a Spinal Tap-style docu - mentary, with the British film-maker Terry Manchester (Brian Murray) charting the Roberts phenomenon. Raised in a commune by hippie parents, Roberts rebelled against his +µôos-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 ++ô reinforced by the truly banal lyrics that send his faithful fans into almost orgasmic adulation: ‘Some people will work, /Some simply will not, /But they’ll 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 difference between a multi-millionaire folk singer-cum-stock investor’s definition of hard work and that of a coalminer or a waitress. Even the socially beneficially 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 film sought to excoriate. Robbins’s hunch was, in all likelihood, correct. Bob Roberts is clean- cut, smooth, superficially 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 America’s cultural heritage and took the pulse of the times. The titles of Bob Roberts’s best-selling record albums (The Freewheelin’ Bob Roberts, Times Are Changin’ Back and Bob on Bob) are, obviously, references to Bob Dylan’s early successes, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan ++y Folk singer, multi-millionaire, right-wing populist: Tim Robbins directed and starred as the slick Bob Roberts (+µµ:), with Alan Rickman as the sinister power behind the throne. (+µô¡), The Times They Are a-Changin’ (+µô¡) and Blonde on Blonde (+µôô). The central narrative premise of the youthful outsider running against the veteran senator who epitomizes the Establishment was first used twenty years earlier in Michael Ritchie’s 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 +µôos. 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 +µôos. Roberts is a corporate yuppie whom we could easily imagine seated at the same table as Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (+µ8y), the monetarist monster whose mantra was ‘Greed is good’. In Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville (+µyj), 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. Walker’s 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 ’ (+µ88), a satirical TV serial ‘mockumentary’, directed by Altman and scripted by Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, about a fictitious presidential candidate – whom some pundits and media personalities initially took at face value. Tanner’s 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 +µµ:, 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. Perot’s impressive showing in the polls siphoned off a signifi- cant number of Republican votes – but the ultimate beneficiary was Bill Clinton. Still, Perot’s strong performance demonstrated a high level of popular frustration with the ‘gridlock’ that had become characteristic of US two-party politics by the early +µµos. While Roberts is not specifically identified 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 (first elected to the Senate in +µôo, 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 Skeffington 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 man’s defeat, yet Paiste’s nemesis is not a well-meaning idiot à 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 off. The campaign degenerates into a tale of rival scandals, involving Roberts’s campaign chairman Lukas Hart III (Alan Rickman is wonder- fully creepy in the role), and a wholly concocted affair between Paiste and a sixteen-year-old girl. Hart’s 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 ++µ picture (omitted from the newspapers) would have shown his grand- daughter in the back seat. Yet the Roberts team’s 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 off into intricate tales of stolen files, laundered cash, offshore 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 off. 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 film, 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: Jefferson Smith ( James Stewart) pays homage to Thomas Jefferson) . . . 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 fired, is accused as the would-be assassin. But Raplin is afflicted with cerebral palsy and could not possibly have held the gun. Nevertheless, when his name is made public, a few fanatical Roberts supporters fixate on his middle name, Alijah, and immediately conclude that he is an Arab. This is set in late +µµo, 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 confined 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 don’t need a gun’) is now a widely hated figure. 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 don’t know if I really like him; I don’t know if he’s healthy for your country’), +:+ . . . and the final scene from Bob Roberts, consciously referencing the pilgrimage of Mr Smith Goes to Washington. pays a late-night visit to the Jefferson 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 Jefferson’s words, on the soundtrack we hear one of Bob Roberts’s 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 Vidal’s and Espos- ito’s addresses to (Terry Manchester’s) camera. Vidal’s lines were largely unscripted and improvised to deliver the Gospel according to Gore. Vidal’s 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, fighting the good fight, even though some of his remarks to Manchester’s camera suggest that he realizes the battle to preserve Americans’ hard-won liberties has already suffered a crucial downturn. Yet what of Paiste’s 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 figure be prophetic? Could such an individual ever flourish and triumph in America, trans- forming the faithful into the fanatical? Vidal delivers another line in the film, 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 films during the +µ¡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 +µjos 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 films from +µô: and +µô¡ (hence bracketing Kennedy’s murder) constitutes the highest point in the evolution of the genre. Products of the ‘Camelot’ era, they are the genre’s 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 +µôos was largely due to public fascination with all things Kennedy - esque. Kennedy had, in effect, glamorized his profession in the popu- lar consciousness. His personality had helped revitalize the market for political films, and his own brand of politics had undoubtedly set the tone. JFK’s 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, +µ¡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 films of the early +µôos. Still, this cycle cannot be attributed solely to Kennedy’s popularity. The late +µjos and early +µôos had witnessed the publication of several popular political novels, all tailor-made for screen adaptation. Thus the loosely contemporaneous production of this cluster of first-class political films also sprang from a fortuitous convergence of era, ethos and artefact. Five films constitute the core of this short-lived golden age: Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (both +µô:), Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man and Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (all +µô¡). All five were filmed in black and white, which had long been the norm for political films (Wilson excepted), but which was very much at odds with the trend for most big-budget, all-star Hollywood productions of the early +µôos. Two figures asserted their dominance within the genre at this juncture: John Frankenheimer directed two of the five films, 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 +µjy and +µô:: Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Sidney Lumet’s  Angry Men and Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (all +µjy), Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (+µjµ), Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind (+µôo), Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (+µô+) and Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mock- ingbird (+µô:). Again, all these films 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 +µjos–early +µôos Hollywood’s ‘Grand Statement’ cinema: the nuclear apocalypse film (Stanley Kramer’s earnest, heart-breaking On the Beach, +µjµ; Stanley Kubrick’s irreverent, side splitting Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, +µô¡; and James B. Harris’s taut, fatalistic The Bedford Incident, +µôj). Kubrick and Kramer made courtroom and nuclear apocalypse films, while Preminger and Lumet segued effort- 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 Men’s liberal hero, Henry Fonda, fought the good fight 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 +µôos took up where the recent classic courtroom dramas had left off. Indeed, the first great political film in this cycle was partially struc- tured to resemble a courtroom drama. Allen Drury’s novel Advise and Consent, first published in +µjµ, had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 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 +µjµ until June +µô+ and, for most of the eighteen-month period from September +µjµ to March +µô+, 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 +µôo to ¡ February +µô+, 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 +µôo election helped to keep Drury’s 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 Drury’s book. Drury’s publisher, Double- day, was able to use the picture as an ad with the caption: ‘Nearly Everybody’s Reading Advise and Consent’. Compelling drama though it was, Advise and Consent harked back to memorable Senate battles from the +µ¡os and ’jos. Its chief appeal was not to the up-and-coming ‘Baby Boomer’ Generation. Even the film has a distinctly ‘retro’ look, feel and flavour to it. This is, in essence, a +µjos movie, although it was made in +µô:. A dying president (Franchot Tone), clearly based on Franklin D. Roosevelt, nominates liberal public servant Robert A. Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) to be his new Secretary of State. Leffingwell 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 +:ô Laughton), whose resolve to block Leffingwell’s 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-Leffingwell senators back Cooley while those in favour of the nominee fall in behind majority leader Bob Munson (Walter Pidgeon). The subcommittee hearing to review Leffingwell’s 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 testifies that he and Leffingwell were, in their youth, members of a Communist cell in Chicago. This is clearly a re-run of the +µ¡µ confrontation between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, but any viewers who had not read Drury’s novel might have readily assumed that the Fonda– Laughton conflict 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-off 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, Laughton’s 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 Kubrick’s Spartacus in +µôo, and there are recognizable traces of these two char- acters in Cooley). In the +µ¡os Laughton had played an impressive array of tyrants, bullies and monsters. He had been Henry VIII, Javert from Les Misérables, over-bearing Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street and Quasi- modo. Above all, he had been Captain Bligh. Significantly, this was a long line of non-American ogres. Thus Laughton’s appearance in the Franchot Tone as the ailing President in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (+µô:). +: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 different set of audience expectations. Yet Advise and Consent, as both novel and film, is a saga of great moral complexity. Leffingwell easily shreds Gelman’s credibility. The problem is, he is lying when he denies his previous Communist affilia- tions. Cooley is on to the truth. Leffingwell 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 Leffingwell has lied. In a meeting, with Bob Munson as a witness, Anderson secures the Presi- dent’s promise that he will withdraw the nomination. But the President has now lied to Anderson. At the President’s instigation, Fred Van Ackerman (George Grizzard), a young, irresponsible, pro-Leffingwell 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 affair 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), Anderson’s best friend in the Senate, disgusted at the skulduggery that cost Brig his life, switches from the pro-Leffingwell camp, voting against the nomination, and so the vote is tied. Significantly, here the unscrupulous President’s plans are derailed by another young Mr Smith in the US Senate – not by a fili- buster this time, but with a single word: ‘No’. The amiable, seemingly Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) confesses his youthful indis - cretion to the President (Franchot Tone) in Advise and Consent. +:8 ineffectual Vice-President, Harley Hudson (Lew Ayres), is now expected to break the tie in Leffingwell’s favour but, before he can do so, he is notified 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, first-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 film as a senator. In +µô: there were no Blacks in the US Senate (and there had been none in Drury’s 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 backfire, 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, Lawford’s 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 Kennedy’s sexual adventurism, but this knowledge was not in the public domain during Kennedy’s lifetime. Advise and Consent may actually be the first mainstream American film to feature a scene in a gay bar (where Anderson, harassed by Van Ackerman’s blackmailers, tracks down the man with whom he had the long-ago affair). 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 +µô¡ Drury published A Senate Journal, –. Close comparison of A Senate Journal with Advise and Consent clearly illuminates the various real-life prototypes for Drury’s fictional 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 . . . +:µ There is a disturbing sense about him, somewhere underneath the very smooth heartiness and the firm, 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 nation’s good fortune that he will never achieve it. ¡ Drury projected McCarthy’s infamy onto a left-wing demagogue. It was, however, his perception of the right-wing isolationist Langer’s 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 film of Advise and Consent is its function as a paradigm of Hollywood liberalism in action. Allen Drury’s 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 briefly in one scene in the Senate chamber), but Preminger and the screenwriter Wendell Mayes toned down the book’s overt right-wing posturing. The casting of Fonda as Leffingwell certainly helps blunt the conservative thrust of the original novel, as does the film’s conclusion. In the book, the Leffingwell nomination is resoundingly defeated by a margin of around fifty votes, with most senators rebelling against the President’s heavy-handed approach which resulted in Anderson’s death. In the film, the vote is neck and neck, as if Leffingwell may still be worthy of The Leffingwell 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 confirmation. In the film, the President’s death is the ironic stroke of fate which finally puts paid to Leffingwell’s confirmation. In the novel, his death is retribution for the duplicity he has practiced and the tragedy he has wrought. Finally, Drury’s novel ends forcefully (whereas the film ends inconclusively), with confirmation of Harley Hudson’s nominee for Secretary of State – conservative Senator Orrin Knox, who, following Anderson’s death, had assumed leadership of the anti- Leffingwell forces. This crucial figure, the novel’s ultimate hero, is effectively 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 +µµ8. Sixteen of those nineteen dealt with Ameri- can politics. Five were sequels to Advise and Consent: A Shade of Differ- ence (+µô:), focusing on the United Nations and race relations in the United States; Capable of Honor (+µôô), a strident indictment of liberal bias in the US media; Preserve and Protect (+µô8), a timely if occasion- ally overheated drama about a Presidential election tragically influenced by political violence; Come Nineveh, Come Tyre (+µy¡), which envis- aged a Soviet takeover of the United States; and The Promise of Joy (+µyj), which posited an alternative to Nineveh, with the Soviets ex- hausted and America triumphant. Drury’s displeasure with Hollywood notwithstanding, the explicitly conservative ideology of his novels made them unlikely screen projects for the +µôos and ’yos. Also, much of the ‘suspense’ in the Advise and Consent sequels was derived from intricacies of voting procedure – a difficult thing to render exciting on film. There was a great deal of both shrewd prophecy and shrill propaganda in Drury’s 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, Drury’s 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-satisfied 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 Drury’s series, whereas +¡+ George Grizzard’s portrayal in the film hints at none of this char acter’s sociopathy. Grizzard’s characterization seems more like a pushy, over- zealous schoolboy who is out of his depth. Thus Preminger’s ‘liberal’ movie even lets Van Ackerman off the hook. Drury’s 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 (+µ¡µ), a decade before Drury’s 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 Warren’s All the King’s Men (+µ¡ô), set in a Southern State, and Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah (+µjô), 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 fiction throughout the +µôos and ’yos, exemplified by novels such as Seven Days in May (+µô:) by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, Fail-Safe (+µô:) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, The Man (+µô¡) by Irving Wallace, Washington, DC (+µôy) by Gore Vidal, and The Senator (+µô8) and The President (+µyo) by Drew Pearson. The second great political movie of +µô: was based on another +µjµ novel, yet this was a tale of an altogether different stripe: Richard Condon’s 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 +µjos 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 effect collaborating in con- junction to undermine American democracy. The Manchurian Candidate begins in +µj:, with a US Army patrol ambushed and captured during the Korean War. After the war, the platoon’s 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 buffoon fit solely to do his wife’s bidding. Raymond despises them both. Meanwhile, the captain of Raymond’s 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 officials, as Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), a Chinese expert in psychological conditioning, explains how he has ‘brainwashed’ these American sol- diers. He effortlessly persuades Raymond to kill two of his men. In Marco’s dream the reality (the Communists, the strangling of a soldier) keeps intruding on the illusion (the Ladies’ Garden Club meeting). Marco notifies 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 wife’s 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 film it is obvious, as it was in Condon’s 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 Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (+µô:). +¡¡ on one particular number and stick to it. He pours ketchup onto his breakfast, then looks thoughtfully at the Heinz bottle – and the film cuts to him proclaiming on the floor of the Senate, ‘There are exactly fifty-seven Communists . . . ’ What is at the back of all this? The brainwashing, Raymond’s false status as a war hero who saved his platoon (when in actuality he mur- dered two of them), his stepfather’s reckless charges of Communist in- filtration 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, who’s 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 Eleanor’s 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), Raymond’s own father-in-law, who is determined to stop Iselin from winning the party’s 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 he’s 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 Jordan’s death scene. Raymond shoots Jordan while he is holding a carton of milk, and (as befits a milquetoast liberal) the consequence is a jet of milk rather than of blood. Seconds after this killing, Raymond’s 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. Jocie’s death unhinges Raymond. Marco, who has finally 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 rifle, 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 fired. 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 crucifixion 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 film, Raymond seizes control of his destiny, telling Marco: ‘You couldn’t have stopped them. The Army couldn’t 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 films 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 +µjµ, just five years after Joe McCarthy’s fall from power (when the Senate voted to condemn him following his conduct in the televised Army–McCarthy hearings of +µj¡), and two years after his death in +µjy. Both Condon’s novel and Frankenheimer’s film 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 Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj). Yet where this film 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 +µôos. The film 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 film from circulation for an entire generation, until its successful theatrical re-release in +µ88–µ. The Manchurian Candidate eerily prefigured the dislocation of the +µôos. 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 Army’s unwillingness to take the matter +¡ô seriously), she promptly throws herself at his head, immediately there- after finishing with her fiancé, 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 Parrish’s 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 Lansbury’s Eleanor Shaw Iselin, is a career-best performance, an original and unforgettable ogre, and the screen’s 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 (+µô:), featuring Lansbury as a possessive mother, this persuaded Sinatra of the director’s 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 final (and mutually fatal) assign- ment. The film consciously acknowledges this element of classical - mythical-Oedipal allusion. When a drunken Raymond talks about his mother, Marco says: ‘It’s 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’; Iselin’s 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 sacrifice 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 final scene, as the gunshot which takes Raymond’s life becomes a peal of thunder, Marco composes a citation attesting to Raymond’s 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 +µô: masterpiece about a lurking rifleman, 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 +µô¡ 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 +µô: 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 JFK’s Inaugural, outgoing Presi- dent Eisenhower had in his Farewell Address issued a stern warning about the relentless growth of the US military’s domestic power and in- fluence (Oliver Stone would later use footage of this speech behind the opening credits of JFK). In doing so, modern America’s 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 Washington’s own Farewell Address had included a firm admonition to avoid overweening military establishments. Eisenhower’s valediction reinforced his own place in the great American pantheon of citizen-soldiers. ô The ramparts they watch: Burt Lancaster as General Scott and Kirk Douglas as Colonel Casey in John Franken- heimer’s Seven Days in May (+µô¡). +¡8 Eisenhower was not alone in expressing anxiety over the pervasive influence of the military-industrial complex. The crusading journalist Fred J. Cook’s +µô: book, The Warfare State, revealed that the Ameri- can military’s payroll outstripped the automobile, steel and petroleum industries combined; and the political revelations in his book were even more alarming. y John Kennedy’s first six months as president had given rise to intense friction between the White House and the Pentagon. Sec- retary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s reforms buttressed regula- tions which several high-ranking officers had often ignored, especially when they made sabre-rattling speeches for public consumption. A number of these officers, both serving and retired, had displayed radi- cal right-wing sympathies. The most notorious was General Edwin Walker, who would become a rallying figure 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 +µô: this issue of excessive military influence was placed before the reading public in the form of an entertainment and a tanta- lizing, terrifying premise – what if the US military were disaffected 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 +µy¡ – a year which, in actu- ality, would witness a unique crisis for the presidency, culminating in Richard Nixon’s resignation. Yet the film of Seven Days in May leaves the year unspecified. 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 Staff. 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 d’état 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 O’Brien’s alcoholic South- ern senator, Martin Balsam’s press secretary and George Macready’s 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. +¡µ 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 +µô:, 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 figures at the Pentagon (not least US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who may have been the authors’ immediate prototype for General Scott), and that McNamara’s reforms of the Defense Department were designed, in effect, as a pre-emptive strike. There were other pronounced parallels between characters in the novel and real-life figures. The collision between President Lyman and General Scott had its roots in the Truman–MacArthur clash over the conduct of the Korean War. The strident Colonel Broderick ( John Larkin) is ‘an officer 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 fictitiously, 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 filmed. At a buffet in Washington, JFK communicated his enthusiasm to Kirk Douglas, who later co-produced the film. All three stars (Lancaster, Douglas and March) were liberal Democrats. More significantly, while the film was being made, the US Senate ratified the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on :¡ September +µô¡. 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 film opens with a riot between pro- and anti-disarmament cam- paigners. This scene was in fact filmed 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 Administration’s tacit cooperation in the making of the film. The inclusion of this riot scene was a sign of the times. Riots would increasingly become both a symptom and a symbol of +µôos America, and by beginning with a riot not featured in the book, the movie high- lighted one of the decade’s key political phenomena. Overall, however, Seven Days in May endorsed liberal solutions within the pre-existing conservative framework, and thus hewed closely to Hollywood’s 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 film’s heroes are the US President and a Marine Colonel, and they do not come much more pro-Establishment than that. While the film’s message about the influence of the military would become increasingly pertinent through- out the +µôos and beyond, after My Lai and Kent State a similar pro- Establishment stance would have appeared poignantly naïve. 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 March’s 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 +µô¡ 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 +µjos definition of consensus in both political and filmic terms. All the major characters in the movie (as with most of the films in this book) were mature white males. The only female character (Ava Gardner as Scott’s ex-mistress, Eleanor Holbrook) was peripheral; and Blacks were even more margin- alized, limited to fleeting appearances in crowd scenes at the beginning and the end. The film is essentially a +µjos version of (presumably) +µyos America, as imagined in the +µôos. 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: He’s not the enemy. Scott, the Joint Chiefs – even the very emo- tional, very illogical lunatic fringe – they’re not the enemy. The enemy’s an age. A nuclear age. It happens to have killed man’s faith in his ability to influence 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 it’s 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 +µô¡ – by one Lee Harvey Oswald). Lyman has his finger on the pulse here. Scott’s assiduous cul- tivation of disenchanted ‘super-patriots’ is exactly what makes him such a potential danger to the US democratic process. It is during Scott’s 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. Scott’s consummate performance before the wildly cheering crowd finally 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 +µô¡. When Republican candidate Honest men against the coup: George Macready, Edmond O’Brien and Fredric March as President Jordan Lyman in Seven Days in May. +¡: Barry Goldwater advocated giving NATO’s Supreme Commander in Europe authority over tactical nuclear weapons, this compounded anxieties about military actions devoid of civilian control. In his +µyµ memoir, With No Apologies, Goldwater wrote: the public’s hysterical, almost unreasoned attitude toward nuclear war was fattened on the misrepresentations of three works of fic- tion [Nevil Shute’s 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 +µô¡ as All the President’s Men was later to be a vote for Jimmy Carter in +µyô. The final scene of Seven Days in May features Fredric March as President Lyman telling the assembled press corps: There’s 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 +µôos 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-effacing 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 films scru- tinized in this book: the right man in the White House makes all the difference. 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 Schaffner’s The Best Man (+µô¡) 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 Vidal’s stage drama of +µôo about the Manichaean conflict between a noble liberal and a vicious right-winger at a Presidential Convention, The Best Man crackles with sly wit and top-flight 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 (Cliff 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 Hockstader’s 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 Russell’s 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 suffered a nervous breakdown. With this damning evidence, he plans to procure Hockstader’s support. If neces- sary, he is willing to release the details of Russell’s 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 effect on Hockstader, who now resolves to stop Cantwell, saying: ‘You know, it’s not that I object to your being a bastard. Don’t get me wrong there. It’s 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 film. ‘Nice thing about you, Joe,’ he says of Cantwell’s lackadaisical attitude towards integration, ‘is that you can sound like a liberal, but at heart you’re 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 Fonda’s presence as the liberal intellectual protagonist and the ancient spectre of a wartime homosexual liaison echo Advise and Consent. The unprepossessing accuser (of Leffingwell’s former Communist affiliations) in Advise and Consent, Burgess Mere - dith’s Herbert Gelman, is psychologically unstable; by contrast, The Best Man’s finger-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 difference.’ It is never established beyond doubt whether Cantwell actually parti - cipated in the homosexual ring, or was instead the officer 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 General’s 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 fight 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. It’s a weapon. And the strong man takes it, and he uses it. And if you don’t go down there and beat Joe Cantwell to the floor with this very dirty stick, then you’ve got no business in this big league. Because if you don’t fight, 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 offers, ‘I won’t throw my mud if you won’t 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 floor, and Governor Claypool, who had once pledged support to Russell, rallies to Cantwell’s 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 floor 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 film). ‘Merwin’s nobody!’ Russell’s 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. +¡ô And that is a tragedy in a man – and it is a disaster in a President.’ Cantwell is finished. The sacrificial resolution is at one with Henry Fonda’s 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 Mann’s underrated West- ern The Tin Star (+µjy). In another very fine Western, Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock (+µjµ), Fonda’s legendary gunfighter eventually clashes with Richard Widmark’s 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 effect, 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 field 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 fill 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. Russell’s arch, self-deprecating wit not only recalls Adlai Stevenson, but also anticipates the +µô8 campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy; and the nervous breakdown issue prefigures George McGovern’s ill- fated first choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate in +µy:. Yet Joe Cantwell is a much more intriguing figure. Formerly in the insurance business, Joe is a hustler from humble stock. On occa- sion, he displays some status anxiety vis-à-vis Russell’s inherited wealth. Russell responds: ‘Self-made man with a self-made issue. Your imagi- nary “Communist Mafia”.’ 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 - profile 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 King’s Men’s 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 Stevenson’s lack of robustness. µ Whoever was the prototype for Joe Cantwell, it is intriguing to imag- ine a sequel in which Cantwell, like Nixon in +µô8, 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 Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (+µyj); 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 fictionalized veneer) was a Kennedy protégé, at odds with Jason Robards’s Nixonesque president, who was hell-bent on eroding civil liberties. Nonetheless, would it be too fanciful to hypo - thesize, in that great unseen intertextual über-narrative of the genre, that Joe Cantwell perhaps dropped out for a few years during the +µôos, 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 film. World-weary ex-President Hockstader’s observations are particularly pithy, such as this admonition to Joe Cantwell: The end justifies 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 I’m 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 benefit political aspirants to watch this film 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 film of the early +µôos. Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, based on Eugene Burdick’s and Harvey Wheeler’s novel, was the last of the implicitly pro-LBJ films of +µô¡. Fail-Safe brought up the rear in helping to annihilate Barry Goldwater at the polls, but Columbia effectively doomed their own movie to obliteration at the box office, having released Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove earlier that year. Kubrick’s film, 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 film. Six US Vindicator bombers, led by Colonel Grady (Ed Binns), make their routine flight to their fail-safe points, fully expecting that they will thereafter be ordered home. But because of a technological error, they are ordered to fly 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 finally 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 Lumet’s Fail-Safe (+µô¡). +¡µ Grady’s 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 President’s voice, and their orders are to disregard such communication. As this last damaged bomber flies 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 America’s good faith and to avert a global nuclear holocaust, the President orders his trusted friend, US Air Force General Black (Dan O’Herlihy), into the air. As soon as Grady’s 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. Burdick’s and Wheeler’s 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 Shaw’s final valiant act: murder and suicide as the supreme, redemptive sacrifice to save America. If not as sophisticated as The Manchurian Candidate, Fail-Safe might surpass Frankenheimer’s classic in one respect. It has perhaps the bleakest ending in the genre. From Advise and Consent to Fail-Safe, Henry Fonda’s 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 confirmed. 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, finally 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. March’s Jordan Lyman and Fonda’s president in Fail-Safe are respectively en- dowed with the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon. In one sense Fonda’s three performances merge into the same character, but there is also a clear ideological trajectory at work here. Allen Drury had based Bob Leffingwell partly on FDR’s protégé Alger Hiss. Gore Vidal based Russell on Adlai Stevenson. Burdick’s and Wheeler’s idealized President in Fail-Safe was based on JFK himself. Within two short years, Fonda’s 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 film 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 Kubrick’s darkly comic Dr Strangelove, but instead as brave, dedicated officers 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 film is a civilian, the grotesque Groeteschele (Walter Matthau), a hawkish political scientist Military mania in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (+µô¡): 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 ôo 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 first-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 May’s 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-Safe’s own Dr Strange - love – survives, quite possibly to shape future policy. Nevertheless, the respective ideological, moral or amoral positions in Fail-Safe are finally reduced to the posturing of one-dimensional figures 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 films of the early +µôos tempered idealism with pragmatism. Jefferson 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: final paragraph of Drury’s 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 Drury’s own, in effect sums up the early +µôos political films’ representation of America. +: Decent men are faced with difficult, 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. Significantly, the heroes of the classic pre-World War II films (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 +µyos (The Parallax View, +µy¡; Three Days of the Condor, +µyj; and All the President’s Men, +µyô). Yet in those early +µôos classics by Pre- minger, Frankenheimer, Schaffner 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 sacrifice. 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 films was a frank treatment of unconventional sexual themes as subplots. Brigham Anderson and Joe Cantwell are both susceptible to homosexual blackmail; Eleanor Shaw Iselin’s relationship with her son Dan O’Herlihy as the humane General Black and Walter Matthau as the amoral Groeteschele in Fail-Safe. +j¡ finally 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 films of the early +µôos had a lasting impact on the genre. Three of the five have been remade, with varying degrees of success. Seven Days in May was remade in +µµ¡ as a TV movie, The Enemy Within (directed by Jonathan Darby), with Jason Robards in the Burt Lancaster role, Sam Waterston as Fredric March’s successor and Forest Whitaker stepping into Kirk Douglas’s shoes. Despite its pres- tigious cast, this was a needless, utterly inferior exercise, ludicrously featuring Russian agents, in this era of glasnost, helping Whitaker’s 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 first live broadcast feature-length drama on American television in ¡µ 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 Demme’s 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 first blush, the idea sounded as ill-advised as attempting to remake Citizen Kane, but Demme’s movie brought the tale’s 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 specific, bygone era. Still, one can discern enduring traces of Drury’s classic in Rob Reiner’s The American President (+µµj), in which the Senate Minority Leader (Richard Dreyfuss) is named ‘Bob Rumson’ (quite possibly a homage to Advise and Consent, in which +j¡ Walter Pidgeon’s Majority Leader was called ‘Bob Munson’); and in Rod Lurie’s The Contender (:ooo), in which the Congressional battle to confirm Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) as the first female Vice- President of the United States is just as virulent as the Senatorial wrangling over Robert Leffingwell in Drury’s novel and Preminger’s film 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 America’s cultural imagination and a last- ing impact upon the genre. We cannot fully appreciate Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (+µy¡) or Don Siegel’s Telefon (+µyy), 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 Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleam- ing (+µyy) or Edward Zwick’s The Siege (+µµ8) without Seven Days in May; or Rod Lurie’s truly nasty nuclear countdown drama Deterrence (+µµµ) without Fail-Safe. Yet the greatest legacy of the classic political movies of the early +µôos is perhaps most likely to be found on television. The immediate progenitor of The West Wing (+µµµ–:ooô) 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 Frears’s 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 Badham’s Nick of Time (+µµj) and its immediate cultural roots in post- µ/++ 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 film. +jj +jô ‘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 ‘first-generation’ or ‘seventh-generation’ as a yardstick of nationality, pedigree or ‘belonging’ – as if the foreign status preceding one’s identification as ‘American’ were essentially an inferior condition. In +µ¡8 the British anthropologist Geoffrey 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 +µôos films 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 flag-waving of the self-styled ‘super-patriots’ who were the real villains of those dramas. Put simply, the Americanism of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson cn+r+ra ô 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, +µôo) +jy Smith, Bill Russell and Jordan Lyman was safe, consensual and uncontested. Many fine films, however, have focused not on consensual protagonists, but upon problematic strands of Americanism or Ameri - can identity, as exemplified 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. Griffith’s ro- manticized Civil War and Reconstruction era epic The Birth ofa Nation (+µ+j), which lionized the Ku Klux Klan as the valiant defenders of white Southern Christian womanhood. In +µ¡y Warner Brothers, ex- hibiting their customary flair 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. Bogart’s 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 picture’s end guarantees the imprisonment of his racist cohorts, there is no redemption for this tortured and now lost soul. The penitentiary doors must finally seal him off from his family, too. Warners returned to the theme of hooded thugs terrorizing small- town America in Stuart Heisler’s Storm Warning (+µj+), which featured Ginger Rogers stopping off 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 films of the +µ¡os and ’jos took sideswipes at diverse brands of home-grown right-wing extremism (George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame, +µ¡:; Arch Oboler’s Strange Holiday, +µ¡j; H. C. Potter’s The Farmer’s Daughter, +µ¡y; and William Cameron Menzies’s The Whip Hand, +µj+), 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- +µôos to the late +µyos perceived by many liberals as an ideologue on the +j8 ultra-right of the political spectrum. Throughout the +µôos and ’yos the Klan and other grass-roots racist organizations had a low filmic profile (with the notable exceptions of William Shatner in Roger Corman’s incisive The Intruder, +µô+, and Terence Young’s sensation- alistic The Klansman, +µy¡). The Ku Klux Klan featured in the climac- tic episode of the mini-series Roots (+µyy), and Marlon Brando won an Emmy Award for his cameo as the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in the +µyµ sequel, Roots: The Next Generations. Yet in the Reaganite +µ8os the Klan, racists and fascists were prominent figures in Hollywood demonology, especially on television. Herbert Wise’s Skokie (+µ8+) dramatized a real-life crisis which oc- curred in +µyy, 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, +µ8¡) chronicled a series of brutal murders near a small Georgia town called Delano (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s middle name). All the villainous characters were virulently anti-Black, and most of them were fully paid-up members of the Klan. Lesli Linka Glatter’s Into the Homeland (+µ8y) starred Powers Boothe as an ex-cop who infiltrates a neo-Nazi group to rescue his daughter, who has fallen for the farmland Führer’s 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 Howell’s 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 Homeland’s inherent message of racial tolerance and coexistence. A fine three-hour telefeature, Cross of Fire (+µ8µ), starred John Heard as David C. Stephen son, the charismatic Indiana Klan leader of the +µ: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 Chetwynd’s So Proudly We Hail (+µµo) was +jµ 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. +µ88 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 Parker’s Mississippi Burning chron- icled the FBI investigation into the murders and disappearance of three Civil Rights workers in +µô¡ (this had previously been covered in Mar- vin Chomsky’s three-hour TV drama Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, +µyj, and would also be revisited yet again in the +µµo TV film 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 +µôos. 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 conflict 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. ¡ Significantly, this saga of racial oppression is framed – as so many Hollywood films 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, +µ8µ). +ôo problem to be solved by white protagonists. This was evident, perhaps inevitable, in conservative films such as John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (+µôo) and his Cheyenne Autumn (+µô¡), 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 - fies to the durability of the ‘white men to the rescue’ narrative which has prevailed throughout the history of Hollywood cinema. Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed (also +µ88) starred Debra Winger as a federal agent assigned to infiltrate 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 terrified 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 Berenger’s 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, indifferent power structures. Still, Betrayed finally falls short of penetrating insight and settles for a formulaic narrative. The lost opportunity of this film 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 fightin’ 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 +ô+ presidential candidate. Her sole triumph is that she has left Berenger’s 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 +µµos movies. The spectre of the Oklahoma City bombing was clearly visible in James Foley’s The Chamber (+µµô) and Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road (+µµµ), respectively featuring Gene Hackman and Tim Robbins as ultra-rightist terrorists who blow up government buildings. Rob Reiner’s Ghosts ofMississippi (+µµô) chronicled the titanic struggle to bring white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith (James Woods) to justice for the killing in +µô¡ of the Civil Rights campaigner Medgar Evers. A full generation elapsed between Evers’s death and Beckwith’s eventual imprisonment. The protagonist of Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill (+µµô) 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 film deals with Jackson’s trial, ending with his acquittal. Both John Singleton’s multicultural campus melodrama Higher Learning (+µµj) and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (:oo¡), the latter based on the Columbine High School tragedy of :o April +µµµ, conclude with sexu - ally insecure, Nazi-infatuated youths massacring their fellow students. Yet perhaps the most incisive analysis of right-wing extremism in American film to date has been Tony Kaye’s brutal American History X (+µµ8), confidently 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 Eastwood’s The face of American neo- Nazism: Edward Norton stars in Tony Kaye’s American History X (+µµ8). +ô: aged, world-weary protagonist in Unforgiven (+µµ:). Norton’s 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 film 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, misfits and heretics. Films such as Gordon Douglas’s Walk a Crooked Mile (+µ¡8), Robert Stevenson’s I Married a Communist (a.k.a. The Woman on Pier , +µ¡µ), R. G. Springsteen’s The Red Menace (+µ¡µ), Gordon Douglas’s I Was a Communist for the FBI (+µj+) and Alfred L. Werker’s Walk East on Beacon! (+µj:) portrayed a netherworld of treasonous ingrates and moral degenerates unfit to inhabit or enjoy the protection of freedom’s 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 films 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 Ludwig’s Big Jim McLain (+µj:), 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 +µ¡os and early +µjos. 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 McCarey’s My Son John (+µj:), finally came down to a Manichaean morality tale with a none-too - subtle ideological undertow. John Jefferson (Robert Walker) – endowed, like Jefferson 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 +ô¡ of his mother’s devout Catholicism and his American Legionnaire father’s flag-saluting patriotism, John Jefferson is an effete, 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 +µyos, when the era of the blacklist and the witch-hunts had become a popular filmic 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 Pollack’s The Way We Were (+µy¡), Lamont Johnson’s TV movie Fear on Trial (+µyj), Martin Ritt’s The Front (+µyô) and, over the next twenty-plus years, Graeme Clifford’s Frances (+µ8:), about the tragic +µ¡os star Frances Farmer, Irwin Winkler’s Guilty by Suspicion (+µµ+), Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (+µµ:) and Frank Darabont’s The Majestic (:oo+). Yet the focus was frequently on protag- onists who had been wrongly accused of Communist sympathies or affiliations. 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 Allen’s front-man scriptwriter in The Front, Robert De Niro’s movie director in Guilty by Suspicion and Jim Carrey’s 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 finger without cause and destroy lives without conscience. Several other films centred on innocents traumatized ‘by associa- tion’: the children of victims of the witch-hunts. This theme underlies both John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (+µyô) and Sidney Lumet’s Daniel (+µ8¡), based on E. L. Doctorow’s +µy+ novel, The Book of Daniel, which was inspired by the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Lumet’s Running on Empty (+µ88), which starred River Phoenix as the conflicted son of Vietnam-era radical activists Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch, was, in effect, 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 justifiable indignation are simplified by the fact that most of these films featured protagonists who were wrongly accused of being Communists. These films condemned the practice and the impact of wrongful +ô¡ accusation, but consequently they failed to address the rights and wrongs of whether governments and industries are justified 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 Hollywood’s liberal consensus. Herbert Biberman’s embattled Salt of the Earth (+µj¡), 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 Beatty’s epic Reds (+µ8+), which romanticized the love affair 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 +µ:os as classically American idealists. This expensive and over- long effort left most American moviegoers as cold as the frozen wastes of the Steppes – and not just because the +µ8os 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 Milius’s Reaganesque Red Dawn (+µ8¡) – 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 film. Senator Joe McCarthy and the Witch-Hunts One man became synonymous with the anti-Communist crusade of the early +µjos. 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- +ôj less defamation of character and intimidation; and, surely, McCarthy’s remorseless bullying and mudslinging have irrevocably linked such behaviour with his name. Ann Coulter, twenty-first-century America’s 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 fierce passions, pro and con, that his name provokes. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj) provided a snapshot of the McCarthy era. Taking its title from the legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow’s customary sign-off, this focused on Murrow’s most courageous show on the controversial CBS current affairs pro - gramme See It Now. On µ March +µj¡ 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 +µjos criticism of McCarthyism on screen was largely the preserve of safe, ostensibly conservative genres (e.g., the Western, the war film and the Biblical epic). When home-grown demagogues appeared in +µjos political movies, they were apt to be country boys with colossal egos (A Lion Is In the Streets, +µj¡; A Face in the Crowd, +µjy), rather than readily recognizable equivalents of Senator Joe McCarthy. One sure sign of Hollywood’s timidity was that the first film version of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s dramatic anti-McCarthy alle- gory, was actually a French project, co-written by Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre, which premiered in Europe in +µjy. That same year, McCarthy died. Hollywood was still in no rush to chronicle the ugly phenomenon that bore his name. Then, in +µô:, fic- titious senators reputedly based on McCarthy appeared in Advise and Consent (George Grizzard’s Fred Van Ackerman) and The Manchurian Candidate (James Gregory’s John Iselin). These turned McCarthy’s 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 +µôos film 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 Army–McCarthy hearings. For eight weeks in the +ôô summer of +µj¡, these first 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 McCarthy’s trademarks, finally shamed him, demanding: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?’ Ed Murrow’s 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 - inger’s courtroom saga Anatomy of a Murder (+µjµ). Then, a decade after the Army–McCarthy hearings, the documentary film-maker Emile de Antonio edited the ¡ô days and +8y hours of broadcast footage into Point of Order (+µô¡), a µo-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 films, made fifteen years apart, each did a superlative job of highlighting Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror. Jud Taylor’s Tail Gunner Joe (+µyy), 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 Magnificent Doll, and also the Whittaker Chambers equivalent in Advise and Consent) as Joseph Welch. In Frank Pierson’s Citizen Cohn (+µµ:), 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 Hoff- man, Citizen Cohn is framed in episodic flashbacks (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 America’s 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. +ôy +ô8 The political films of the early +µôos 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 films were the progenitors of the political thriller’s evolution during the +µyos. The edgy paranoia that had tugged at Bennett Marco’s subconscious in The Manchurian Candidate became the dominant ethos of the +µyos political film. 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 film 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 films of the +µ¡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 Rosenberg’s WUSA (+µyo), based on Robert Stone’s +µôy novel, A Hall of Mirrors, plays like a Nixon-era Day of the Locust, as three lost souls brush against one another’s lives prior to a conflagration. 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, +µôµ) +ôµ inated by the right-wing radio station WUSA (‘Voice of the Ameri can’s 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-off). When a colleague informs him, ‘They’re all delighted upstairs. They must have big things in store for you’, Rheinhardt replies neutrally but shrewdly: ‘Yeah, they’re 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 find 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 suffered 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 off welfare. Matters come to a head at a ‘Patriotic Revival’ – a mass rally spon- sored by WUSA. There is an old Western film star on the platform (a John Wayne-type figure?), played here by Wayne’s frequent co-star Bruce Cabot, who ‘referees’ a staged gunfight. 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 significant. At this rally designed to evoke memories of a heroic, John Wayne-style American past, Harvey’s presence here as an ersatz Southerner not only recalls his characterizations in Summer and Smoke (+µô+) and Walk on the Wild Side (+µô:), but also mischievously subverts his most heroic American role, as Colonel Travis in Wayne’s The Alamo (+µôo). In ad- dition, Harvey’s 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 film history and film iconography. In +µj¡, 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 Allen’s Suddenly. In WUSA, filmed 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 +µô8 Democratic Convention in Chicago (only two years before the film, but one year after the publication of Robert Stone’s 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 fifteen years in jail, she hangs herself with a chain in her cell. Farley advises Rheinhardt to leave town soon, ‘Or you’ll find yourself in someone’s conspiracy theory’. Rheinhardt, though saddened by Geraldine’s death, remains a survivor. But WUSA is still very much in operation. Rainey’s assassination attempt has done nothing to derail Bingamon’s 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 film 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 +µ8os and ’µos. 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 films of the +µyos. ‘Procedural’ political narratives such as Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (+µy:) and Jerry Schatzberg’s The Seduction of Joe Tynan (+µyµ) 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 significant change. The Candidate’s cynical snort and Joe Tynan’s impotent sigh both lament democratic politics as an exercise in futility. Even the most acclaimed film of the decade, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (+µy:), depicted the Mafia as inextricably linked to US political and economic power structures. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) tells Kay Adams (Diane Keaton): ‘My father’s no different than any other powerful man. Any man who’s res ponsible for other people. Like a senator, or a president.’ Kay says: ‘You know how naïve you sound? . . . senators and presidents don’t have men killed.’ Michael responds: ‘Who’s being naïve, 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 Miller’s Executive Action, scripted by Dalton Trumbo (perhaps the most talented of the Hollywood Ten) and released November +µy¡ – 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 America’s thirty-fifth 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, fictitious albeit symbolic, are appalled by the prospect of the Kennedy dynasty occupying the White House for an entire generation ( John Kennedy until +µôµ, Bobby Kennedy until +µyy, Teddy Kennedy until +µ8j). When, in June +µô¡, 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 effect handing Asia over to the Communists, Farrington and Foster begin to lay the groundwork for Kennedy’s 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 it’s told to stand for. Or what it’s 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 JFK’s death by conspiracy, and then blame it all on a lone nut. The fatal shots will actually be fired by three riflemen (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 don’t like ’em. They’re tolerable only if they’re 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 effort there will give us control of South Asia for decades to come; and with proper planning we can reduce the population to five hundred and fifty million by the end of the century. I know – I’ve 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 affected be better off, 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 +µy¡, but were the makers of this movie suggesting that the US Government might be complicit in experi ments which might have a lethal effect on millions of Americans? Farrington’s 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 Lancaster’s and Ryan’s earlier screen teamings, in the Westerns The Professionals (+µôô) and Lawman (+µy+), Lancaster was the resolute, unstoppable protagonist and Ryan’s char- acters were relatively weak figures. 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 final oper- ation. Foster appears to be sympathetic, saying: ‘We all have our failures of nerve.’ Even this seemingly amiable response is significant, 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 friend’s demise. The screen goes black, and it is then filled with the photographs of eighteen real-life material witnesses who had died in the first three years and three months since John F. Kennedy’s murder – only two of them from natural causes. As Randy Edelman’s haunting theme plays in the background, the narrator informs us: ‘An actuary, engaged by the London Sunday Times, concluded that on November ::nd, +µô¡, the odds against these witnesses being dead by February, +µôy, were one hundred thousand trillion to one.’ Executive Action is a well-made yet sadly underrated film. It was not a popular or critical success, and perhaps the impact of Kennedy’s 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 films ever made. It merits revival, however, making its point in under half the running time of Oliver Stone’s better-known but seemingly interminable JFK (+µµ+). 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 Costner’s 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 film, and he died before its release. It was one of his last performances, and one of his finest. 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 there’ll 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 God’s 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 Crossfire (+µ¡y), which ran into trouble with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, anti-Japanese in Bad Day at Black Rock (+µj¡) and anti-Black in Odds Against Tomorrow (+µjµ); but Ryan’s 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 first 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 fine if too frequently under - appreciated career. Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (+µy¡) was another assassination- themed conspiracy thriller – and it picked up exactly where Executive Action had left off. Specifically, 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 I’ve 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 official 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 Carroll’s murder, six material witnesses have died. Broadcaster Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), who was there that day, is terrified 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 official’s verdict: ‘Every time you turned around, some nut was knockin’ off 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 film 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 infiltrate the Parallax Corporation, having deduced, +yj The ‘assassin’ of a Senator, about to fall to his death in Alan J. Pakula’s classic paranoid thriller The Parallax View (+µy¡). ‘Whoever’s 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 flee 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 Carroll’s death, Frady had acted alone in assassinating Hammond. + Democratic debate is silenced as the committee’s spokesman utters the film’s last line: ‘There will be no questions.’ The Parallax View was a paradigm +µyos 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 Pakula’s All the President’s Men, +µyô). The gnawing sense of paranoia was reinforced by an archetypal +µyos 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 +µyos 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 film’s 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 flawed but fasci- nating. In any event, they were infinitely superior to the last assassina- tion-themed film of the +µyos, William Richert’s Winter Kills (+µyµ), based on a novel by Richard Condon. This was a tawdry hotchpotch with Jeff Bridges as the brother of a slain Kennedyesque president, +yô searching for the true motivation behind his assassination. The mastermind turns out to be the late President’s 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 +µyos, 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 finest thrillers of the +µyos. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (+µy¡), 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 inflection of a single word (‘He’d 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 Polanski’s Chinatown (+µy¡), a private eye ( Jack Nicholson) investigates a water commissioner’s death in late +µ¡os Los Angeles. The motive is revealed as a high-stakes utili - ties scam, in which powerful businessmen plan to divert Los Angeles’s precious water supply into their own desert lands. The mastermind behind the conspiracy is the dead man’s business partner and father-in- law, Noah Cross (John Huston), the most monstrous figure in the con- spiracy sub-genre since Eleanor Shaw Iselin (and, like her, a practitioner of parent–child incest). Both Peter Finch in Sidney Lumet’s Network (+µyô) and Jack Lemmon in James Bridges’s The China Syndrome (+µyµ) 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 films of the (post-)Watergate era. +yy Watergate certainly made its mark in mid-+µyos political films. The most obvious instance was, of course, All the President’s Men (see the section on Richard Nixon in chapter Three). Still, another Robert Red- ford film addressed the disturbing hypothesis of extra-legal operations conducted by a ‘government within the government’. In Sydney Pol- lack’s Three Days of the Condor (+µyj), Redford’s 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 Valjean’s dogged nemesis in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Meanwhile, the CIA’s morally compromised role in mid-+µyos American politics is highlighted during an exchange between the New York office’s Deputy Director Higgins (Cliff Robertson, PT ’s Jack Kennedy and The Best Man’s 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, wasn’t it?’ In his routine reading, he had unwittingly stumbled across the scenario for an unauthorized CIA operation in the Middle East. He had filed 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 Turner’s office. 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 nullifies 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 I’m away too long.’ Turner chooses to remain in America and risk being murdered rather than live as a man without a country. Yet Turner’s last confrontation is with Higgins, who admits that part of the CIA’s 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.’ Turner’s 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 Higgins’s 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 film made in +µyj: HIGGINS: It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen 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 they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who’ve never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know some- thing? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll 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. ‘You’ve done more damage than you know.’ However, the truth-seeker and truth-teller, however, is likely to be outflanked by the master of both institutional and geopolitical pragmatism, and the film ends on an uncertain and literally discordant note, haunted by Higgins’s confident query: ‘Hey, Turner – how do you know they’ll print it?’ General Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) is another truth-seeker and truth-teller. The protagonist of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleam- ing (+µyy) 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 Dell’s perception of the US Government’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Following his return to America, Dell’s 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, +yµ with the President as hostage; and, most crucially, full public disclosure of a secret National Security Council document revealing the true rationale behind America’s involvement in Vietnam (a fictional equi - valent of the Pentagon Papers). According to Twilight’s Last Gleaming, America had waged war in Vietnam to prove to the Soviets that, no matter how terrible, bloody and protracted the conflict might become, the United States would have the guts and the will to see it through. America’s 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 justification 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 officer who had been imprisoned by the Viet Cong could remain so naïve about human nature, with his faith in the all-vanquishing power of truth, Dell is a blood-brother to Jefferson Smith. Dell’s right-hand man in this doomed quest is fellow escapee Willis Powell (Paul Winfield), 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. Twilight’s 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 +µô¡ Lancaster’s 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. Harris’s The Bedford Incident (+µôj), Widmark’s Naval Captain’s political obsessions provoked a nuclear catastrophe. But in Twilight’s 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 finger on the nuclear trigger. MacKenzie calls his renegade ex-colleague a ‘lunatic son-of-a-bitch’. Yet Dell’s response suggests a history of personal betrayal as well as political grievance: ‘Lunatic’, in my book, is defined as someone who buries the truth. I intend to hold it up to the world and let them see what it’s 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 wouldn’t trade what I believed in for a star, you sent me to the shredder. In a +µjos or early +µôos film, MacKenzie would have been the hero: the sane, responsible soldier who must defuse the crisis. Yet the decid- edly left-wing viewpoint of Twilight’s 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 MacKenzie’s treachery will only become apparent in the last few minutes of the film. 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. Dell’s 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 can’t do business with murderers’, Stevens shrewdly responds: ‘That’s not true, Arthur, and it never has been true. When it’s 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 confidence 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 fifty 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 horrified by the contents of NSC docu- ment µyjµ. Several of his principal advisers are adamant that the truth cannot be disclosed. Stevens tries to negotiate with Dell, now offering  million dollars and guaranteeing safe transit to any country in the +8+ world. But when Stevens baulks at going public with NSC document µyjµ, 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 sufferings of an infinite 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 it’s too late. I’m sorry, Mr President, but this item is non-negotiable. Back in the White House, Stevens and his advisers discuss the controversial NSC document µyjµ, 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 inflict and suffer untold punishment. And, no matter what the cost in American blood, we would perpetuate a theatrical holo- caust.’ Because nuclear war was unthinkable, Stevens’s advisers explain, the Soviets had to be convinced that America would never flinch 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 µyjµ. Guthrie gives him his word of honour. The President and his entourage fly to Montana. At the silo, Dell and Powell await the President’s arrival. A throw- away line from Powell about the Air Force and the Mafia 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, don’t you under- stand? You are messin’ with the brains of this country. DELL: But we’re not going out there alone. The President’ll be right between us! POWELL: You really are pitiful. DELL: What the hell are you trying to say? POWELL: I’m 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, don’t 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’. That’s 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 µyjµ. As they leave the silo, Dell tells Stevens: ‘I’d like you to know, sir, for the first time since ’Nam, I feel I’ve 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. MacKenzie’s final 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 µyjµ. He dies with his question unanswered, and Guthrie walks away in silence – probably to remain silent. Again, as with several of the other great +µyos 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, Twilight’s 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 film 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. Twilight’s Last Gleaming, filmed 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 conflict overseas, the military had achieved this sinister goal at home by the back door. Twilight’s Last Gleaming was an uneasy mix of techno-thriller and left-wing political discourse. At the box office, 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 +µyos was the ‘golden age’ of the political conspiracy film. In the +µ8os, 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 Milius’s Red Dawn (+µ8¡). It was only in +µµ+ that paranoia and conspiracy fleetingly resumed their centrality within the political genre, as Oliver Stone’s 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 Stone’s film was compromised by his fast-and-loose conflation of fictional supposition with the docu - mentary record. Conspiracy movies enjoyed a brief resurgence in the late +µµos. Several of these were essentially formulaic thrillers (Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power, Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory and Dwight H. Little’s Murder at , all +µµy, and Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State, +µµ8). Both Absolute Power and Enemy of the State allowed Gene Hackman to deliver variations on previous performances. In Roger Donaldson’s No Way Out (+µ8y), 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 mistress’s 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 Coppola’s The Conversation. A few others, while resonant in their own right, harked back in theme and/or style to classics from earlier times. Edward Zwick’s The Siege (+µµ8) and Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road (+µµµ), filmed after Oklahoma City but before µ/++, 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-µ/++ 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-Safe’s 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 Zwick’s The Siege (+µµ8). 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 finally 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 first (Hubbard calls his bluff: ‘Make mur - derers out of these young kids’). Outside, Americans of every colour and creed demonstrate against Devereaux’s heavy-handed policies, chanting ‘No Fear!’ and denouncing the blanket demonization of innocent citizens. The Siege was a pre-µ/++, 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 +µôos classics. Yet Arlington Road hurtled relentlessly towards a far bleaker ending. History professor Michael Faraday ( Jeff 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 fireworks. Faraday is still trying to recover from the death of his wife, an FBI agent killed during a botched operation on an anti-government activist’s property in Copper Creek, West Virginia (modelled on the tragic siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August +µµ:). ¡ 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 field trip to the scene of his wife’s 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 +µ April +µµj. Yet he doubts that the misfit blamed for St Louis acted alone, even though that was the official 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 wife’s 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 +8ô 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 Faraday’s 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 underground’s 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 +µô¡. The ironic, sinister ending of Arlington Road recalled the paranoia and hopelessness of The Parallax View in +µy¡. Yet the most sophisticated conspiracy film of the late +µµos 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- first century progresses. Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (+µµy) was based on Larry Beinhart’s +µµ¡ novel American Hero, which hypothesized that the +µµ+ Gulf War was manufactured to bolster George H. W. Bush’s ratings in the polls. By +µµy even that issue appeared passé (albeit temporarily). Wag the Dog was contemporary with a vengeance. The principal photography was completed in :µ days, with the crisis facing the White House changed from an uncharismatic, ineffectual president to one too charis- matic for his own good. As a sex scandal threatens the (fictional) President’s 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 Dog’s president greet- ing the ‘Firefly 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 film 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 Hoffman) to salvage the President’s faltering, scandal-plagued re-election campaign. Motss, a consummate showman, intuits that nothing gets the American +8y +88 people rallying round the flag 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 fleeing 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 figment, 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-offs’ related to the ‘war’. But when the President’s opponent gets wind of the fact that the crisis is faked, he outflanks Brean’s 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 find 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 Hoffman as the Hollywood master of illusion in Barry Levinson’s brilliantly scathing Wag the Dog (+µµy). 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 hero’s funeral, complete with a fictitious regiment and the rousing ‘Ballad of the ¡o¡’ (its theme clearly derived from ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’). The President’s approval rat- ings are sky-high and the election is in the bag, but Motss is unhappy. Despite Brean’s 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 Dog’s 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 films of note have sought to come to grips with the milieu of American politics in the early twenty-first century – a political landscape so recently yet so significantly altered. +8µ +µo Political films have, occasionally, espoused an ethos that anticipates political actuality in American society. For example, JFK (+µµ+) and Bob Roberts (+µµ:) were essentially Clinton-era films made before Bill Clinton was elected President. Similarly, the first film 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 five. Rod Lurie’s Deterrence received its world premiere in Toronto on +o September +µµµ, exactly two years and one day before µ/++, and it reads like a neo- conservative’s most fervent fantasy. Walter Emerson (Kevin Pollak) is an unelected President, first appointed to the vice-presidency and then succeeding to the Oval Office 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 Hussein’s 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 conflagration, for Emerson has known all along that the atomic weapons on which Iraq had been relying were defective and thus harmless. Emerson’s rationale is pre-emptive defence – but it sounds more like mass murder, committed with impunity. Deterrence is a truly loathsome little film, apparently indifferent to any moral boundaries which distin- guish national and global security from war crimes. Conclusion Twilight’s Last Gleaming? ‘This used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.’ George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in Easy Rider (directed by Dennis Hopper, +µôµ) +µ+ The real-life events of the first few years of the twenty-first 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 Mann’s Ada (+µô+), 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 µ/++ and the Patriot Act (already in the pipeline) was passed soon thereafter, that ill-conceived legislation ignored the message of Edward Zwick’s grimly prophetic The Siege: that the liberties of law- abiding citizens are not safeguarded by being curtailed. George W. Bush’s glib conflation of Iraq with al-Qaeda implied Iraqi responsi - bility for µ/++, thus recalling the purposely stage-managed conflict 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 Emerson’s in Deterrence. The hubris per- vading current US policy in the Middle East was evident as far back as +µyj, courtesy of Three Days of the Condor, while the unaccountability of self-styled Olympians had been a major concern of Executive Action and Twilight’s Last Gleaming. As the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on with no end in sight, military veterans and anti-war activists of the Vietnam era might reflect 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 films 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 Doe’s D. B. Norton, Willie Stark, Lonesome Rhodes, Eleanor and John Iselin, General James Mattoon Scott, Joe Cantwell, WUSA’s Matthew Bingamon, The Dead Zone’s Greg Still- son, and Bob Roberts have all stalked the genre as they have stalked these pages – each of them a celluloid spectre made flesh, warning Americans to be wary of fanatical super-patriots and to look instead for the agendas beneath all the flag-waving. In view of that strong thread running through the genre, perhaps a man who attained the presidency +µ: by dubious means, whose complacency resulted in a national tragedy, whose subsequent waving of the bloody shirt provoked an unjustifiable war, and whose Patriot Act still threatens the hard-won liberties of Americans – perhaps such a man was made to order for the political film. Conceivably, this was exactly the kind of politician the genre had been sounding warning bells about since the +µ¡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 filmic predecessor, the messianic and dictatorial President Judd Ham- mond (Walter Huston) in Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel Over the White House (+µ¡¡). + However, I would suggest that Bill Russell’s 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 films of :oo¡ represented the most conscious, concerted effort to influence 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 +µô¡. At first blush, Niels Mueller’s 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 +µy¡, 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 Driver’s anti-hero and would-be assassin Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). In the post-µ/++ era, however, this scenario of a misfit attempting to crash a plane into the White House inevitably had a disturbing contemporary resonance. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit / raised a multitude of questions about George W. Bush’s ‘victory’ in :ooo, the governmental incompe- tence that resulted in µ/++, the Bush family’s intricate, long-term +µ¡ 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 Moore’s docu- mentary enjoyed a box-office success usually reserved for feature films. 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 Sayles’s 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 O’Brien (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 Polanski’s Chinatown (+µy¡) and Sayles’s own Lone Star (+µµô). The casting rein- forced the connection to those films. Both Cooper and Kris Kristoffer- 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 fire. It had greater potential as a satire. The Pilager dynasty (a wonderful name, suggestive of ruthless plunderers) is clearly meant to evoke the Bushes. Dickie’s father, Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy), is not an Samuel J. Bicke (Sean Penn) reaches the end of the line in Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon (:oo¡). +µ¡ ex-President but a senator. Murphy had played the third-party candi- date Hal Phillip Walker’s advance man in Robert Altman’s Nashville (+µyj) and presidential hopeful Jack Tanner in Altman’s +µ88 TV ‘mocku mentary’ Tanner ’. Here he is an elder statesman with no illus - ions about his son’s intelligence, but Dickie is bolstered by corporate backers who are delighted that he is so ‘user-friendly’. Richard Drey- fuss’s bald, bespectacled, intense campaign supremo Chuck Raven is, even down to his name, clearly meant to suggest George W. Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove. Inevitably, however, it will be Chris Cooper’s 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 finding both feet in his mouth. Silver City’s sidelong swipes at Dickie Pilager’s real-life counterpart struck their target, but the overall tale of corporate intrigue and environmental devastation ultimately lacked clarity. Nevertheless, the final 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 fish, glittering lifelessly atop the water, as the lyrics resonate, ‘And crowned thy good with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea’. Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate was not simply a remake of John Frankenheimer’s +µô: 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 +µµ+. This is curiously apposite, since the great tragedy of +µôos Ameri- ca became conflict in Asia, whereas the great tragedy of early twenty- first-century America has become the war in the Middle East. Denzel Washington plays Bennett Marco, the old Frank Sinatra role. He helps Chris Cooper’s second-generation politico and Richard Dreyfuss’s tough campaign manager in John Sayles’s 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. Pakula’s The Pelican Brief (+µµ¡) and Edward Zwick’s The Siege (+µµ8). 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 Darby’s The Enemy Within (+µµ¡). These actors fitted effortlessly 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 film, 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 fortified her power base via a shrewd political mar- riage (part Teresa Heinz Kerry?), Eleanor is also Jocasta to Raymond’s 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 suffi- 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. +µj And the banner of the pro-Shaw forces depicts a fist smashing through the American flag, accompanied by the caption: ‘Secure Tomorrow’. It seems an implicitly fascist clarion call, reminiscent of Bob Roberts’s ‘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 office. However, there was no sign in the new movie of the vacuous, demagogic Senator Iselin from Condon’s novel and the +µô: film. 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 effect. Film-makers’ scrutiny of political issues and events has not abated in Bush’s second term, however. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (:ooj) starred David Strathairn as Ed Murrow, who helped halt the menace of Joe McCarthy through his current affairs 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 President’s Men had sought to get at the printer’s ink under the fingernails 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 Gaghan’s Syriana (:ooj), a blistering con- demnation of the unholy machinations of governments and corporations that sacrifice the interests of citizens and the environment in pursuit of the great god, Oil. Conventional political thrillers continue to be produced (Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, :ooj; Clark Johnson’s The Sentinel, :ooô), but +µô Two generations of a political dynasty poised to ‘secure tomorrow’ for corporate fascism: Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber in Jonathan Demme’s :oo¡ remake of The Manchurian Candidate. the American political film remains an ideal genre for ambitious film- makers who have their hearts set on grandiose sagas and important statements. :ooô saw the release of: a new version of All the King’s Men, directed by Steven Zaillian and featuring Sean Penn as Willie Stark; Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, an Altmanesque ensemble piece set in and around the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at the time of Robert Kennedy’s assassination on the premises; and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, an epic saga of the early days of the CIA. The Good Shepherd’s inspirational template is, reputedly, The Godfather – in this context, a template perhaps reminiscent of that Michael Corleone/ Willis Powell (of Twilight’s Last Gleaming) assertion, that governments and organized crime sip out of the same cup? In their discussion of Robert Aldrich’s late-career political master- piece, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, writers Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene L. Miller referred to the title (taken, of course, from Francis Scott Key’s ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’) as designed to reflect ‘a film 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 first Black President (Barack Obama), or the first 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. µ/++ was, without doubt, the ‘defining moment’ of George W. Bush’s presidency, as surely as the hostage crisis in Iran had been Jimmy Carter’s. µ/++ has altered the political landscape irrevocably, and not only in the United States. An American tragedy was reconfigured 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 significant and perhaps understandable that the films dealing with µ/++ to date have focused on the heroism of Americans in crisis (Paul Greengrass’s United  and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, both :ooô), rather than on the negligence that allowed this tragedy to occur. Still, an alternative version of events has +µy +µ8 been watched by hundreds of thousands on the Internet. Dylan Avery’s controversial :ooô documentary Loose Change is questioning the official version of µ/++, 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 film’s first 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 film critics. Contemporary critical reception is no longer limited to newspapers and magazines. Now, anyone with a computer can offer an opinion, as valid as anyone else’s, and it is there for all the world to see. The Internet Movie Database has democratized movie criticism, and the more recent the film, 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 film, 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-fighting 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 Wayne’s The Green Berets (+µô8) aside, American film -makers did not fully address that divisive conflict 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 America’s 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 +µôo, Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry and Stanley Kramer’s 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 finest of American political films, which have always privileged intelligence over intolerance, should be ideally placed to resist its momentum. In Donald Wrye’s bleak TV masterpiece Amerika (+µ8y), which imagined the Soviet takeover of a defeated USA, sapped by materialism and apathy, Sam Neill’s Russian Colonel observes: ‘You lost your country before we ever got here.’ The underlying message was akin to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 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 film-makers alike have proclaimed that the price of liberty is vigilance. Americans must now and always beware those opportunistic fear - mongers, long vilified by the political movie, who would have them believe that the price of vigilance is liberty. +µµ :oo Introduction: Once Upon A Nation: The Ideology of American Political Films + See http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/greatestamerican/greatest - american.html (accessed +µ 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, +µ8y); Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London, +µµ:); Gary Crowdus, ed., The Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL, +µµ¡); Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh, :ooo); Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds, Hollywood’ s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History (Lexington, KY, :oo¡); Mark Wheeler, Hollywood: Politics and Society (London, :ooô); and Harry Keyishian, Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies (Lanham, MD, :ooô). 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 America’s pantheon of national heroes, see Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship (Ann Arbor, MI, +µ¡+; reprinted +µôô). ¡ See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, ed., The Almanac of American History (New York, +µ8¡), pp. +o–+:. j Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, +µµ¡), p. ix. ô See, for example, Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, .,.,–.,,. (London, +µµo), pp. +:ô–y. References :o+ Chapter +: American Politics, American Movies: Movie America, Movie History + Characters in three other films of +µôo, all set in the +µ:os, repudiated anti-Catholic bigotry: John McIntire (shocked) in Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry, Spencer Tracy (rhetorically) in Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind, and Robert Preston (with colourful indignation) in Delbert Mann’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. It is entirely reasonable to read McIntire’s rebuke of Edward Andrews’s negative comments about a Catholic (Al Smith) running for president and, certainly, Preston’s ridicule of sister-in- law Eve Arden’s bizarre anti-Catholic fantasies as implicit cinematic votes for Kennedy in that year’s imminent presidential election. : See Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading, MA, +µy8), pp. :oô, :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 Clinton’s Camelot Legacy’, in Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington, KY, :oo¡), pp. ¡oµ–+µ. 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, +µµ¡), pp. :o–:¡. ¡ Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley, CA, +µy8), 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 Ford’s greatest films (Lincoln; The Grapes of Wrath, +µ¡o; How Green Was My Valley, +µ¡+; My Darling Clementine, +µ¡ô). ¡ 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 Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (+µ¡+), based on Stephen Vincent Benét’s folk opera of +µ¡µ, 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 (+µ¡µ) and Meet John Doe (+µ¡+). 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 Browder’s ‘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, +µô+), p. +y. ô Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. +¡j. y For a comprehensive treatment of Teddy Roosevelt’s relationship to the new medium of film, see J. Tillapaugh, ‘Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders: A Century of Leadership in Film’, in Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington, KY, :oo¡), pp. µô–++¡. 8 Blackmer subsequently appeared as TR in The Monroe Doctrine (+µ¡µ), Teddy the Rough Rider (+µ¡o), March On, America! (+µ¡:), In Old Oklahoma (+µ¡¡), Buffalo Bill (+µ¡¡) and My Girl Tisa (+µ¡8). µ For an in-depth production history of Zanuck’s epic, see Thomas J. Knock, ‘History with Lightning: The Forgotten Film Wilson (+µ¡¡)’, in Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, ed. Peter C. Rollins (Lexington, KY, +µ8¡), 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 +µ8¡ as Joseph Kennedy, Marshall essayed: Harry Truman in Collision Course: Truman vs. MacArthur (+µyô); John Foster Dulles in Eleanor, First Lady of the World (+µ8:); Eisenhower in the +µ8ô TV production, Ike (not to be confused with the +µyµ mini-series starring Robert Duvall), and again in the mini-series War and Remembrance (+µ88); as U. S. Grant in Emma: Queen of the South Seas (+µ88); and as John Mitchell in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (+µµj). In addition, Marshall played Senator Joseph Paine (the Claude Rains role) in Tom Laughlin’s +µyy reworking of Mr Smith, titled Billy Jack Goes to Washington; ‘The President’ in Richard Lester’s Superman II (+µ8o); the Senate Chair- man in Miss Evers’ Boys (+µµy); and other DC dignitaries in Roger Young’s Under Siege (+µ8ô), Sidney Lumet’s Power (+µ8ô) and Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power (+µµy). Not a bad ‘Washington insider’ track record. : Ronald Reagan has, on occasion, been claimed as an ‘ex-Catholic’. Reagan’s 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, +µµ:), pp. +8y–j:µ. ¡ See Michael Singer, ‘Interview with Oliver Stone’, in Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film, ed. Eric Hamburg (London, +µµô), 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, +µ8ô), p. :88. ¡ John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon in the presidential election of +µôo was wafer-thin, with a majority of just around +oo,ooo. The televised debates were crucial factors in securing Kennedy’s 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, +µ8¡), p. ¡yo. j William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, .,¸:–.,,: (London, +µyj), p. ++y. ô See Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men [+µ¡ô] (London, +µy¡), 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 King’s Men; the second was as a bullying, authori- tarian scrap-metal dealer who plans to bend Washington to his will in George Cukor’s classic comedy Born Yesterday (+µjo). Intriguingly, in Luis Mandoki’s +µµ¡ 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 Louisiana’s Long dynasty, US Senator Russell B. Long (Huey’s son), was played by Walter Matthau in an unbilled cameo appearance in Oliver Stone’s JFK (+µµ+). µ Gore Vidal, ‘Barry Goldwater: A Chat’, Life (µ June +µô+); reprinted in Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, .,,:–.,,: [+µµ¡] (London, +µµµ), 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, +µ8¡), passim, and Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (London, +µ8¡), 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 Fonda’s association with that genre in .: Angry Men and Laughton’s in Witness for the Prosecution. ¡ Allen Drury, A Senate Journal, .,,¸–.,,, (New York, +µô¡), pp. :y, ¡¡; for Van Ackerman’s character, see Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (New York, +µjµ), pp. :jô–yo, ¡¡j–ô, ¡j:. ¡ See Greil Marcus, The Manchurian Candidate, BFI Film Classics (London, :oo:), pp. ôµ–yo. j The classic literary indictment of ‘Momism’ in American society is, of course, Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York, +µ¡:). ô 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. yo–µo. y See Fred J. Cook, The Warfare State (New York, +µô:), passim. 8 Barry M. Goldwater, With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater (New York, +µyµ), p. +¡µ. µ Gore Vidal, ‘Political Melodramas’, in Vidal, United States: Essays, .,,:–.,,: [+µµ¡] (London, +µµµ), p. 8j:; and see Vidal’s ‘Richard Nixon: Not The Best Man’s Best Man’, in the same volume, p. µoo. +o This character’s 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. ô+ô. Chapter ô: Enemies Within: White Hoods, Red Scares, Black Lists + Geoffrey Gorer, The Americans: A Study in National Character (London, +µ¡8), p. +j¡; the overall thrust of Gorer’s chapter, ‘More Equal Than Others’, pp. +¡ô–y+, is especially pertinent in precisely this context. : See, for example, two television movies of +µ88 with very similar plots: Karen Arthur’s Evil in Clear River, starring Lindsay Wagner as the mother who does battle with Randy Quaid’s charismatic high school teacher who is filling his pupils’ heads with an anti-Semitic revisionist version of Holo- caust history; and Anthony Page’s Scandal in a Small Town, with Raquel Welch fighting exactly the same good fight against Ronny Cox. ¡ The pairing of Hackman’s Anderson and Dafoe’s 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, +µ8¡), passim; and also to the ‘outlaw hero’ and ‘official hero’, as outlined in Robert B. Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, .,¸c–.,Sc (Princeton, NJ, +µ8j), 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. jj–y:. j Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London, +µôô), p. ô+. 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 (+µ¡¡). : 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 +µy+, an event allegorized in Aldrich’s violent whites vs. Indians Western Ulzana’s Raid (+µy:), 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 +µµ:, was the subject of a +µµô 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 Lancaster’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Scott, in Seven Days in May. Conclusion: Twilight’s 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, +µ8ô), p. +µy. :oô :oy Adair, Gilbert, Hollywood’s Vietnam: From ‘The Green Berets’ to ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (London, +µ8µ) 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, +µ8ô) Beinhart, Larry, American Hero (London, +µµ¡) Berecz, John, All the President’s Women: An Examination of Sexual Styles of Presidents Truman through Clinton (Atlanta, GA, +µµµ) Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (New York, +µyj) Biskind, Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London, +µµ8) —, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (London, +µ8¡) Black, Gregory D., The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, .,,c‒.,,, (Cambridge, +µµ8) Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford (Berkeley, CA, +µy8) Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner, Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s 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 America’s 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, +µ8¡) Carnes, Mark C., ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (London, +µµô) Carney, Raymond, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge, +µ8ô) Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, .,¸c‒.,6c [+µ8¡] (Urbana and Chicago, :oo¡) Select Bibliography :o8 Chester, Lewis, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of .,6S (London, +µôµ) Christensen, Terry, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from ‘Birth of a Nation’ to ‘Platoon’ (New York, +µ8y) Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate (London, +µôo) Cook, Fred J., The Warfare State (New York, +µô:) 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, +µµy) Cripps, Thomas, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, +µµ¡) Crowdus, Gary, ed., The Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL, +µµ¡) Crowther, Bruce, Hollywood Faction: Reality and Myth in the Movies (London, +µ8¡) Cunliffe, Marcus, American Presidents and the Presidency (London, +µy:) 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, +µµo) Donald, David, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, :nd edn (New York, +µô+) Dooley, Roger, From Scarface to Scarlett: American Films in the .,¸cs (New York, +µ8+) Drury, Allen, Advise and Consent (Garden City, NY, +µjµ) —, A Senate Journal, .,,¸‒.,,, (New York, +µô¡) Dugger, Ronnie, On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (New York, +µ8¡) Edwards, Anne, Early Reagan: The Rise of an American Hero (London, +µ8y) 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, +µµj) Flynn, John T., As We Go Marching [+µ¡¡] (New York, +µy¡) Foner, Eric, The Story of American Freedom (New York, +µµ8) Friedrich, Otto, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the .,,cs (London, +µ8y) Gabler, Neal, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, +µ88) Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and his Films (Berkeley, CA, +µ8ô) Girgus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra and Kazan (Cambridge, +µµ8) Goldwater, Barry M., With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. 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Kennedy (London, +µµ+) Richards, Jeffrey, Visions of Yesterday (London, +µy¡) :++ Ridgeway, James, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture (New York, +µµ+) Riordan, James, Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker (London, +µµô) Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington, IN, +µ8+) Rogin, Michael Paul, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA, +µ8y) 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, +µ8¡) —, and John E. O’Connor, eds, Hollywood’s 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, +µ8µ) Salewicz, Chris, Oliver Stone: The Making of his Movies (London, +µµy) Salisbury, Harrison E., The Many Americas Shall be One (London, +µy+) Sardar, Ziauddin, and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why do People Hate America? (Cambridge, :oo:) Sayre, Nora, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York, +µ8:) Shindler, Colin, Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, .,:,‒.,¸, (London, +µµô) Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr, ed., The Almanac of American History (New York, +µ8¡) —, The Cycles of American History (Boston, MA, +µ8ô) —, The Imperial Presidency (Boston, MA, +µy¡) —, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (London, +µôj) Scott, Ian, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh, :ooo) Segal, Ronald, America’s Receding Future: The Collision of Creed and Reality (London, +µô8) Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York, +µyj) Smith, Hedrick, The Power Game: How Washington Works (Glasgow, +µ88) Stone, Oliver, and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film: The Documented Screenplay (New York, +µµ:) Stormer, John A., None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO, +µô¡) Suid, Lawrence H., Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading, MA, +µy8) Toplin, Robert Brent, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana, IL, +µµô) —, ed., Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History and Controversy (Lawrence, KA, :ooo) :+: Vidal, Gore, United States: Essays, .,,:‒.,,: [+µµ¡] (London, +µµµ) Wade, Wyn Craig, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York, +µ88) Warren, Robert Penn, All the King’s Men [+µ¡ô] ( London, +µy¡) Webster, Duncan, Looka Yonder!: The Imaginary America of Populist Culture (London, +µ88) Wecter, Dixon, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship (Ann Arbor, MI, +µ¡+; reprinted +µôô) Weinstein, Allen, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (London, +µy8) Whale, John, The Half-Shut Eye: Television and Politics in Britain and America (London, +µyo) Wheeler, Mark, Hollywood: Politics and Society (London, :ooô) White, Theodore H., America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, .,,6‒.,Sc (London, +µ8¡) —, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York, +µyj) —, The Making of the President, .,6c (New York, +µô+) Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, +µµ+) Wills, Garry, The Kennedys: A Shattered Illusion (London, +µ8¡) —, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (London, +µ88) 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, +µµµ) —, and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York, +µyô) Wylie, Philip, Generation of Vipers (New York, +µ¡:) Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States (London, +µ8o) :+¡ Features Released in Theatres +µ+j The Birth of a Nation (directed by D. W. Griffith) +µ:¡ America (D. W. Griffith) The Dramatic Life ofAbraham Lincoln (Phil Rosen) The Iron Horse ( John Ford) +µ¡o Abraham Lincoln (D. W. Griffith) +µ¡: The Dark Horse (Alfred E. Green) The Phantom President (Norman Taurog) Washington Masquerade (Charles Brabin) Washington Merry-Go-Round ( James Cruze) +µ¡¡ Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory La Cava) +µ¡¡ Judge Priest ( John Ford) +µ¡j Thanks a Million (Roy Del Ruth) +µ¡ô The Gorgeous Hussy (Clarence Brown) The Prisoner of Shark Island ( John Ford) +µ¡y Black Legion (Archie L. Mayo) This is My Affair (William A. Seiter) +µ¡8 Of Human Hearts (Clarence Brown) +µ¡µ Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra) Young Mr Lincoln ( John Ford) +µ¡o Abe Lincoln in Illinois (a.k.a. Spirit of the People) ( John Cromwell) The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges) +µ¡+ Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) Louisiana Purchase (Irving Cummings) Meet John Doe (Frank Capra) +µ¡: Keeper of the Flame (George Cukor) Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz) +µ¡¡ Tennessee Johnson (William Dieterle) +µ¡¡ Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges) Wilson (Henry King) Filmography :+¡ +µ¡j Strange Holiday (Arch Oboler) +µ¡ô Magnificent Doll (Frank Borzage) +µ¡y The Farmer’s Daughter (H. C. Potter) The Senator was Indiscreet (George S. Kaufman) +µ¡8 State of the Union (Frank Capra) +µ¡µ All the King’s Men (Robert Rossen) +µjo Born Yesterday (George Cukor) The Magnificent Yankee ( John Sturges) No Way Out ( Joseph L. Mankiewicz) +µj+ Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler) The Tall Target (Anthony Mann) The Whip Hand (William Cameron Menzies) +µj: Big Jim McLain (Edward Ludwig) Lone Star (Vincent Sherman) My Son John (Leo McCarey) +µj¡ A Lion is in the Streets (Raoul Walsh) The President’s Lady (Henry Levin) The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford) +µj¡ Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman) Suddenly (Lewis Allen) +µjô Giant (George Stevens) Storm Center (Daniel Taradash) +µjy Beau James (Melville Shavelson) A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan) +µj8 The Buccaneer (Anthony Quinn) The Last Hurrah (John Ford) +µjµ On the Beach (Stanley Kramer) +µôo Ice Palace (Vincent Sherman) Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer) Primary (Robert Drew) [documentary] Sunrise at Campobello (Vincent J. Donehue) Wild River (Elia Kazan) +µô+ Ada (Daniel Mann) The Intruder (Roger Corman) +µô: 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) +µô¡ PT .c, (Leslie H. Martinson) +µô¡ 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) +µôj The Bedford Incident ( James B. Harris) +µôô John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums (Bruce Herschen- sohn) [documentary] +µô8 America Is Hard to See (Emile de Antonio) [documentary] Wild in the Streets (Barry Shear) +µôµ Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper) Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler) +µyo 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) +µy+ Millhouse: A White Comedy (Emile de Antonio) [documentary] +µy: The Candidate (Michael Ritchie) The Man ( Joseph Sargent) .,,6 (Peter H. Hunt) +µy¡ Executive Action (David Miller) The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack) +µy¡ Chinatown (Roman Polanski) The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola) Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis) [documentary] The Klansman (Terence Young) The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula) +µyj 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) +µyô All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula) Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby) The Front (Martin Ritt) Marathon Man ( John Schlesinger) Network (Sidney Lumet) Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese) +µyy 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) Twilight’s Last Gleaming (Robert Aldrich) +µy8 Born Again (Irving Rapper) Bully: An Adventure with Teddy Roosevelt (Peter H. Hunt) Coming Home (Hal Ashby) :+ô The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino) F.I.S.T. (Norman Jewison) The Greek Tycoon ( J. Lee Thompson) +µyµ . . . 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) +µ8o Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino) The Kidnapping of the President (George Mendeluk) Return of the Secaucus Seven ( John Sayles) +µ8+ Blow Out (Brian De Palma) First Monday in October (Ronald Neame) Ragtime (Milos Forman) Reds (Warren Beatty) +µ8: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Colin Higgins) Frances (Graeme Clifford) Missing (Costa-Gavras) +µ8¡ Daniel (Sidney Lumet) The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg) The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman) Silkwood (Mike Nichols) Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode) +µ8¡ Flashpoint (William Tannen) The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah) Red Dawn ( John Milius) Secret Honor (Robert Altman) +µ8j The Falcon and the Snowman ( John Schlesinger) Invasion USA ( Joseph Zito) Marie (Roger Donaldson) Revolution (Hugh Hudson) +µ8ô Platoon (Oliver Stone) Power (Sidney Lumet) Salvador (Oliver Stone) +µ8y 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) +µ88 Betrayed (Costa-Gavras) Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker) Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet) +µ8µ Blaze (Ron Shelton) Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone) :+y +µµ+ Guilty by Suspicion (Irwin Winkler) JFK (Oliver Stone) True Colors (Herbert Ross) +µµ: 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) +µµ¡ 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] +µµ¡ Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis) Guarding Tess (Hugh Wilson) Legends of the Fall (Edward Zwick) +µµj 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) +µµô 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) +µµy 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) +µµ8 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 +µµµ 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) :ooô All the King’s 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 +µô8 Shadow on the Land (directed by Richard C. Sarafian) [S] +µyo The Unfinished Journey of Robert Kennedy (Mel Stuart) [D] +µy+ Vanished (Buzz Kulik) [M] +µy¡ The Missiles of October (Anthony Page) [F] +µyj Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan (Marvin J. Chomsky) [M] Fear on Trial (Lamont Johnson) [F] :+µ +µyô 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] +µyy 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] +µy8 The Bastard (Lee H. Katzin) [M] King (Abby Mann) [M] Ruby and Oswald (Mel Stuart) [F] +µyµ Backstairs at the White House (Michael O’Herlihy) [M] Blind Ambition (George Schaefer) [M] Friendly Fire (David Greene) [F] Ike (Boris Sagal and Melville Shavelson) [M] The Rebels (Russ Mayberry) [M] +µ8o FDR: The Last Year (Anthony Page) [F] +µ8+ Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Steve Gethers) [F] Skokie (Herbert Wise) [F] +µ8: The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen) [M] Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (Robert Lieberman) [F] +µ8¡ 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] +µ8¡ Concealed Enemies ( Jeff Bleckner) [M] George Washington (Buzz Kulik) [M] +µ8j North and South (Richard T. Heffron) [M] +µ8ô 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] +µ8y 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] +µ88 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] +µ8µ Cross of Fire (Paul Wendkos) [M] The Final Days (Richard Pearce) [F] +µµo Murder in Mississippi (Roger Young) [F] Running Against Time (Bruce Seth Green) [F] So Proudly we Hail (Lionel Chetwynd) [F] +µµ+ Darrow ( John David Coles) [F] A Woman named Jackie (Larry Peerce) [M] +µµ: Citizen Cohn (Frank Pierson) [F] +µµ¡ And the Band Played On (Roger Spottiswoode) [F] +µµ¡ The Enemy Within ( Jonathan Darby) [F] +µµj Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (Thomas Schlamme) [F] Kissinger and Nixon (Daniel Petrie) [F] Truman (Frank Pierson) [F] +µµô The Siege at Ruby Ridge (Roger Young) [M] +µµy George Wallace ( John Frankenheimer) [F] Rough Riders ( John Milius) [M] +µµµ Inherit the Wind (Daniel Petrie) [F] The West Wing (created by Aaron Sorkin) [S, +µµµ–:ooô] :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] That’s 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, :ooj–present] The Plot to Kill Nixon (directed by Paul Sauer) [F] Warm Springs (Joseph Sargent) [F] :ooô 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. I’ve 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 Satgé; 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. +µ¡; Avenue Pictures/Home Box Office: p. yj; Central Independent Television: p. yo; Cinecom Pictures: p. 8o; Cinergi: pp. ¡¡, yô, 8:, 8¡; Columbia: pp. +y, ::, :y, 8y, µ:, +oµ, +:o, +:ô, +:y, +:µ, +¡8, +¡µ, +jo, +j+, +j:; Columbia/Universal: p. 88; DreamWorks: p. 8µ; Epoch Producing Corpo- ration: p. ¡¡; The Finnegan-Pinchuk Company: p. j+; Home Box Office/Spring Creek: p. ôj; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: pp. µô, µy; NBC Entertainment: p. +jµ; New Line Cinema: pp. y¡, +ô+; New Line Cinema/Tribeca: p. +88; Newmarket Films/Columbia TriStar: p. +µ¡; Paramount: pp. :8, +o¡, +oj, +¡y, +¡+, +¡¡, +yj, +µô; 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. :¡, ¡ô, jj, ô:, +8j; United Artists: pp. :+, :ô, ¡¡, ¡j, jo, +¡:, +¡¡; Universal: p. 8ô; Warner Bros: pp. +¡, :¡, ¡+, y8, µ¡, ++j; Warner Bros Television: p. +j¡. ::¡ .: Angry Men µ, +o:, +:¡, +:j, +:ô, +¡ô Abe Lincoln in Illinois, :¡, ¡¡, ¡ô–y, ¡8, j+, jj, jy, ô¡, +jô, +ô8 Abraham Lincoln (+µ¡o), :o, :., ¡¡, ¡¡, ,,, ,,, ¡ô, +ô8 Absolute Power ¡y, 8µ, µo, +8¡–j Ada +µ+ Adams, John ¡+, j+, j¡, j¡, yô Adams, John Quincy j¡, j¡, ô+ Advise and Consent µ, +¡, +j, :y, :,, :µ, 8y, µj, +oo, +o:, +:¡, +:j–¡ +, .:6, .:,, .:,, +¡:, +¡¡, +¡µ, +j +, +j:, +j¡–¡, +jj, +ôj, +ôô Air Force One ¡8, 8µ Alamo, The (+µôo) +ôµ Alda, Alan +ô, µ8, +yo Aldrich, Robert +j, ¡+, 88, +j¡, +yµ, +8+, +8¡, +µy All the King’s Men (+µ¡µ) 8, ++, +ô, :¡, :,, ¡ô, +oy, +o8–+:, .c,, ++¡, ++¡, +¡+, +¡y All the King’s Men (:ooô) ¡o, + +¡–+¡, +µy All the President’s Men 8, ¡+, ¸., ¡:, yy–8, ,S, 8:, +¡:, +j:, +yô, +y8, +µô Allen, Joan ¡µ, S:, 8¡, 8µ, +j¡ Altman, Robert ¡o, y+, 8+, +oo, ++8, +µ¡, +µô, +µy American History X .6., +ô+–: American President, The ¡ô, ¡y, y+, SS, 8µ, +j¡, +j¡ Amerika (+µ8y) ¡µ–jo, +µ8 Amistad j¡, jô Arlington Road +j, ¡µ, +ô+, +8j, +8ô–y, +µ+ Arthur, Jean µ: Ashby, Hal µ8 Asner, Edward y:, ++¡ Assassination of Richard Nixon, The ¡o, 8¡, ++¡, +µ:, .,¸ Ayres, Lew +:8 Backstairs at the White House ¡j, ôo, ôj Bailey, Charles W., II +¡+, +¡y Baker, Joe Don +ôô Balsam, Martin ¸., y8, +¡8 Barrymore, Lionel jj, jô, jy Bates, Kathy 8ô Beatty, Warren ¡o, ¡¡, ¡8, ô8, 8¡, µµ, +oo, +ô¡, +yj Bedford Incident, The :µ, +:¡, +8o Being There y8, µ8–µ Bellamy, Ralph :ô, ¡j, ô¡–¡, ôµ Berenger, Tom jµ, +ôo, +ô+ Berman, Shelley +¡¡ Bernstein, Carl yy, 8: Bernstein, Walter +jo Best Man, The µ, ++, +¡, +j, +ô, :y, :µ, ¡:, ôô, µj, ++ô, +:¡, +:j, +¡:, +¡¡–8, +¡µ, +j+, +j:, +j¡, +jj, +jô, +ô¡, +y8, +µ: Betrayed ¡¡, +ôo–ô+ Biberman, Herbert +ô¡ Big Jim McLain :j, +ô: 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 +ô, :ô, ¡ô, µ+, ++ô–::, ..,, ..S, .:., +¡y, +µo, +µ+, +µô Bobby y+, +µy Booth, John Wilkes ¡:, ¡¡, ¡y–8 Index ::¡ Bostwick, Barry ¡j, j¡, j¡ Bouchey, Willis +o¡ Bowling for Columbine ¡o Bridges, Jeff ¡µ, 8µ, S,, +yô, +8ô Brown, Blair yo, ,c Buchman, Sidney µ+ Bulworth ¡8, µµ–+oo Burdick, Eugene +¡+, +¡µ, +¡8, +¡µ, +jo Bush, George H. W. +µ, ¡¡, ¡j–ô, 8j, ++8, ++µ, +8y, +µ:, +µ¡–¡ Bush, George W. y, +µ, :j, ¡¡, ¡µ–¡o, 8ô, 88, ++¡, +µo, +µ+, +µ:, +µ¡, +µ¡, +µj, +µô, +µy, +µ8 Cagney, James :j, ++: Candidate, The +ô, µy–8, +oo, ++8, +yo Capra, Frank ++, +:, +µ, ::, :¡, ôo, yy, 8µ, µ+, µ¡, µ¡, µj, µô, µµ, +oo, +oj, +j¡ Captains and the Kings ôµ Carey, Harry µ: Carradine, John ¡¡, +o¡ Carter, Jimmy ¡o, ¡:, ¡¡, 8j, +¡:, +µy Carville, James ++¡ Chamber, The ¡8–µ, +ô+ Chambers, Whittaker 8+, +:ô, +ôô China Syndrome, The ¡o, +yy Chinatown ¡o, +yy, +µ¡ Citizen Cohn +ôô Citizen Kane ++, .., :o, :¡, 8¡, µj, +oµ–++, ..c, +¡j, +j¡, +ôô Clinton, Bill y, +o, +µ, :j, ¡¡, ¡ô, ¡y, ¡8, ¡µ, ¡o, y¡, 8¡, 8ô, 8µ, µo, ++¡, ++µ, +8y, +µo Clinton, Hillary ¡8, 8ô, +µj, +µy Clooney, George ¡o, +¡j, +j¡, .,,, +ôj, +µô Cohn, Roy M. +ôô Condon, Richard ¡o, y:, +¡+, +¡j, +yô, +µô Contender, The +:, ¡µ, 8µ, S,, +j¡ Conversation, The ¡+, +yy, +8j Cook, Fred J. +¡8 Cooper, Chris +µ¡, +µ¡, .,, Cooper, Gary µ¡, ,,, µô Coppola, Francis Ford ô, ¡+, +yo, +yy, +8j Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras) ¡¡, ¡j, +ôo Costner, Kevin ¡ô, ¡µ, y¡, y¡, +::, +y¡ Cotten, Joseph µj, ++o, +8+ Coulter, Ann +ôj Crawford, Broderick +ô, :¡, :,, ô¡, +oµ, .c,, +++, ++: Cromwell, John :¡, ¡ô Cronenberg, David y+, ++¡ Cross of Fire +j8, .,, Curley, James M. :j, +o+ Daniels, William j¡–¡ Da Silva, Howard ô¡, ôµ Dave ¡ô, 8µ Day of the Locust, The µ, +ô8 Day Reagan Was Shot, The 8j de Antonio, Emile +ôô Dead Zone, The y+, ++¡–+ô, +µ+ Dean, John 8o–8+, +88 Demme, Jonathan +¡, ¡o, +j¡, +µ¡ De Niro, Robert +ô¡, +8y, +µ:, +µy Deterrence +j¡, +µo, +µ+ Dick 8¡ Dieterle, William ¡+, ¡µ, jô Donaldson, Roger ¡µ, y¡, +8¡ Donlevy, Brian µ¡ Douglas, Kirk +j, :8, +:¡‒j, .¸,, +¡8, +¡µ, +j¡, +µj Douglas, Melvyn y, µy, µ8, +8: Douglas, Michael ¡¡, ¡y, y+, SS, 8µ, ++8 Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb µ, :8, 8y, S,, +:¡, +¡:, +¡8, +jo, .,c, +j+, .,., +µ: Dreyfuss, Richard 8j, 8µ, +j¡, +µ¡, .,, Dru, Joanne ++o, ++: Drury, Allen :y, +:j, +:ô, +:8, +:µ, +¡o, +¡+, +jo, +j:, +j¡, +j¡ Duggan, Andrew ôj Dunst, Kirsten 8¡, +88, .SS Durning, Charles ¡+, 88, +8+ Eastwood, Clint ¡ô, ¡y, y:, 8µ, +ô+, +8¡ Easy Rider :µ, +µo Ehrlichman, John yµ Eisenhower, Dwight D. +:, :j, :y, ¡j, ôj, ô8, yo, yô, +o+, +¡y, +¡8, +¡o, +y+, +µµ Elmer Gantry µ, +µ8 Enemy of the State +8¡, +8j Enemy Within, The +j¡, +µj Esposito, Giancarlo µ+, +:o, +:: Estevez, Emilio y+, +µy Executive Action ¡o, ô8, y:, +y+–¡, +yô, +8µ, +µ+ Face in the Crowd, A ++, :ô, ¡ô, ++¡, ..,, +:o, +ôj Fahrenheit ,/.. ¡o, ++¡, +µ:–+µ¡, +µj Fail Safe (:ooo) +j¡, .,, ::j Fail-Safe (+µô¡) µ, :8–µ, ¡o, ¡:, 8j, 8y, +:¡, +:j, +¡+, +¡µ, +¡:, +¡8–j+, .,S, .,,, +j:, .,:, +j¡, +j¡, +jj, +8j, +µo, +µ: Farmer’s Daughter, The +j, :¡, µj, +jy Faulk, John Henry +¡¡, +ô¡ Fear on Trial, +ô¡ Final Days, The S., 8: Fitzgerald, Geraldine ô+, yo Flanders, Ed ô¡, ôj Fonda, Henry +j, +ô, ::, :¡, :¸, :y, :,, :µ, ¡o, ¡j, ,6, ¡y, ¡8, ô¡, 8y, µj, +o:, +:¡, +:j, +:ô, .:,, +:µ, +¡¡, +¡¡, +¡ô, .,S, +¡µ–jo, +µo Fonda, Peter :µ Ford, Gerald R. ¡:, y8, ,S, 8j, 88 Ford, Harrison ¡8, 8µ Ford, John ::, :¡, :j, ¡:, ¡¡, ¡j–ô, ¡y–8, jô, jµ, ô8, µ¡, +oo, +o+, +o:, +o¡, +oj, +j¡, +ôo Forman, Milos +¡, ¡¡, ¡y Foster, Jodie ¡: Frankenheimer, John µ, :y, :8, ¡µ, ô¡, y¡–j, 8y, +:¡, +¡+, +¡j, +¡ô, +¡y, +¡µ, +j:, +µ¡ From Here to Eternity :j Front, The +ô¡ Gabriel Over the White House :o–::, ¡µ, 8y, +ô8, +µ: Gambon, Michael y¡, ,, Gardner, Ava jô, +¡o Garrison, Jim ¡ô, y¡, +y¡ Garson, Greer :ô, ô¡ Geer, Will ô8, +y+ George Washington ¡j, j+, j¡, j¡ Ghosts of Mississippi +¡–+¡, +ô+ Give ’Em Hell, Harry! ô¡ Gleason, James µ¡ Godfather, The ô, µ, +8, +yo–y+, +yô, +yy, +8¡, +µy Godfrey, Arthur ++¡ Goldman, William yy Goldwater, Barry M. :µ, +¡µ, +¡:, +¡8, +µ: Good Night, and Good Luck 8, ¡o, +¡j, +ôj, +µô Good Shepherd, The +µy Goodman, John ++¡ Gore, Albert ++ô Gorer, Geoffrey +jô Grant, Ulysses S. j:, j8–µ, yo, yô Great McGinty, The µ¡ Green Berets, The +µ8 Greenwood, Bruce ,¸, y¡ Gregory, James ¡µ, +¡:, .¸:, +¡j, +ôj Griffith, Andy :ô, yµ, ++¡, .., Griffith, D. W. +¡, :o, ¡:, ¡¡, ¡¡, ¡ô, j¡, +jy Grizzard, George µj, +:y, +¡+, +ôj Guilty by Suspicion ¡ô, +ô¡ Hackman, Gene ¡y, ¡8–µ, 8µ, +jµ, +ô+, +yy, +8¡–j Hagman, Larry 8¡ Haig, Alexander 8j Haldeman, H. R. yµ, 8¡ Hall, Philip Baker Sc, 8+ Harding, Warren G. :o, ôo, ôj, yô Hardwicke, Cedric ô: Harvey, Laurence +¡+, +¡j, +¡ô, +ôµ, +µj Hawthorne, Nigel j¡, jô, ô+ Hayden, Sterling +jo, .,c Hayward, Susan ,,, jô Heard, John +j8, .,, Hearst, William R. :o, :¡, ¡µ, +oµ Hedaya, Dan 8¡ Heflin, Van ¡+, ¡µ, jô, ô: Henabery, Joseph ¡:, ,¸ Heston, Charlton ,,, jô, j8 Hinckley, John W. Jr, ¡: Hiss, Alger 8+, 8:, +o:, +:ô, +jo Hitler, Adolf j8, ++ô, +jµ, +ôo, +y: Hoffman, Dustin ¡+, ¸., yy, +8y, .SS Holbrook, Hal ¡j, jo–j+, j¡, yy, y8 Hoover, J. Edgar ¡ô, ô¡, yo, +y¡ Hopkins, Anthony ¸,, j¡, ô+, yj, ,6, S:, S¸, 8¡, ++¡ Houseman, John j:, +y8 How the West Was Won ¡:, ¡y, jj, jµ Hussey, Ruth jy Huston, Danny +µ¡ Huston, John y:, +yy, +µ¡ Huston, Walter :o, ¡¡, ,,, ,,, ¡µ, +µ: Ike ôj In the Line of Fire ¡ô, y: Independence Day ¡8 Inherit the Wind +:¡, +:j, +jô, +µ8 Into the Homeland +j8 Intruder, The ++, +¡, +j, +j8 Ireland, John ++o, ++: Iron Horse, The ¡:–¡ ::ô Jackson, Andrew jj–ô, jy, ô¡ Jackson, Glenda yµ Jefferson, Thomas y, +:, j¡, yô, µ+, µ¡, .:c, .:., +:: Jefferson in Paris j¡, ,,, ô¡ JFK 8, ¡¡, ¡ô, ¡µ, y+, y:–¡, yj, yy, 8:, 8¡, 8j, +::, +¡y, +y¡, +8¡, +µo Johnson, Andrew ¡+, ¡µ, jô–8 Johnson, Lamont ¡j, ¡¡–¡, j+, +ô¡ Johnson, Lyndon B. +µ, :µ, ¡:, ¡¡, ôô, ôy, ô8, y:, y¡, y¡–j, yô, yµ, 88, +¡o, +¡:, +¡¡, +¡8, +8¡, +µ: Jones, Tommy Lee ¡ô, y:, 8¡ Judge Priest +oo Kaufman, Philip y¡ Kazan, Elia ++, :j, :ô, ++¡ Keeper of the Flame :¡, µj, +jy Keith, Brian jµ, ôo Kennedy ¡j, ,c, yo–y+, y¡ Kennedy, Jacqueline ¡ô, yo Kennedy, John F. y, +o, +µ, :j, :ô, :y, :8, :µ, ¡o, ¸., ¡¡, ¡j, ¡ô, ¡µ, ¡o, ¡:, j:–¡, ô¡, ôj, ôô, ôy–y¡, yj, yô, ,6, yy, yµ, 8o, 8:, 8¡, 8¡, 8µ, +oo, +oj, ++8, ++µ, +:¡–¡, +:j, +:8, +¡j, +¡y, +¡8, +¡µ, +¡o, +¡y, +jo, +jµ, +y+, +y:, +y¡, +y¡, +yô, +y8, +8¡ Kennedy, Joseph P. ôµ, yo, +yy Kennedy, Robert F. :8, ¡o, ôô, ôµ, yo, y+, y¡, 8o, +:o, +¡j, +¡ô, +y+, +y¡, +µy Kerry, John F. +µj King ¡j, ôµ King, Henry ôo, ô¡ King, Martin Luther, Jr :8, ¡o, ¡j, ôô, ôµ, +:8, +y¡ Klein, Joe 8j Knebel, Fletcher +¡+, +¡y Knox, Alexander ô+, 6: Kramer, Stanley :ô, +:¡, +jô, +µ8 Kristofferson, Kris +µ¡ Kubrick, Stanley µ, :8, 8y, +:¡, +¡8, +jo La Cava, Gregory :o, ¡µ, +µ: Lancaster, Burt :8, :S, :µ, ¡+, ô8, +:j, .¸,, +¡8, +¡µ, .,¸, +j¡, +y+, +y:, +yµ, +8o, +8+, +8¡ Langer, William L. +:8–µ Lansbury, Angela +ô, ,c, µô, ,6, +¡:, .¸:, +¡ô, +µj Last Hurrah, The :j, +oo, +o+, +o:–j, +oµ, ++¡, ++µ, +¡+ Laughton, Charles µj, +o:, +:j–ô, +:y, .:, Lawford, Peter +:y, +:8 Lee, Spike +¡, ¡y Leigh, Janet +¡j LeMay, Curtis +¡µ Levinson, Barry ¡8, +8y Lewinsky, Monica ¡y, ¡8, 8ô, 8µ, +8y Lincoln ¡j, ¡¡, ,., j+–: Lincoln, Abraham y, +o, ++, +:, +ô, :o, :+, :., ::, :¡, :µ, ¡j, ¡+–j:, ,c, j¡, jj, jô, jy, j8, ô+, ô:, ô¡, ôy, yô–y, y8, µ+, ,,, +o:, +::, +:ô, +¡ô, +¡o, +jô, +ô8 Lincoln, Mary Todd ¡ô, j: Lion Is In the Streets, A :j, ++:, +ôj Long, Earl K. ++¡ Long, Huey P. :¡, :j, +oy–µ, +++, ++:–+¡, ++¡, ++ô, +:µ Loose Change (:ooô) +µ8 Lumet, Sidney µ, :8, ¡o, 8y, µ+, ++:, +:¡, +¡8, +j:, +ô¡, +yy Lurie, Rod +:, ¡µ, 8µ, +j¡, +µo MacArthur, Douglas ô¡, +¡µ MacArthur, the Rebel General ô¡ McCain, John +µy McCambridge, Mercedes ++o, ++: McCarey, Leo :j, +ô: McCarthy, Joseph R. :j, ¡µ, ++¡, +:8, +:µ, +¡:, +¡j, +¡+, +¡ô, +ô¡, +ô¡–j, +ôô–y, +y¡, +µô McElvaine, Robert S. +µ: McGiver, John +¡¡, .¸, McKinley, William jµ MacLaine, Shirley µ8 McNamara, Robert S. +¡8, +¡µ Macready, George +¡8, +¡+ Madison, Dolly Payne Todd j¡–j Madison, James j¡–j, +ôô Magnificent Doll j¡–j, +ôô Malcolm X +¡, .,, ¡y Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The ¡:, jô, jy, +oo, +o+, .c,, .c,, +oj–y, +oµ, +¡y Manchurian Candidate, The (+µô:) 8, µ, ++, +j, +ô, :8, ¡o, ¡µ, ,c, y:, yj, µô, +:¡, +¡+–y, .¸:, .¸,, +¡:, +¡µ, +j+, +j:, +j¡, +j¡, +jj, +jô, +ôj, +ô8, +ôµ, +µ¡, +µj, +µô Manchurian Candidate, The (:oo¡) +¡, ¡o, ++¡, +j¡, +µ¡–ô, .,6 March, Fredric :8, ¡o, 8y, +:j, +¡8, +¡µ, +¡o, .,., +¡:, .,¸, +jo, +j¡ ::y Marshall, E. G. ô¡, yo Marvin, Lee +oô Massey, Raymond :¡, ¡ô, ¡y, ¡8, jj Matthau, Walter :µ, ¡y, +jo, .,: Meet John Doe ++, :¡, µ¡–¡, ,,, µô, +µ+ Meredith, Burgess j¡, +:ô, +¡¡, +ôô Milius, John ¡¡, jµ, ôo, +ô¡, +8¡ Miller, David ¡o, ô8, +y+ Missiles of October, The ôµ, y+, y¡ Mississippi Burning +¡, ¡¡, ¡µ, +jµ–ôo Moore, Mary Tyler ¡j, ,., j: Moore, Michael ¡o, +µ:, +µ¡ Mr Smith Goes to Washington, 8, ++, +:, +j, +ô, +y, .,, +µ, ::, ::–¡, :j, :y, ¡o, ¡+, ô¡, µ+–:, ,:, µ¡, µ¡, µj, µô, µ8, µµ, +oo, +oj, +oô, +oy, .:c, +::, +j+, +j:, +jô, +ô8 Mueller, Niels ¡o, 8¡, +µ: Murphy, Michael ++8, +µ¡–¡ Murray, Don +j, +:y, .:, Murrow, Edward R. +¡j, +¡µ, +ôj, +ôô, +µô My Son John :j, +ô:–¡ Nashville ¡o, ++8, +µ¡ Nasty Habits yµ Neal, Patricia ++¡, ..,, +ôô Neill, Sam +µµ Network ¡o, +yy Newman, Paul ++¡, +ô8 Nichols, Mike ¡8, 8j Nicholson, Jack ¡y, ô¡, 8¡, +yy, +µo Niven, David jj Nixon ¡¡, ¸,, ¡y, ¡µ, ôo, ô¡, yj, ,6, S:, 8:–¡, S¸ Nixon, Pat ¡µ, 8¡ Nixon, Richard M. +µ, :j, ¡o, ¡+, ¡:, ¡¡, ¡j, ¡y, ô+, ôô, yo, yj–8¡, 8j, 88, +oo, +o+, +o:, +o¡, +:j, +¡:, +¡8, +¡o, +¡y, +ô8, +y+, +y8, +µ: Nolte, Nick j¡, ,, North and South ¡j, j+, y8 Norton, Edward +ô+, .6., +ô: Obama, Barack +µy O’Brien, Edmond +¡8, .,. O’Connor, Edwin +o+, +¡+ O’Donnell, Kenneth y¡ O’Herlihy, Dan ô¡, +¡µ, .,: Oldman, Gary ¡µ, 8µ On the Beach :ô, :8, +:¡, +¡: On the Waterfront :j Oswald, Lee Harvey y:, +¡+, +y¡ Overton, Frank .,,, +jo Pakula, Alan J. +¡, +j ¡o, ¡+, yy, +oo, +j¡, +y¡, +µj Parallax View, The +j, ¡o, ¡:, ¡µ, yy, +oo, +j:, +j¡, +y¡–ô, .,,, +yy, +8ô, +8y, +µ+ Parker, Alan +¡, ¡¡, +jµ Parrish, Leslie +¡¡, +¡ô Path to War yj, ,, Peck, Gregory ¡j, jo, ô¡, +o: Pelican Brief, The +¡, +µj Pellington, Mark +j, ¡µ, +ô+, +8j Penn, Sean ¡o, 8¡, ++¡–+¡, +µ:, .,¸, +µy Perot, H. Ross +oo, ++µ Petersen, Wolfgang ¡ô, ¡8, y:, 8µ Pidgeon, Walter +:ô, .:,, +j¡ Pierson, Frank ô¡, +ôô Point of Order +ôô Polanski, Roman ¡o, +yy, +µ¡ Pollack, Sydney ¡+, +¡y, +ô¡, +y8, +µô Pollak, Kevin +µo Power µ+ Preminger, Otto µ, :y, 8y, +oo, +:¡, +:y, +:8, +:µ, +¡+, +j:, +j¡, +ôô President’s Lady, The ,,, jô Primary Colors ¡8, 8j–ô, S6 Prisoner of Shark Island, The ¡:, ¡¡ Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, The ô¡, ôµ, yµ, ++: ‘Project for the New American Century’ +yµ PT .c,, ô¡, ô8, 8¡, +¡y, +y8 Rains, Claude µ:, ,: Rathbone, Basil +o¡ Raymond, Gene +¡ô Reagan, Nancy ¡¡, j:, 8j Reagan, Ronald y, +:, +µ, :¡, ¡:–¡, ¡¡, ¡j, jo, j:, 8j, 88, ++8, +¡o, +jy, +j8, +ô¡, +8¡ Red Dawn ¡¡, ¡j, +ô¡, +8¡ Redford, Robert +ô, ¡+, ¸., yy, 78, µy, ++8, +yo, +y8 Reds ¡¡, +ô¡ Reiner, Rob +¡, ¡ô, y+, 8µ, +j¡, +ô+ Rickman, Alan ..,, ++µ Right Stuff, The y¡ Ritchie, Michael µy, ++8, +yo Robards, Jason ¸., ô¡, y8, yµ–8o, +¡y, +j¡ Robbins, Tim, +ô, ¡ô, ¡µ, ¡o, µ+, ++ô, ++y, ..,, ++µ, +ô+, +8ô ::8 Robertson, Cliff +ô, :y, :µ, ô8, yµ, µj, +¡¡, +¡y, +y8 Rogers, Ginger j¡, +jy Rogers, Will ¡j, ôo, +oo, ++¡ Roosevelt, Eleanor :ô, ô¡, +¡µ Roosevelt, Franklin D. y, +µ, :o, ::, :j, :ô, ¡¡, ¡j, ¡o, ¡µ, ô+, ô¡–¡, ôj, ô8, ôµ, yô, µj, +oy, +:j, +¡¡, +¡o, +jo, +j8, +ôô, +µ8 Roosevelt, Theodore .., jµ–ôo, ô¡ Rosenberg, Stuart ¡o, +ô8 Rossen, Robert ++, :¡, +oy, +oµ, ++: Rough Riders jµ, ôo Rove, Karl +µ¡ Ryan, Robert ô8, +y+, +y:, +y¡, +y¡ Salt of the Earth +ô¡ Sayles, John ¡¡, ¡o, +µ¡ Scacchi, Greta j¡, ,, Schaffner, Franklin µ, :y, ôô, +:¡, +¡¡, +j: Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr +:, +ô, +oy Schreiber, Liev +µj, .,6 Schulberg, Budd ++¡ Scorsese, Martin ¡:, +µ: Scott, George C. +jo, .,. Seconds :y–8 Secret Honor Sc, 8+–: Seduction of Joe Tynan, The +ô, µ8, +oo, +yo See It Now +¡j, +ôj, +ôô, +µô Sellers, Peter 8y, S,, µ8 Senate Journal, .,,¸‒.,,,, A +:8–µ Seven Days in May µ, ++, +j, :8, :S, :µ, ¡o, ¡+, ¡:, ¡8, yj, y8, 8j, 8y, +:¡, +:j, +¡+, +¡y–¡¡, .¸,, .,., .,¸, +¡j, +jo, +j+, +j:, +j¡, +j¡, +jj, +jô, +ô8, +8o, +8¡, +8j, +8y, +µ:, +µj Sheen, Martin ¡j, ôµ, yo, ,c, y+, 8o, ++¡ Sherwood, Robert E. :¡, ¡ô Siege, The +¡, ¡8, +j¡, .S,, +8j–ô, +8y, +µ+, +µj Silver City ¡o, ++¡, +µ¡–¡, .,,, +µj Sinatra, Frank +j, :j–ô, :6, +¡:, +¡j, +¡ô, +ôµ, +µ¡ Sinise, Gary ô¡, 6, Sirhan, Sirhan Bishara +¡j Sklar, Zachary y¡ Skokie +j8 Smith, Al :ô Smith, Lane S., 8: Smith, Margaret Chase +¡µ, +ôô Sorkin, Aaron y+ Spartacus +:ô Spielberg, Steven ¡¡, j:, j¡, ô+, +8¡ Spirit of the People (see Abe Lincoln in Illinois) Stagecoach ::, +oj Stanwyck, Barbara jµ, µ¡ State of the Union µj–y, ,6, ,,, µ8 Stevenson, Adlai E. :y, :µ, ôµ, 8y, +¡¡, +¡¡, +¡ô, +¡y, +jo Stewart, James +j, +ô, .,, +µ, ::, 22, ¡:, jô, jy, µ+, ,:, µô, +o+, .c,, +oj, .c,, +oô, +oy, .:c, +:: Stone, Milburn ¡ô, +o+, +o: Stone, Oliver ¡¡, ¡¡, ¡j, ¡ô, ¡y, ¡µ, ¡:, ôo, ô¡, y+, y:, y¡, yj, 8:, 8¡, 8¡, 8j, ++8, +¡y, +y¡, +8¡, +µy Storm Warning +jy Strathairn, David +µô Streep, Meryl µ8, +µj, .,6 Strode, Woody ¡:, +oô Sturges, Preston µ¡ Suddenly :ô, :6, +ôµ Sun Shines Bright, The +oo–:, +jô Sunrise at Campobello :ô, ô¡, ô8 Sydow, Max von +y8 Syriana ¡o, +µô Taft, William H. ¡j, ôo, ô¡, ôj Tail Gunner Joe ôj, +ôô Tanner ’SS ++8, +µ¡ Taxi Driver ¡:, +µ: Tennessee Johnson ¡+, ¡µ, jô–8, ô:, ô¡, +jô Thirteen Days ¡µ, ,¸, y¡ Thompson, Emma ¡8, 8ô Thornton, Billy Bob 8ô Three Days of the Condor ¡+, +¡y, +j:, +y8–µ, +µ+ To Kill a Mockingbird ¡8, +o:, +:¡ Tone, Franchot 8y, +:j, .:6, .:, Torn, Rip 8o Tracy, Lee ôô, +¡¡ Tracy, Spencer :j, µj, µô, ,,, +o+, +oµ, ++¡, +:y, +jô Travolta, John ¡8, 8ô, S6 Truman ô¡, 6, Truman, Harry S. :y, ¡¡, ôo, ô¡, ôj, ô8, yo, yô, +:8, +¡µ, +¡o, +¡¡, +y+ Trumbo, Dalton ¡o, +y+ Twilight’s Last Gleaming +j, ¡+, ¡:, 88, +j¡, +yµ–8¡, +µ+, +µy Unforgiven +ô: ::µ United ,¸ +µy Van Buren, Martin j¡, jô, ô+ Vaughn, Robert ôj, yµ Vidal, Gore :y, ¡j, ¡¡, j+, ++ô, +::, +¡+, +¡¡, +¡y, +jo Voight, Jon +µj Wag the Dog ¡8, +8y–µ, .SS, +µ+ Walken, Christopher y+, ++j Walker, Edwin +¡, +¡8, +¡µ, +¡+ Walker, Robert :j, +ô: Wall Street ¡¡, ++8 Walsh, Raoul :j, ¡:, ++: Wanger, Walter :o Warden, Jack y8, µ8 Warfare State, The +¡8 Warlock +¡ô Warren, Earl +¡8, +y¡ Warren, Robert Penn :¡, +oy, +o8–µ, +¡+ Washington, Denzel +¡, .,, ¡y, +8ô, +µ¡–j Washington, George y, +o, +:, ,,, j¡, j¡, ô:, yô, µ+, ,,, +¡y, +¡¡ Washington: Behind Closed Doors ¡j, yµ–8o, +¡y Waterston, Sam ¡j, j+, ,., +j¡ Wayne, John :j, jy, +oj, +oô, +oµ, +ô:, +ôµ, +µ8 Weaver, Fritz .,, Welch, Joseph N. +ôô Welles, Orson ++, .., :o, :¡, 8¡, µj, +oµ, ..c West Wing, The y+, 8o, +j¡ Wheeler, Burton K. µj Wheeler, Harvey +¡+, +¡µ, +¡8, +¡µ, +jo Whitmore, James ôo, ô¡ Widmark, Richard +¡, :µ, +¡ô, +8o Willis, Bruce +8j, .S, Willkie, Wendell µj Wilson ôo–ô¡, 6:, ô8, y+, +:¡, +jô Wilson, Woodrow ôo–ô¡, ôj Wind and the Lion, The jµ, ôo Winfield, Paul ¡j, ôµ, +8o Winninger, Charles +oo–+, +o: Winter Kills ¡o, y:, +yô–y With No Apologies +¡: Witness for the Prosecution +:¡, +:j, +:ô Woods, James 8¡, S¸, +ô+, +ôô Woodward, Bob yy, 8: Woodward, Joanne +ô8 World Trade Center +µy Wrye, Donald ¡µ, +µ8 WUSA ¡o, +ô8–yo, +µ+ Young, Loretta +j, µj Young Mr Lincoln +ô, ::–¡, :¸, ¡:, ¡¡, ¡j–ô, ,6, ¡y–8, j+, ô¡, µ+, +o:, +:¡, +:ô, +j:, +jô, +ô8 ‘Your Arkansas Traveler’ ++¡ Zaillian, Steven ¡o, ++¡, +µy Zanuck, Darryl F. ôo, ô+, y+ Zinnemann, Fred :j Zwick, Edward +¡, ¡8, +j¡, +8j, +µ+, +µj