1967, United States. Starring James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Joan Delany, Pat Harrington, Jill Banner, Eduard Franz, Walter Burke, William Daniels. Directed by Theodore Flicker. Written by Theodore Flicker. Purchase from Amazon.com.

The President's Analyst is without a doubt one of my all-time favorite films, starring one of my all-time favorite actors, James Coburn. In the genre of espionage and spy films, it may be my favorite, struggling on a regular basis for said top spot with From Russia With Love, Our Man Flint, Dr. No, and Danger: Diabolik -- which I know isn't actually a spy or espionage film, but it's close enough. Some of those other movies look better, have better art design (is anything really ever going to top Diabolik for costumes and outrageous pop art set design?), but there is something about modest little President's Analyst that keeps it a hair above the rest. That something, by and large, is the message and overall tone of the movie, which is far more in line with my own philosophies about the world than some of the more authoritarian spy movies.

Coburn plays Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a successful Manhattan psychotherapist with a penchant for meditating while playing the gong and trying to "figure out what it's all about." One of his patients, Don Masters (legendary character actor Godfrey Cambridge), happens to be a secret agent in the government organization CEA -- a fact he finally reveals to Schaefer when he announces that the purpose of his visits has actually been to assess whether or not Dr. Schaefer would be a qualified analyst for the President of the United States, who is suffering from all sorts of mental maladies and stress-related problems. Schaefer is taken aback at first, but after consulting with his own psychiatrist, who had recommended Schaefer to the CEA as the right man for the job, and sorting things out with his girlfriend, Nan (Joan Delaney), he accepts.

The idea of hiring a citizen for such a sensitive position doesn't sit well with Henry Lux (Walter Burke), the diminutive head of the FBR, another government organization, and one that seems as interested in competing with the CEA in an ongoing turf war as they are interested in protecting the security of the United States. Any similarity to real U.S. intelligence agencies and real intelligence agency in-fighting and petty territoriality is purely coincidental, of course. Lux is immediately hostile toward Schaefer, and disgusted by the doctor's enlightened lifestyle and flirtations with Bohemian sympathies. Unmarried people living together? Sympathy for the peace movement? Lux feels Schaefer is an insult to fine, old-fashioned, American values and moral repression.

Schaefer enjoys his job at first, and marvels at the incredible load the President has to carry on his shoulders. But when the President begins calling for him and all hours of the day, Schaefer's patience with the man begins to grapple with his compassion. Before too long, lack of sleep coupled with the fact that he has a wealth of confidential information about the president that even the invasive FBR would envy starts to make Schaefer paranoid. He begins seeing spies and assassins everywhere, even behind the eyes of his girlfriend. There's only one problem with Sidney's paranoia: it's all completely well-founded. Everyone around him is a spy, and they're all anxious to either learn what he knows about the President, or trap him in some sort of predicament that will allow them to justify killing the poor doctor. Unable to take the incessant whining of the President and cope with his own growing paranoia, Dr. Schaefer plots an escape from the White House by befriending a family from new Jersey who happened to be touring the White House and telling them that the President is interested in having them interviewed so he can better understand the sentiments and concerns of average American people. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if the President actually did care about such things?

Sidney's flight from the White House is all Lux needs to determine that the doctor is some hippie commie traitor, and he assigns the men of the FBR to assassinate Schafer before he defects or is captured by enemy agents. Everyone from Russia to China to England wants to get a hold of Schaefer and pick his brain. Masters and the CEA are more sympathetic to Sidney's breakdown, and they want to find him and bring him back in before he's captured by foreign spies or killed by the FBR.

And so begins Sidney's bizarre odyssey across the United States as he attempts to simply find a little peace and quiet and locate a nice place where he can relax and not be spied on. What really sets this movie apart from others is that it's soundly and obviously informed by a political and social message. You wouldn't necessarily want to look to the James Bond movies for political messages, even if politics inhabit the world that makes the Bond movies possible. With The President's Analyst however, the social messages are in the forefront and, indeed, the main reason for the film to exist. The petty bickering between the FBR and the CEA is going to be tragically familiar to anyone who has paid attention to our recent dance with intelligence failures that arose directly out of the unwillingness of the FBI and CIA to swap notes from time to time.

At the same time, The President's Analyst doesn't take the easy liberal road of saying, "everything is bad, man." The CEA, as characterized by Godfrey Cambridge's Don Masters, is made up of generally decent people who balance their concern for national security with their concern for personal privacy and freedom (there's your clue that this is a work of fiction). The Jersey family Schaefer uses as his escape route are also an interesting social commentary. Headed by another famous character actor, William Daniels, the Quantrills are "classical liberals." Given today's definition of "liberal," which grows closer and closer to socialism (don't worry -- oddly enough, even conservatives seems to be moving closer to socialism, or am I thinking of totalitarianism -- oh, is there even a difference anymore), people may have forgotten what it used to mean. The Quantrills are staunch public supporters of the Civil Rights movement, for example, but they're also staunch supporters of the Second Amendment, and patriarch Wynn Quantrill's sizeable arsenal of handguns is, in his eyes, in the true spirit of the Second Amendment, which was not, as if often mistakenly thought, there to allow you protect yourself against criminals. It's there so you can defend yourself against the tyranny of your own government. And Mrs. Quantrill, while still the housewife, is an "enlightened suburbanite" who enjoys ethnic cuisine and judo classes. The whole Quantrill clan firmly believes in self-sufficiency and the classical idea of rugged individualism, but still have found it perfectly acceptable to become parts of the local community. Schaefer admires them, at least until the large number of guns and the judo-chopping wife cause him to think that the Quantrills might be spies too.

The President's Analyst also takes a progressive attitude toward the Cold War. Russian secret agent Kropotkin (Severn Darden, yet another solid character actor -- this movie really has a stupendous cast) is after Sidney, same as all the other agents of the world, but he's as friendly and sympathetic as Don Masters -- who happens to be his old friend, resulting in one of my favorite lines, when a disguised Masters confronts a disguised Kropotkin and barks at him in Russian, to which Kropotkin says, "Please, no Russian. I'm spying!" It's really the delivery that makes it so funny. In the eyes of this movie, the Russians may be rivals, but they're really not the dangerous enemies. The greatest threat to American freedom comes from America itself, and the willingness of America to sacrifice freedom in the name of protecting freedom -- something been Franklin warned about, and yet another sentiment that keeps this movie disturbingly timely in this era of the Patriot Act and random bag searches on the street.

At the same time, however, Schaefer is put off by how enthusiastically the Quantrills have accepted violence as a healthy part of American life, to the point that they become just as shrill and overbearing as the "Nazis and fascists" against which they stand in the suburban battlefield. The movie frequently assumes this point of view, that extremism in any direction is just fascism, regardless of whether it's to the left or right, and that maybe, once in a while, people should just take a deep breath, relax, and actually think about something rather than spouting slogans and refusing to listen to anyone else.

My favorite part of the whole movie is the sequence that begins with Sidney and the Quantrills being attacked after leaving a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. While the Quantrills defend themselves competently thanks to their guns and judo training (another of the film's very funny moments), Sidney escapes capture by hiding in a nearby van which happens to be owned by a group of trippy hippie musicians. They offer him refuge and a chance to relax among people who don't want to hurt him and don't demand anything from him, so long as he's willing to answer one question:

"Are you a man of violence?"

The way in which Coburn look sat them and then answers, "No," is really wonderful, even touching, and a fine example of just how sublime this film can be. It's not really a moment I can properly communicate in a review, and maybe not even one other people will find as effective and poignant as I do, but I absolutely love it. The hippies help Schaefer elude capture by the Chinese and FBR agents being thrashed by the Quantrills, and for the first time since becoming the titular President's analyst, Schaefer is able to relax and trust people. At least for a little while. In a great scene in which he lies in a field with one of the hippie girls (Snow White, played by Jill banner), a veritable armada of assassins and agents creep through the swaying tall grass, each agent offed by a rival agent sneaking up behind him, until finally Kropotkin offs the last of the agents but allows Schaefer and the girl to walk away, completely oblivious to the danger that previously surrounded them. There's a wonderful aerial shot of Schaefer and Snow White wading through the grass while Masters stands in the middle of a half a dozens trails that end in dead enemy agents.

The inspired cap to the hippie sequence involves Schaefer, disguised in a turtleneck, fur vest, shaggy mop top wig, and sunglasses banging wildly on a gong after joining the band while FBR agents who have managed to track him down drink acid-laced juice and have groovy freak-outs. Unfortunately, another one of the bands on the bill for the night is actually a group of Canadians agents who are keen on capturing Schaefer not so much because they want to know what's in his head as they are desperate to prove that their country isn't just some goofy, easy-to-ignore nation. The FBR, however, shows up to make short work of the Canadians and continue their efforts to execute Schaefer.


It's Kropotkin to the rescue, but his plan to bring Schaefer to Russia is derailed when Schaefer takes Kropotkin on as a patient and helps the Russian spook understand why he's so unhappy. The two of them then decide to say to hell with the whole game and go somewhere where they can just live their lives without incessant prying form the governments and spies of the world. Masters seems prone to join them, but before they can get the doctor back to Washington to sort the whole mess with the FBR out, Schaefer is kidnapped by yet another player, known only as TPC, in the game of espionage, though this one surprises them all.

The President's Analyst really does just about everything right. It's full of messages about paranoia, the invasion of privacy, micromanaging bureaucracies, personal liberty, and national security, but it isn't preachy or heavy-handed in its handling of the material. It's easy to swallow even if you don't agree. And even though the movie is serious about its messages, everything is presented in a comedic wrapper. This movie is frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious to me, even when the parallels to current events are tragically spot-on. While certain aspects of the movie may seem dated (the sweetness and light hippies, for example), the political and social situation it presents is frighteningly familiar. The message that paranoia about other countries should be secondary to keeping an eye on the actions of your own resonates with me, as does Schaefer's revelation that a man of peace can be a man of peace because other men are willing to be men of violence, and to swear allegiance wholly to one philosophy or the other is to be a hypocrite -- especially when faced with a private army of goons armed with machine guns. It's the willingness to resort to violence exhibited by the Quantrills that saves him in Greenwich Village, and the willingness of Masters to kill that saves him in the field. Schaefer himself realizes that there are instances when, tragic though it may be, the human condition forces one to resort to violence, though violence should always be looked at as a last resort against "hostile sons of bitches."

It's delightfully prescient on the road the Cold War would take. As Kropotkin explains to Schaefer why he shouldn't be upset about going to Russia, he says, "Every day your country becomes more socialistic, my country becomes more capitalistic. Pretty soon we'll meet in the middle and join hands." The paranoia of the governments is small potatoes compared to the paranoia that really matters: that of the government about its own people, or the left about the right, right about the left, government departments about one another. In the end, Kropotkin was completely right. The US has become more socialistic and authoritarian; Russia less so, relative at least to how it was previously. And the real danger ended up being allowing our own government to curtail liberty in the name of satisfying their paranoia about an outside enemy. Now, of course, we have Islamic Fundamentalists standing in for Mother Russia, and this particular enemy makes for a much hotter conflict than the Cold War ever was. Still, it's not exactly a secret that many of the security measures taken since the launch of the "war on terror" have little to no impact on making Americans safer, but have a severe impact when it comes to chipping away at our personal freedom and already badly battered Constitution. It is a cry, almost, from someone who sees the two choices the establishment presents us with and isn't satisfied with settling for either of them and those organizations, public and private, who would legislate away every last freedom in the name of "protecting us from ourselves" or because "it's for your own good."

If The President's Analyst seems, at times, somewhat confused and neurotic regarding its take on the world, can you really blame it? Aren't you? Anyone who tried to grapple with such matters and doesn't come away at least somewhat confused and conflicted simply hasn't comprehended the larger picture. What's important for a movie like this, and what makes it better than so many other "message movies," isn’t that it tell you the answer. It's just a movie, after all, and the answer for one person in one situation isn't going to be the answer for someone else in a different situation. What's important is that it makes you want to find the answers for yourself, or at least give it all some thought instead of remaining unquestioning and swallowing the propaganda and misleading soundbites that both ends of the spectrum try to cram down your throat.

It's not exactly standard fare for the spy genre, or the comedy genre, and if The President's Analyst has any peers, it would be Dr. Strangelove, even more than Coburn's "Derek Flint" movies, thought the Flint movies were certainly informed by the same distrust of authority and sympathy for the counter-culture that is so pronounced in The President's Analyst. Those looking for an action-packed, no-frills thriller may be put off by the film's earnest outlook on society, which manages to be both pessimistic and hopeful. However, this is still a James Coburn spy-comedy, so there's plenty of action, fist fights, daring escapes, stiletto-flinging, and of course a vast, space-age secret lair. There are also tons of great sight gags -- the best of which would be the fact that all the agents of the FBR dress identically and none of them are over five feet tall, thought he sight of Coburn tossing his hippie hair about and playing the gong on stage is priceless, as well.

It's rare that a movie manages to be this smart, thrilling, hilarious, and satisfying. The movie deftly juggles its many sentiments and expertly delivers something that is equal parts cynical satire, black humor, whimsical farce, thrilling action, despair, and hope. I think I end up watching it at least once a month, and nothing about it ever gets tired to me. It's a damn shame the film seems to have been lost in the jumble, though the people who have watched it lately seem overwhelmingly positive about it, which is encouraging. Not that I'm sad about the Flint movies getting the bulk of the attention -- they are wonderful films, after all -- but folks ought to take some time out and acquaint themselves with The President's Analyst. It's an absolute joy.

Labels: Espionage, Year: 1967