Movie Details
| Title: | The President's Analyst | |
| Director: | Theodore J. Flicker | |
| Year: | 1967 | |
| Genre: | Comedy | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.10.24 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.10.24 | Internet | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2024 I learned of this thanks to the Movies That Made Me podcast. Joe Dante and Josh Olsen screened this in LA and they sold it pretty hard without saying anything about what it's about so that sounded well worth tracking down. Wow this was pretty wacky. James Coburn plays a psychiatrist who's enlisted by the CIA and FBI to offer his services to the president. At first he's overjoyed to get such an exciting client, but then security concerns (like he talks in his sleep) quickly lead him to feel isolated and paranoid like everyone around him is a spy. Uh, the story goes on from there but I feel like part of the joy of the film is discovering which twists and turns it takes. I'll recount everything for my own memory down below in a spoiler section but before then, I can say in a spoiler-free way that this movie really does take some turns. But with a late 60s, pre-watergate, swinging swanky Lalo Schiffrin score, young-ish James Coburn kind of light-heartedness that we'd never get today. Things are much too dystopian now for such frivolity. Even in the 90s we got Will Smith in Enemy of the State. This is still infused with a wackiness akin to James Bond spy spoofs. It's really fun. Instead of a Checkov's Gun there's a Checkhov's Gong. The one weird part is that I guess they couldn't call the FBI and CIA by name so they put up a title card talking about the "FBR" and "CEA" and all through the movie whenever anyone says the acronym it's ADR'd in, often very clunkily. I suppose the phony initialisms add to the 60s surreal comedic nature of the movie, but it's an odd thing. My favorite part is the family that James Coburn meets on a white house tour. They'd ironically be right at home today. "By 'liberal' I don't mean left-wing." Damn, I really can't say anything without spoiling. BEGIN SPOILER SECTION Ok here's the rest of the plot. Feeling overwhelmed, Coburn wants to stop being the President's Analyst so he convinces a tourist family to take him home, but the dad is a gun nut, the mom is into suburban karate, and the kid is an aspiring spy himself. In the meantime, all of the actual spies who have been surveilling Coburn (including his girlfriend) learn of his defection. All the international spies want to grab him and take him back home to extract all the secret info that he now knows thanks to being in the president's confidence. In order to keep that from happening, the FBI orders his assassination. The CIA learns of this and is a tiny bit more sympathetic but recognize that if they can't get to him first they'll have to kill him too. So he's basically on the run without knowing it at first until he's accosted outside a chinese restaurant. Thankfully the gun nut dad and his karate wife mistake them for muggers and start shooting them dead and kicking the shit out of everyone. From there, Coburn hides out with a hippie band that was supposed to be The Grateful Dead. He makes love to a hippie chick in a field and there's a fun sequence of all these different spies sneaking up to him in the tall grass while they're doing it, but the various spies keep taking one another out so they can grab Coburn. It goes on so long that the love-making ends and there's a pile of bodies in the grass. Someone finally gets him when he's on stage with the hippie band playing the gong, but then he uses his powers of psycho-analysis to win the russian agent over to his side. However, they stop at a phone booth (after disembarking from the boat via a hilarious hydro-car) and Coburn gets locked inside and abducted. Turns out, the phone company (TPC) was a player in all of this as well, listening in to every phone in the country. They have an idea to implant a phone into everyone's brains. But then the CIA and Russian agent storm the place, Coburn is shooting phone company employees with a machine gun all of a sudden as they save the world by killing the phone network and the movie ends with everyone having a jolly Christmas party but the phone company, as always, is watching. Whew. END SPOILER SECTION So this was quite fun. I really went into this blind so it took a minute to figure out what kind of movie it was but once Coburn pretended to be shot in a restaurant and literally everyone in the place pulled a gun on each other I figured it out and sat back to enjoy the ride. But I think I'm calling it here. I have to wake up for work in the morning and there's a DnD game scheduled so It'll be hard to fit more movies in tomorrow. That makes this a pretty short DVRfest but I knew it was compromised from the start anyway. There's always next year. Ok let's do the numbers. 12 movies in the past week (1.71/day), 32 in the past month (1.07/day), 74 in the past year (0.2/day), and 3522 in the past 20 years (0.48/day). You know, for not being in top form since 2007 when my daily average was up to 2, watching a half a movie every day for the past 20 years still sounds like an achievement to me! I think I'm past the guilt of not watching so many movies anymore. Maybe I'll get back into the hobby in retirement or something but the truth of the matter is I'm working, I play a bunch of video games, I watch a decent amount of TV, and I've got other shit going. Back in 2006, 2007, all I did was watch movies. Can't sustain that even when you love it as much as I do. Now that I'm not doing Fantastic Fest either, that's ~30 movies/year that I'm not seeing which used to be my saving grace, but on the flip side I still have so many movies on my hard drive and virtually everything is available now so when I hear about a movie I can watch it whenever I want. The world is different. The state of Hollywood might be dire but there's a hundred years of great movies out there, still stuff I've never heard of like The President's Analyst and A Man Escaped. And even bullshit hacks can make decent movies like Split and The House of the Devil, so movies as entertainment, as a hobby, aren't going anywhere. Even my "unwatched" shelf, the single-disc criterion releases were just one small part of it. I think as long as the Internet exists and I can host this site I'll still be doing DVRfest. And maybe more. I'm already thinking of some kind of sister-fest where I can only re-watch movies I've seen. Nothing new. We'll see if that comes together. In the meantime, I gotta go to work! |
