O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!: “The President’s Analyst” (1967)

By Scott Ross

Theodore J. Flicker wrote and directed this absolutely crazy, often wildly funny, satire on spies, liberal pieties, reactionary politics, psychoanalysis and government secrecy, and it’s blissful. It is also, despite its essential outrageousness, a warning few heeded and its climax, once thought amusing but absurd, now seems eerily (and unfunnily) prescient.

Although I’d seen the picture twice before, I had for some reason forgotten when I sat down with it again recently how knock-down hilarious most of it is — the kind of laughter that can be called “gut-busting,” of which so many comedies of recent vintage (roughly the past 50 years) are allegedly made but which almost none actually are. The President’s Analyst is not only brilliantly conceived, and written with dazzling wit, acuity and political insight, it’s funnier than any other movie of its year, with the exceptions, I suppose, of The Graduate and, of all things, the Disney Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, another clever American satire.* Most of the “big” comedies of the 1960s (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming) were as bloated as their titles and at best only fitfully amusing, if at all. They tended to hit their targets with sledge-hammers, relying on “all-star” casts to bring in the patrons and then giving them flabby lampoons and extended vaudeville sketches. (The wittiest things in It’s a Mad (etc.) World and The Russians Are Coming… are their musical scores.†) The President’s Analyst is as heartless (and as funny) as Dr. Strangelove and like its predecessor it’s one of the few American political satires that succeeds on nearly every level.

Although the American President in the movie is not named, seen or even heard, it’s obviously meant to be Lyndon Johnson. Any elected official might benefit from psychoanalysis, but Johnson, escalating the dirty CIA war in Vietnam at the behest of his bosses in the Defense Department and wrestling with growing dissent at home, might have benefitted more than most. The central joke of the picture is that the analyst, privy to the secrets (and the mental state) of the United States President, becomes an irresistible target of both foreign espionage agents and internal security. Flicker originally named agency names but the FBI apparently got to Robert Evans at Paramount, who had approved the movie, resulting in the ludicrous acronyms “FBR” and “CEA” and the redubbing of lines on the soundtrack. Hoover’s fingers were probably also in the movie’s sudden withdrawal from the nation’s theaters, yet only a congenital idiot would be confused about which entities Flicker was targeting. One of the picture’s best jokes is that the Hoover stand-in (rather obviously called Lux) is a sour, diminutive, morality-obsessed reactionary middle-aged punk; when Lux (Walter Burke) addresses his agents, the camera gradually reveals that every “FBR” agent in the room is an identically-dressed little shrimp. The “CEA” head is, conversely, a curiously benign, professorial John Foster Dulles look-alike, and considering how pathological and demonic that particular gentleman was, in both public and private life, Flicker’s letting him off the satirical hook is one of the movie’s rare thematic lapses. Otherwise, the fashions, the diegetic music and the occasional references to hippies are about the only aspects of the picture that date it at all.

James Coburn gets to show off his sly sense of humor and gift for controlled hysteria in the titular role of Dr. Schaefer, along with those rather amazing horsey teeth of his, and he’s abetted by a batch of superb comedians: The wonderfully droll Godfrey Cambridge as Schaefer’s CIA analysand; Severn Darden as a merrily father-obsessed, cosmopolitan Russian spy; Pat Harrington Jr. as the smiling representative of the movie’s ultimate surveillance-state horror; William Daniels and Joan Darling as a pair of friendly liberal suburban maniacs who live for the opportunity to express violence against others; and Arte Johnson as a grimly determined “FBR” agent intent on killing Schaefer. Soon-Tek Oh also shows up, briefly, as a Chinese spy, as does Will Geer as Schafer’s own analyst.

_{“Total sound”: The cheerful nightmare of ticky-tacky American suburbia.}

Flicker’s ideas, his wonky yet eminently sane dialogue and his genius for satire bubble up and explode on a more or less consistent basis throughout the movie; it’s like a Shavian debate performed by slapstick comedians. Only in Harrington’s sequence did I stop laughing, which has less to do with Flicker than with how close his comedy comes to what we have been living through for the last 20 years generally, and the last two specifically. What Harrington’s genial sociopath proposes — essentially a digital passport which will control every aspect of people’s lives — is no less than what is coming very soon if we don’t stand up and stop it in its remorseless tracks. That (admittedly farsighted) observation to one side, The President’s Analyst is one of the great, largely undiscovered, gems of 1960s black humor. The lengthy episode in which the camera reveals one assassin after another attempting to bump off Schaefer, and each other, has all the surprise and wit of the garden-club sequence in The Manchurian Candidate but is far funnier. Flicker’s wonderfully skewed vision is beautifully abetted by William A. Fraker’s crystalline cinematography, Pato Guzman’s imaginative production design, Jack Bear’s witty costumes and Lalo Schifrin’s hip, smooth musical score, pitched midway between the hot espionage of his theme for “Mission: Impossible” and the propulsive cool of Bullitt, and which seems in spots to predict Neal Hefti’s Odd Couple theme.

There’s also, for the assassins sequence, an almost impossibly infectious, and perfectly placed, song by Barry McGuire,‡ who appears as part of a psychedelic rock band with whom Schaefer briefly hides. Like nearly everything else in The President’s Analyst, you can’t imagine that song, or that sequence, being bettered. And when you see this nonpareil American comedy, you’ll wish that Theodore J. Flicker had been permitted to make a whole lot more.

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*Two for the Road, also released that year, is one of the great romantic comedies of the era, but it’s witty as opposed to outright hilarious.

†By Ernest Gold and Johnny Mandel respectively.

‡”Inner-Manipulations”; one of the great ear-worms of the late 1960s.

Text copyright 2013 by Scott Ross