Tonight’s movie, via the new local Blu-ray release from Imprint. The first film to be greenlit by the infamous Robert Evans in his role as head of production at Paramount, THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST (1967) is one of the greatest near-miss cult films of the sixties. It has never really enjoyed much recognition beyond a very small but devoted fan base, but hopefully this new Blu-ray will help change that. It’s certainly a hard film to easily define – it’s equal parts political satire, paranoia thriller, groovy spy spoof, and counterculture head trip, all captured through a strange, almost MAD Magazine-styled, lens.
Written and directed by Theodore J.
Flicker (perhaps best known as the co-creator of the classic BARNEY MILLER sitcom),
THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST stars James Coburn, at the epitome of his 60s cool, as
New York psychiatrist Sidney Schaefer, who is recruited to work exclusively as
the personal analyst to the president of the United States. On call 24/7, it
isn’t exactly the dream gig that Schaefer first imagines it to be, and he soon
finds himself overwhelmed and exhausted by stress and paranoia, and the very real
feeling that various local and foreign organisations are coming after him, all with
their own agendas to either use him to influence the President’s policy
decisions, glean whatever secrets he has learned from his private sessions, or
simply to silence him altogether.
THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST is one of
those movies where the narrative continually dips between reality and paranoid
illusions, and the soundtrack score by Lalo Schifrin (and the way it is mixed) provides
an impressive and suitable sense of aural schizophrenia. Coburn is great, but
Godfrey Cambridge, as the agent who recruits Schaefer for his important new
role, is sensational, his opening scene in the movie being particularly potent
and powerful (and certainly not the way you might expect the movie to begin).
And its depiction of telecommunication companies being all-invasive and controlling
seems scarily prophetic in retrospect.
Thankfully, this print of THE
PRESIDENT’S ANALYST includes the original music by Barry McGuire, which was
replaced due to rights issues on TV and early VHS prints. McGuire, well-known
for his classic 1964 protest song “Eve of Destruction”, also has an onscreen
role here, as the leader of a travelling hippie commune that Schaefer spends
time hiding out amongst. Extras on the Imprint release include the original
theatrical trailer, a video appreciation of the film by UK author Kim Newman (who
interestingly compares it to the works of Philip K. Dick), and an audio
commentary by film historian and writer Tim Lucas, a lifelong admirer of the film
who provides a good balance of production information and analysis (I am
intrigued and excited by his suggestion that THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST contains
the film debut of MANIAC’s Joe Spinell!).
