The President’s Analyst

Hi Aki,

Yesterday I watched The President’s Analyst a 1967 picture written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, and the finest satire on postwar America I can think of.

Story has respected New York psychoanalyst Sydney Schaeffer (James Coburn) being recruited to be the President’s analyst. It seems the weight of the world (unspecified and thus presumably everything that was going on at the time, from riots to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to hippies and desegregation and Civil Rights) is just too much for any one man to bear. Sydney is checked out by the ‘CEA’ (CIA) and ‘FBR’ (FBI) and cleared, although the director of the FBR, a short humorless man, disapproves of Sydney sleeping with his girlfriend.

Sydney is whisked from New York to Washington and he and his girlfriend are set up in a handsome house in Georgetown. This house is of course thoroughly bugged and spied-upon. The President is too busy to schedule appointments, so he signals when he wants Sydney, and Sydney must go to the White House for counseling. This happens when Sydney is eating, sleeping, making love, in the toilet … soon Sydney is getting frazzled. ‘The President has me to talk to, but I can’t talk even to you,’ he complains to his girlfriend.

Sydney starts to acquire paranoid symptoms. He even begins to imagine his girlfriend is spying on him (and, of course – she is). He knows he’s going to crack, so he slips in with a tour group in the White House and talks a New Jersey family (played by William Daniels) into taking him home with them.

This leads to a sendup of the so-called ‘liberal’ family man with his obsession on the latest sound equipment, making good time on the freeways, and guns. ‘When the right-wingers disarm, we liberals will disarm!’

Word of Sydney’s escape immediately reaches all the secret services in the world. Africans, Russians, Chinese, British – everybody wants Sydney.

Sydney tries to call his own analyst in New York, but can’t get through. Meanwhile Jr. is tapping and recording Sydney’s phone conversation, and two FBR goons (all in suits, without humor, and short) come in with orders to kill Sydney on sight. But Sydney has gone with the parents to eat out in the city.

There he slips away from the couple, but the spies are after him and chase him through the streets. Sydney only makes his getaway by slipping into a minibus owned by a stoned rock band, who agree to take him with them back to Minnesota.

There Sydney, now garbed like a fashionable hippie, trips out and makes love to band groupie ‘Snow White’ in the middle of a green field while various spies kill one another competing to see who can capture him.

He is captured by a British-seeming rock band who turn out to be Canadian spies, and sail on a yacht across the Great Lakes. But the FBR goons take over the ship, murder the Canadians, and are about to kill Sydney – but they are out of bullets and must go reload. When they do, Kropotkin, the Russian spy, kills them and drugs Sydney. He intends to sail to the North Atlantic to meet a trawler.

But at last Sydney gets to use his psychoanalytical skills in self-defense. He succeeds in revealing Kropotkin’s hatred for his secret-service-commanding father. With three to seven years of treatment, Sydney promises to cure Kropotkin of his neuroses. Kropotkin says they will take Sydney back to Washington to carry on the treatment; first Sydney should phone the White House and tell the President to stop the FBR.

Sydney tries to call at a phone booth, but the operator is less than helpful. Kropotkin agrees that ‘the phone company’ is hated the world over, and goes back to town to get more change. Meanwhile Sydney finds himself locked into the phone booth beside the highway in the middle of nowhere. Along comes a large truck that scoops up the phone booth with Sydney in it, puts another in its place, and drives off. Kropotkin meets the CEA agent Dan (Godfrey Cambridge) at the site and are baffled at what could have happened to Sydney.

Sydney comes to in the bowels of an advanced underground lair suitable for a James Bond villain. There (still trapped in the phone booth) Sydney is made to watch a smiling, unctuous man’s pitch: he represents the Phone Company, and they have a breakthrough phone as small as the head of a pin. Surgically implanted in the brain, it will allow everyone to call anyone else just thinking of them; people will get the CC chips implanted before they are born, and all names will be replaced with numbers – their personal phone numbers. If Sydney will just convince the President to push through all the needed legislation…?

Sydney calls him nuts, but it doesn’t phase the Phone Company representative. Meanwhile Kropotkin and Dan break in; Kropotkin sabotages the phone lines so that service will be damaged for months, with the Phone Company getting all the blame, and Sydney, the man of peace, finds he enjoys wielding the automatic weapon and killing all the service technicians who arrive to repair the damage. And the ‘representative’ turns out to be a robot, wired to a plug in the floor.

Later on, at Christmas, Sydney is happily installed at his Georgetown home. Since his girlfriend is CEA and has just as high a security clearance as he does, he can confide in her. Kropotkin and Dan come by for a Christmas party, and on the news they see that the Phone Company, blamed for incompetence for the bad service of recent weeks, has agreed to be nicer, and lower rates.

As the four friends celebrate, the camera pulls back: they are being watched on a large monitor by a group of shadowy figures. And behind them are rows of men in suits and vapid expressions, sitting in chairs and wired to plugs in the floor…

This is a very funny movie. Shot in Panavision in bright colors, it had a big budget even though this was only Flicker’s second feature (Flicker had a long career as writer and director, almost all of it on television). The action is staged at a nice balance between seriousness and cartoonishness.

Flicker stages things very well. In one hilarious scene, when the Director of the FBR is giving the order to kill Sydney to a room full of suited, humorless agents just as short as the Director, a man walks in from the back of the room – a very tall man. He weaves his way in and out of the agents, head and shoulders above them, deposits a paper on the Director’s desk, and retreats. The contrast in heights make for a great laugh, but Flicker shoots it all in one master shot, underplaying the gag.

My big question about the movie is casting Coburn. He was undoubtedly the coolest American actor in the period, and lends a hipness to the production. He also was a big star at the time, notably as the parodical American super-spy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), so his participation helped green light the picture. But part of the humor of Analyst lies in the prospect of a middle-aged, sober, serious Doctor coming up against the world of wacky spies, getting turned on, and ending up mowing down men. With this in mind it seems that William Daniels, Wally Cox, or Bob Newhart (or even Jonathan Winters) would have been funnier. On the other hand, audiences had shown they liked to laugh at the spy world with Coburn, and his hipness helped bring in younger viewers who wouldn’t have been so keen to go watch Wally Cox.

(21 April 2009)