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Rating:  - The President's Analyst
My husband and I are both James Coburn fans but we found this movie to be unwatchable. The story line is boring in that you just keep seeing him getting called in the middle of the night and then leaving the President's room. We watched this once and will not waste the time on watching it again.
Rating:  - A '60s Cult Classic
This is one of the great cult classics of the 1960s. It rolls all of the political, racial, gender, corporate and establishment fears, misunderstandings, stereotypes and psychosis of the '60s cultural revolution into a big ball and then throws it at the nearest bureaucrat. No matter how often you watch this film, you always find something new that you didn't see the last time.
Rating:  - Coming soon : Gulliver's Travels through the webosphere?
This 1967 movie may seem dated to some, it's a product of the now mythologised "swinging sixties" but classy, unpretentious and funny satire, like "The President's Analyst" is really ageless.
Jonathan Swift's 1726 "Gulliver's Travels" was a satire on British politics of his day. Gulliver, marooned on Lilliput, met it's six inch high inhabitants. They were in mortal conflict with similarly vertically challenged neighbours, the Blefuscu. Their war was a holy war based on different ways to crack open boiled eggs. Do you open the big end or little end first? Swift was drawing attention to how small policy differences between the Whigs and Tories were inflated into cosmic conflicts by politicians who benefited from the controversy. The story hasn't got old.
"The President's Analyst", of course, isn't classic literature like Swift but it still packs a punch. It variously satirises modern American politics, the Beatles ("the puddlians"), the power of technology (TPC's plan for "a brain chip"), the cold war (the stock portfolio of Kydor Kropotkin ), psychiatry, gun ownership, inter-service rivalry within government (the "FBR" versus the "CEA" that is much more deadly than any East-West rivalry), the bizarre "Spy Vs Spy" world of espionage (who knows how many agencies are chasing the protagonists!) and the modern corporate state (The TPC's secret agenda to control the country by controlling the president by controlling his psychiatrist).
Gulliver is our tour guide through Swift's various satirical worlds. In "The President's Analyst", the ever cool James Coburn as Dr. Sidney Schaefer, plays the same role.
My guess is that before too long this movie will be remade for the X-box internet cell phone generation. Hollywood doesn't seem to write much new material these days. It's probably more relevant today. We're already seeing RFID tracking chips ("Spychips") being inserted into dogs and cats as well as human beings. The connected always on world is an everyday reality. So intead of being dated, maybe "The President's Analyst" was really ahead of it's time.
Rating: - "Rules Are Rules!"
I watched this movie two months ago and that replaced The Coen Brothers film "Raising Arizona" as the funniest and craziest movie I have ever seen in my life. Most funny scene is early on when Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) is sitting in Sidney Schafer's (James Coburn) office and he tells him a story of growing up in the south. The laugh comes when he says "Here comes that nigger again!" (another scene that is amusing is when Coburn is in a phone booth and a TPC truck comes in and snatches him and replaces it with another phone booth). Most crazy scene is the concert when the fictional band The Puddlians (lead singer is played by real life singer Barry McGuire) gives the customers LSD in their drinks (which included Cambridge and Severn Darden) and as the music gets louder the crowd gets wacked. The crazy moment comes when one man actually rapes a waitress naked! (that must of been a shock for those who saw it in 1967) Then there is the surprise ending; for which I can't tell you but pay attention to what happens in the climax. Joan Delaney is good as Coburn's girlfriend (at one point she is wearing Pucci-like elephant pants!) and so is William Daniels and Pat Harrington as the President of The Phone Comapny. Wish Paramount would release it again as an anniversary special edition.
Rating: - The Original Music
The original music (Barry McGuire's "Inner-Manipulations") has been restored in the DVD version of this fantastic '60s flick. Five stars and two thumbs up!
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