The President's Analyst.

The idiocy of Cold War intrigue as represented in 1967 in The President's Analyst, with James Coburn playing the swinging new age psychiatrist Dr Sidney Schafer before there was such a thing as new age, is enough to make you nostalgic, given the pernicious idiocy of politics and "intelligence" today. Imagine a modishly groomed Manhattan psychiatrist who plays a Chinese gong before he puts patients like undercover agent Godfrey Cambridge on the couch, and admits that he likes contemporary art, another target of constant satire in those days. Dr Schafer's pact to treat the president is sealed during a visit to the Whitney Museum, Marcel Breuer's concrete castle on Madison Avenue, where he accepts the job in a hushed gallery in front of a John Chamberlain sculpture of smashed metal.

"The presidency used to be the world's loneliest job, but now even he has someone to talk to," says Dr Schafer, with that toothy Coburn smile. Just think of how things might have been if presidents had an alternative back then to that soul-searching tete-a-tete with Billy Graham. As far as I can remember, the only Washington figure who saw a psychiatrist in those days (and admitted it) was the Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Elsberg, and the Watergate dirty tricks squad on orders from a paranoid White House burglarized his shrink's office, looking for incriminating material.

Indeed, once Dr Schafer decamps for Washington from a stylishly filmed New York (in which writer/director Theodore J Flicker lingers on modern architecture and elegiac views of the skyline), he soon knows too much, and therefore the FBI determines that he must be killed before any of the foreign intelligence services gets him. A comedy of terrors ensues that takes Coburn and the would-be killers and kidnappers from Chinatown to a bus that leaves for the countryside with protest singer Barry McGuire's band (and a nymphette named Snow White) to a Cold War face-off with a Russian spy (Severn Darden) on a yacht. Coburn in mufti, wearing glasses and a wig, gives you a sense of this farce's tone.

Sound a bit like James Bond? Every parody back then did. And parodies like this one were playing in theaters at the same time that the "real" James Bond was on a screen down the street. This was in the days before multiplexes.

The twist here is that this analyst's secret weapon turns out to be analysis itself. He immobilizes his adversaries by getting them talking - like Darden's KGB agent, who launches into a soliloquy about his communist parents once Schafer asks the right questions. "I, VI Kropotkin, hate my father. All my life I've been miserably unhappy, but I always thought it was my Russian soul. Yes, KGB agents are people, too, and The President's Analyst mines this comic vein almost 40 years before Analyze This/Analyze That took on the sensitive mobster.

The interiors, especially Dr Schafer's loft-like bachelor pad that seems styled for a Scotch ad of the time, are wild time capsules. So are the groovy clothes that Coburn wears, which look as if he walked off with them from the wardrobe room of another spy-farce in which he starred, In Like Flint. The President's Analyst reminds us once again of the gulf between intelligence and government "Intelligence." See this one before you wait on line for Get Smart.

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2008 12:07 PM