A Likely Candidate

...though her ambition is much more naked and naive than his, the two can be made to mesh...

...There are expert performances by a few known actors, too, like Peter Boyle's chillingly cynical, ominously subdued Luke, who nevertheless retains a minimum of vulnerability under his frozen eyes...

...or impure hokum like The Best Man...

...As he starts his campaign, he is disarmingly honest: When he has an answer to a question, it is as like as not an un-politic one...

...When McKay is outmaneu-vered by Jarmon in an on-the-spot appearance at a Malibu brush fire, you may be able to read Bill's lips forming the words, "The son of a bitch...

...I don't know whether improvisation too was used here, but the scene is full of little awkwardnesses, contretemps, failures to connect that set the stage for bigger future mishaps...

...Or should one say ever...

...the handheld camera echoes Bill's wavering, indeterminate movements...

...Similarly, right in the middle of McKay's first major political speech, you may just overhear a TV cameraman's callous, "We've got all we need...

...But whose arse is really in...

...Usually, we are given either pure hokum like Advise and Consent...

...Absolute alarm is attained at film's end, when the victorious McKay's call for help and Luke's laconic reply are drowned out by crowd noise...

...The message thinks it is the medium, the medium thinks it is the message, and armies of stupefied viewers think nothing at all, except perhaps that McKay is cuter than Jarmon...

...So Redford carefully calibrates his degrees of bewilderment...

...Help from this crass, worldly politician appalls his son the reformer...

...But as soon as Bud begins to win over the public with an honesty that John mistakes for cunning, dad is solidly behind him, even though his son merely wants him to keep out of it altogether...

...Or is it politicians who truly belong in latrines, as E. E. Cum-mings suggested: "a politician is an arse upon/ which everyone has sat except a man...

...In a final scene, as he grins at Bill and cackles, "You're a politician, son !", the very grayish yellowness of his teeth (do I merely imagine food particles lodged among them...

...The Candidate is perforce a slightly less than profound analysis of the corruption, not of power but of the mere process of acquiring power, because it covers so much: virtually all the funny, grim, grotesque and saddening aspects of a victorious political campaign...

...The Candidate concerns the change that takes place in a fighting, progressive young California lawyer, Bill McKay, whom the Democratic party runs as a dark-horse candidate for senator against the Republican incumbent, Crocker Jarmon, an entrenched, died-in-the-wool conservative smoothly and smarmily representing the forces of pious retrogression...

...The Candidate, sensibly and sensitively, understates...

...and Melvyn Douglas' retired, hedonistic ex-governor, a figure of amiable repul-siveness...

...The political circus is there down to its puniest absurdities, but it is up to you to catch them on the wing...

...There is Klein, the TV image-maker who with his camera henchmen turns McKay from a genuine human being into a sexy commodity...

...His ironic responses are a via media between idealistic intransigence and practical ambition...

...often it is impossible to tell whether they are washed-out on purpose or from ineptitude...

...at other times, it moved inversely, from the televised version to the event actually taking place...

...Let it not be thought, though, that the film depends chiefly on such literary or ideological elements...

...The McKay followers are more couth or, at least, a little younger, for the most part...

...Cruelly but not unjustly, the camera picks them out one after the other...

...it'll look like you're trying to make political capital out of it...

...But in the televised debate sequence, Ritchie has the multitude of monitors, glass partitions, control booths and panels take over almost completely, while still allowing the human debaters their share of sus-penseful, exacerbated humanity...

...That is the utterly uninspired color cinematography of Victor J. Kemper...

...or you may not...

...Klein is Bill McKay's most evil demon, yet with every cheap, clever TV ad he puts out, up goes McKay's rating on the opinion polls by a couple of points...

...Patriotic music is being segued in under his speech, which ends with grand cliches about keeping America beautiful...

...Ironies, big and small, jostle one another...

...Thanks to both actors and director, expressions do much of the film's talking...

...or else actual public figures, from politics and the media, doing what, alas, comes naturally to them...

...Robert Redford's McKay is right down to his Teddy Kennedy looks: Redford is always believably complex, never settles for an easy or excessive effect, and communicates Bill's inner doubts without losing the enveloping grace of a winner, even if he is a winner who doesn't know what to do with his winnings...

...he becomes merely somewhat shopworn and morally rumpled-still a good man, but one whose compromises have left him unsure of his footing and of himself, confused enough to be a likely candidate for further decline into genteel trimming...

...Bill McKay is a rather Kennedy-ish figure: glamorous, charismatic, quick-witted, essentially honest and well-meaning, with some rather well-developed foibles, such as an appetite for attractive, available women...

...it is that of a skilled writer as well...

...But most of the people who surround McKay are themselves walking ironies...

...Something is wrong between her and Bill, yet when their rapport is worst, their sex is best...

...The family that preys together . . . And there is Bill's father, ex-Governor John J. McKay, who views his son as a hostile baby, calls him Bud, and would just as soon see him lose...

...It is also exultantly visual...

...McKay is a cogently conceived and executed figure: a clean, staunch young man, reasonably not sacrosanctly idealistic, who discovers that there is no way of preserving one's purity while running for office...

...But even so, it has my vote...

...As a result, both time and place become schizophrenic...

...But they too comprise garish hippies, beaming simpletons, silly matrons whose one thought is that Bill McKay is cute, swooning young girls who pin large McKay buttons on their panties just over the pudenda, movie stars who are as much concerned with getting themselves photographed with McKay as he is with getting photographed with them, and so on...

...He is, in the beginning, an embattled storefront lawyer, genuinely interested in social improvement and beloved by his youthful staff...

...Equally brilliant is Ritchie's handling of the sound effects during a department-store harangue where the PA...

...it is as if both anxiety and cynicism had reached some form of supreme purity beyond verbalization...

...also, perhaps, more appealingly gotten up...

...The camera never zeroes in on the graffito...

...Michael Ritchie and Jeremy Lar-ner have shrewdly allowed some actes gratuits, loose ends, red herrings to infiltrate their film-whether it be a religious fanatic walking the streets and heralding doomsday, or someone out of nowhere taking a swing at McKay, or a vending machine dyspeptically refusing to yield its Pepsi despite Bill's imprecations and kicks...

...system goes haywire, or during an embarrassing address at a farmers' meeting hall that is almost empty, and where we mostly hear silences in which a chair abjectly scrapes against the floor or McKay despondently clears his throat...

...introduces Bill at a banquet patronizingly, he compounds the offense with the mala-propism "unequivocably," which may easily get past you...

...or else something exotic and remote from most of us like All the King's Men...

...This may not sound like a particularly novel statement for even a Hollywood film to make...

...That perfer-vid, sneezing whale-is that what will keep America beautiful for us...

...Although Jarmon is depicted only in terms of his slick demagogu-ery and adroit manipulation of reactionary platitudes, he does not become a caricature—unless, that is, Nixon and his Cabinet are caricatures too...

...There is no longer a clear difference between the happening and its edited, broadcast version...

...There is one such woman in the film (you'll have no difficulty identifying her prototype), seen first giving Bill a very special handshake, later whispering in his ear, still later hovering at a distance...

...Or is America to be kept beautiful for it...

...These incidents, in context, acquire a certain left-handed relevance...

...There is Lucas, who pretends to be helping Bill get his ideas before the people (the candidate is not actually expected to win), when he is merely using him for a fall guy in a race considered too hopeless for a reputable Democrat to essay...

...Throughout, he is ably served by his scenarist, Jeremy Lamer, who brings his experiences as a McCarthy speechwriter to bear on the script?yet Larner's work is not merely that of an alert political sideline observer...

...but the subtlety, penetration and wit with which it is made are certainly original and welcome...

...What else, since he does not man the pumps, could he be doing in any case...

...but he is also interested in Luke's offer-half promise, half defiance...

...The crane shot shows his smallness in that crowd that couldn't care less about shaking hands with obscure office seekers...

...There is a ride in a limousine during which Bill makes up parodistic distortions of his campaign slogans, and a television program that he blows completely by uncontrollable fits of laughter, superficially without cause but with a deeper motivation: a sense of the absurdity of it all...

...The Candidate could have used a Wexler...

...And when the McKay campaign winds to a close, Ritchie creates a splendid montage of ever shorter, ever more frenzied scenes that build pyramidally to an apex of terminal tension...

...The film progresses by marvelous rhythms: chiefly hectic syncopation lapsing into moments of relaxation-either devil-may-care amusement, or doldrums of accidie...

...The film has something resembling a happy ending: The battling underdog ousts the smiling reactionary, but at the price of moral diminishment for himself, and watered-down representation for the people...

...And where else does an arse really belong...

...Again, when McKay and his team are flying by helicopter to that brush fire, and Bill rehearses some of the points he will make to the assembled representatives of the media, his chief adviser tells him to drop some of those points: "Don't make this into an issues thing...

...When Pat Harrington Jr...

...No less adroit is the casting...

...When Bill and his campaign manager, Marvin "Luke" Lucas-a rather mysterious figure who drops in out of nowhere to tempt, cajole and provoke him into running for senator-are closeted for a conference in a water closet, the only place where they can escape the crowd, people bang impatiently on the door...

...We notice especially a colossally fat woman who applauds frantically, stops long enough for a big, fat sneeze, then resumes her applauding undaunted...

...Throughout the film, TV screens and monitors have figured prominently: Not only has the action moved from the big to the small screen...

...She is given to inimical banter and innuendoes that imply less than meets the ear...

...Luke bangs back from inside and shouts, "Get your arse out of here...

...But who are these America Beautifulers in his audience...

...It is modest when a girl pulls down the top of her dress and squeals: "Sign me, please, sign me...

...The final question is at what point does the bearer of such compromised views become no better than anyone else-which is decidedly not good enough...

...And what kind of beauty might that be...

...It reaches proportions of dismay when a former co-worker accompanies his handshake with "You and I both know that this is bullshit, but the point is: they are believing it...

...That is why, as Bill's father boasts, he will not get his arse kicked...

...its judicious and witty selection of telling details without rubbing our eyes and ears in the obvious...

...Or consider the television debate between Jarmon and McKay...

...Drive, He Said is forgiven and forgotten: Lamer has now earned his premature acclaim, and possibly even a little something extra...

...But now there is The Candidate, written by Jeremy Larner, directed by Michael Ritchie, and starring Robert Red-ford, so Medium Cool is no longer the only decent, serious political film made in America within recent years...

...Ritchie and Redford, who brought us the fine Downhill Racer, co-produced this venture, providing an impetus that would not have come from the customary uncreative sources...

...but the only real hint we get before the comic denouement is a glimpse of a campaign poster where someone has scrawled "A toss in the hay with" just before the printed "Bill McKay...

...Kemper's colors lack definition and excitement...

...Then there is Bill's wife, Nancy, looking very much like a Kennedy consort: cool, symmetrical, wrapped in a cellophane placenta...

...you either notice it in passing or you don't...

...contrasts sardonically with the white ones of his son, bared in a smile of frozen horror...

...By using frequent diagonal shots to create distortion, the film, often showing one face as really there and the other encapsulated on a TV monitor, suggests a world gone awry, where nothing is seen undistorted any more, and one cannot be sure where television ends and life begins...

...Soon McKay drools over babies as repulsive as those Jarmon chucked under the chin, and the patriotic music at McKay rallies swells to climaxes every bit as rousing as the Jarmon crescendos...

...It is Bill's tragicomedy and ours, for we are in the picture too...

...What saves the film from superficiality is its ability to suggest a great deal more than it has time to show...

...Other things are less elusive...

...its resolute avoidance of cliche by observing the most time-dishonored truths with a sharp, circumspect eye that sees everything as if for the first time...

...Sometimes it is a skilful reductio ad ab-surdum...

...when he has no answer, he admits it...

...No melodramatic sellout occurs: McKay is shown neither as perfect in the beginning nor as thoroughly corroded in the end...

...Ritchie will combine a crane shot with handheld camera work to convey the sense of isolation and confusion McKay experiences when he first goes out to shake the hands of factory workers rushing homeward...

...The actors are either unknowns or near-unknowns who manage to look their parts with uncanny veracity...

...Crocker Jarmon is conducting a big rally under a huge picture of himself-an hommage to Citizen Kane, perhaps...

...Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, besides being a more humane piece of political filmmaking, benefited from the acuity and inventiveness of Wexler's camera work...

...There is only one other weakness in the film, besides the almost unavoidable quasi-superficiality...

...Is there any difference...

...McKay does preserve a sense of humor and a simulacrum of independence, even if they can express themselves only in gratuitous acts...

...And what of Bill McKay himself...

...There are two kinds of films: those that tell us what to think, and those that merely invite us to think...

...The film records how his positions become coated over or thinned out by the men around him, and how their ideas seep back into his...

...When Luke wants a hollow McKay promise to fire the Regents eliminated from one of the TV ads, Klein responds cynically that it "sounds good...