Celluloid Candidates

...Unfortunately, "the machine" back home has already slated Matthew Berke is managing editor of First Things...

...hands down...

...Daniel McGinty (Brian Donlevy), a tough Depression-era hobo, is pulled off a breadline by the city's political boss (Akim Tamiroff...

...If you don't fight, this job is not for you, and it never will be...

...How does he lead others while barely managing to cope with his own demons...

...And the fascination with character is the one constant of political movies since Hollywood began: We could realize the American Dream if only men of integrity and courage would step forward, rallying the masses who are good or bad only because a leader appeals to their best or worst impulses...

...Fonda's Senator Bill Russell is more Adlai Stevenson than Alger Hiss—humane but weak and indecisive...

...Does she ever...

...Gee, why didn't anybody think of that...

...Political films in the 1970s raised the ante of realism even higher...

...Jarmon seems unbeatable at first, but eventually voters come to like the hip, handsome young idealist with the rumpled clothes and the wind-tossed shock of blond hair...

...Old-fashioned political farce has made a comeback in recent years...

...But audiences elsewhere grasped that the story is a vindication of democratic values...

...The 1960s brought a new level of realism to political movies...

...Spencer Tracy turns in one of his greatest performances as Frank Skeffington, a doughty old Irish pol and mayor...

...Among political farces, nothing quite measures up to The Great McGinty, but for pure fun there is The Farmer's Daughter (1947), with Loretta Young as Katie Holstrom, a poor but gorgeous Swedish-American girl who moves to the big city, becomes a maid, and, through perspicacity and spunk, ends up running for Congress on a platform of milk for schoolchildren and a higher minimum wage...

...Nearly every conservative observer has complained about Hollywood's ideology in recent years—but few of these observers seem to have noticed that liberalism appears in films not as an argument but as a sign of good character...

...Smith is pure corn: a pat, sentimental, feel-good yarn in which good will and gumption overcome evil within two hours...

...McKay's final mortification comes when his cynical old father tells him, "Congratulations, son, you're a politician...

...You all know who I am," he tells the crowd, and of course we do know...

...Superficially cynical, The Great McGinty actually presents a moving account of how a bad man can sometimes turn good, and how better things may come from a reformed bum than an arrogant idealist...

...Hollywood's increasing radicalism was at least partially responsible for the cynical realism that dominated political movies from the 1960s on...

...But Mr...

...the Jarmon coalition is composed of unphotogenic rich creeps and obese, lower-middle-class slobs with bad teeth —the types the media delight in displaying at every Republican convention...

...In exasperation, her sister Beth says, "Sydney, the man is the leader of the free world, he's brilliant, he's funny, he's an above-average dancer...

...But everything else has changed—every-thing, that is, except Hollywood's insistence that all that matters in politics is character...

...Smith Goes to Washington), this stubborn absolutism seems shallow and petulant...

...Senate when political consultant Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) tells him he's sure to lose, so he can say whatever he wants, using the campaign as a platform for his ideas...

...It's not about the normal give-and-take of politics, but the pre-political foundation of democracy...

...Jefferson Smith, head of a youth organization called the "Boy Rangers," is selected by the political bosses of his prairie state to fill a vacancy in the U.S...

...He defends orphans against federal budget cuts, thwarts a wicked conspiracy, and wins the girl (Sigourney Weaver...

...The drama turns on which candidate will receive the blessing of ex-president Art Hockstader (Lee Tracy), a feisty Truman-inspired character who is terminally ill...

...Men have rights, he reads in Black-stone's Commentaries, and "wrongs are violations of those rights...

...If what the movies think constitutes character these days doesn't appeal to you, go down to the video store and rent Mr...

...Primary Colors, Mike Nichols's 1998 screen adaptation of the roman a clef by Joe Klein, is about Jack Stanton (John Travolta), a dead-ringer for Bill Clinton in his first presidential race...

...Still, State of the Union effectively shows the enormous, often conflicting, pressures put on political candidates...

...McKay's opponent is a conservative establishment blowhard with the unlikely name of Crocker Jarmon...

...Just as he is about to collapse, the tide turns, thanks to the Boy Rangers' publicity campaign and a hysterical last-minute confession from his opponent, Claude Rains...

...Jefferson Smith is the common man at his peak, but Lincoln is the incarnation of greatness, combining high ideals with practical wisdom and driven by a power beyond himself...

...even then he worries about the poor janitor who thinks it's just another night mopping up at Terrorist Headquarters...

...This time we actually see The Beast's face: It's none other than Larry Hagman, ol' J.R...

...In the end, it's not clear what The Candidate is really about...

...With a real chance to win, McKay now must speak to journalists when he's not in the mood, tailor his clothing and made the second—which is part of what makes The Candidate a genuinely interesting picture...

...It's not that a flawed man can never be a good leader, but that this man's personal vices are paralleled in his politics: It's love 'em and leave 'em with the women and the political supporters he seduces...

...Dave (1993) stars Kevin Kline as a sweet-tempered presidential look-alike who actually becomes the commander-in-chief...

...If The Great McGinty overemphasizes the venality of the urban political machine, John Ford's 1958 gem The Last Hurrah completely ignores it, stressing instead how, in the pre-welfare era, city politicians provided poor immigrants with a personal brand of social service until they could assimilate into the American mainstream...

...Smith was unfavorably received, even reviled, in Washington and Hollywood...

...Sydney likes Andrew, but she worries that he might not be right for her...

...Unlike Capra and Ford, director Preston Sturges never touches the deepest emotional chords, but he can spin a hilarious story that also ends up having a serious message...

...Politics intrudes when conservative Republican Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss) attacks the president for protecting the environment too much and standards of sexual propriety too little—and out goes any semblance of realism...

...But despite all the human frailties and nasty hardball, Advise and Consent is an exercise in political reassurance: The system does work, in large part because most of the senators are honorable men accepting partially moral solutions and refusing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good...

...But it was only in the 1990s that the radicalism finally trumped even the realism...

...She persuades him to stage a filibuster to save his bill, his reputation, and his faith in American institutions...

...Smith was never meant to bear detailed scrutiny...

...It captures beautifully the Clintonian blending of public compassion and private ruthlessness, his shameless and predatory womanizing, his seductive appeal to those "aching to do good...

...But the naive young idealist quickly runs into trouble when he introduces a bill for a camp where kids can learn about nature and American ideals...

...All I got to say is, I can lick any man here...

...For a comic Nixon, Dan Hedaya is just right in Dick, a silly 1999 Watergate spoof in which two ditzy Valley Girl types turn out to be the real agents of Nixon's downfall...

...There were real possibilities here, but Beatty fritters it away with speeches saying that the country needs socialism...

...Henry Fonda is surprisingly convincing as a young man, tall and ungainly, having to untangle himself when he rises to give a speech...

...Henry Fonda plays another liberal intellectual in The Best Man, a 1964 production using Gore Vidal's own screen adaptation of his stage play...

...Charles Lawton Jr.'s fine black-andwhite cinematography helps to conjure up the old city streets with poor-but-tidy back alleys, the boisterous Irish-immigrant wake, the campaign headquarters with beat cops stopping by for coffee and sandwiches, the cigar-smoking men in overcoats and fedoras...

...Advise and Consent, Otto Preminger's 1962 adaptation of Allen Drury's novel, has the U.S...

...The most famous American political movie is Frank Capra's 1939 Mr...

...The Candidate only touches the surface of sexual temptation and infidelity, an eternal element of bigtime politics...

...Shepherd, a lonely widower and single parent with a cute, sassy daughter, ends up falling in love with environmental lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening), who alternates between tough Washington insider and weak-kneed, infatuated schoolgirl...

...By jimm, that's all there is to it—right and wrong...

...Taken as a whole, these political movies are, after their own fashion, a kind of testament to the American democratic experiment...

...Perhaps the filmmakers started out to make the first point but inadvertently country today...

...Official Washington calls for his removal from office, but Jean Arthur, his jaded legislative aide, realizes that Jeff has "plain, decent, everyday common rightness...

...Smith Goes to Washington, The Great McGinty, and The Candidate...

...Lincoln, John Ford's 1939 meditation on political leadership, which seems at first little more than an animated Thomas Hart Benton painting, a bit of nostalgic Americana...

...At the end he walks down a long road at dusk, approaching a great but unknown destiny...

...Nixon (Anthony Hopkins), having eased relations with Russia and China, is challenged by the Hagman character: "Aren't you forgetting who put you here...

...This is, admittedly, a limited framework, but it is the one in which some of America's greatest directors and screenwriters have worked...

...Smith Goes to Washington, with James Stewart in the title role...

...Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) is an Alger Hiss knockoff, a snobby, self-confessed liberal "egghead" who is glibly evasive about allegations that he once attended a Communist meeting...

...And who can resist Pat O'Brien as a ward boss who says, "You've done grand things, Frank—grand, grand things...

...The American people put me here," replies the president...

...When should a politician stand on absolute principle, and when should he make a reasonable accommodation to the fallen, rough-and-tumble world of politics...

...In a sense, Primary Colors is less about the president than that "aching to do good," and the desperate will to believe in a leader...

...Whatever its intentions, the film makes a very strong case that no beautiful flower will emerge from the muck of such a candidacy...

...Really...

...the movie simply represents to us in stunning visual form the myth of Lincoln, the man of destiny, who rises from humble origins, suffers the loss of a mother and sweetheart, spares no effort to get hold of books, and chooses a career in the law...

...His ideas, alas, turn out to be standard liberal pieties on abortion, busing, envi-ronmentalism, welfare, etc...

...Fearing that fascists would use the film as propaganda against "decadent" democracy, a consortium actually offered Columbia two million dollars to can the film...

...Senate deliberating over a presidential nominee for secretary of state...

...McKay supporters tend to be cool young people, ghetto blacks, concerned-looking suburbanites, and movie stars...

...Power is not a toy we give to good children," Hockstader says...

...The Senator Wbs Indiscreet, a 1947 film from George S. Kaufman, is a McGinty wannabe that goes nowhere, though it gets off one good line: "If you can't beat 'em, bribe 'em...

...And this country could use some of that...

...When I think about it, I get weak in the knees...

...After Oliver Stone gave us his portrayal of the media-government-finance conspiracy he called "The Beast" in his 1991 fantasy JFK, he gave us Nixon, a 1995 film biography of the thirty-seventh president...

...the proposed site for a crooked land scheme...

...It's an outpouring of moral consciousness, a fable of the lone individual resisting organized evil with only truth and right...

...Is it that the process of politics is corrupting and dehumanizing, that a candidate makes so many concessions and compromises that he loses his very soul...

...Men without ambition—^jellyfish...

...Wag the Dog (1997) is a frequently hilarious farce about an incumbent president (never actually seen or heard) whose reelection is jeopardized by a sex scandal...

...In Nixon you always know The Beast is around when you see cartoon-like clouds flying over the White House...

...Hockstader tries to convince Cantwell not to reveal that Russell once had a nervous breakdown...

...Having built a socialist-crack dealer alliance, as well as romance with a femme fatale named Nina (Halle Berry, reprising her great role from The Flintstones movie of 1994), the senator tries to call off the assassination...

...Isn't it possible our standards are just a tad too high...

...The Seduction of Joe Tynan, a pretty good 1979 film with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep, develops the theme of illicit sex in the corridors of power...

...Rob Reiner's The American President (1995) is a romantic comedy with just enough sex to disqualify it as family viewing...

...How does a politician retain his humanity in a relentlessly public life...

...Well, that can be changed...

...Ewing from Dallas, looking the model of the sinister white guy—a standard Hollywood stereotype nowadays...

...His opponent, Senator Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson), is a nasty, right-wing street fighter, a Nixon-McCarthy blend with a touch of Barry Goldwater...

...Better is Young Mr...

...Another fine Nixon performance is Lane Smith's in The Final Days, a 1989 made-for-TV movie that succeeds—too much for its own good—in showing how dull government is...

...But he's not all sweetness and light: After explaining in legalese why his neighbors shouldn't lynch an accused man, he adds, "Gentlemen, I'm not here to make any speeches...

...Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, son of the former California governor (Melvyn Douglas) and an attorney at a legal clinic serving the poor...

...Uncompromising idealism didn't work so well in Capra's State of the Union (1948), the story of wealthy industrialist and Republican presidential hopeful Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy), a man of integrity who makes no concession or compromise to "special interests...

...Based on Edwin O'Connor's novel, the movie also has parallels to the real-life career of Boston mayor James Michael Curley...

...Does anyone believe conservatives get hysterical over discreet premarital sex in an age where the divide between liberals and conservatives is whether the Boy Scouts should be forced to accept gay scoutmasters...

...William Demarest (one of the great American character actors) delivers the ultimate tribute to payola: "If it weren't for graft, you would get a low type of people in politics...

...For newly sensitized moviegoers in the early 1970s, that was probably the preferred interpretation...

...You end up hoping the hit man never gets the message...

...To win the nomination, however, Matthews soon finds himself dispensing favors, jobs, and flattery...

...To distract public attention, the president's media handlers—Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Anne Heche—produce a war that doesn't exist except in images on television...

...Though it softens the book's even harder edge, this is a conservative movie that somehow snuck past Hollywood's liberal radar...

...The Candidate (1972), directed by Michael Ritchie, brilliantly recreates the frenzy of a major campaign: the whirl of meetings, speeches, rubber-chicken dinners, fund-raisers, female groupies, photo ops, and microphones with ear-popping reverb...

...Misleading in purporting to tell the whole sordid story, Primary Colors is still great entertainment and gets a lot right...

...Bulworth expresses everything that's horrible about Hollywood liberalism today: It is sexually libertine, self-righteous, apocalyptic, and wrong about nearly everything...

...The sense of authenticity is further enhanced by the presence of real political professionals in minor roles...

...Katharine Hepburn as Mary, the candidate's estranged wife and conscience, laments, "They're killing Grant, they're slicing him up sliver by sliver until there's nothing...

...And you thought the coup against Nixon was orchestrated by the left...

...When Smith refuses to back down, the bad guys organize a slander campaign...

...But though Hockstader despises Cantwell, he can't abide Russell, who refuses to fight even though he knows a nasty rumor about Cantwell...

...So could the whole cockeyed world...

...Streep tells Alda: "I think you are the most exciting political figure in the his message to popular tastes, and pretend to like people he hates...

...Senate...

...in private he babbles fragments from stump speeches in an incoherent stream...

...Indeed, with Warren Beatty's Bulworth (1998), we've come full circle, back to pure fantasy...

...By ignoring the machine's parasitic dimension, Ford is able to draw into uncluttered relief a nobly and unapolo-getically patriarchal social order...

...When he has to bomb Libya in retaliation for terrorist acts, for instance, he attacks at night in order to minimize civilian casualties...

...We may have returned to politics as fantasy in recent years: The most recent political film, last month's The Contender, is pure wish fulfillment...

...Never before had any movie shown the practices and procedures of the Senate with such detail—not only the visible parliamentary aspects but the behind-the-scenes negotiating, horse-trading, and back-stabbing (including blackmail against a senator with a homosexual past...

...Unshaven and exhausted, his voice cracking, Smith holds the floor for twenty-four hours, pleading for "plain ordinary kindness...

...McKay hates the sordid world of politics, but is persuaded to run for the U.S...

...softened by his wife and children, he feels strong enough to buck the machine and provide relief to tenement dwellers and sweatshop labor-ers—or at least he tries...

...Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas, is the model of leadership: liberal but prudent, principled but worldly, dynamic yet glib and self-effacing, reflective but decisive...

...Starting as a protection-racket strongman ("You need to be protected from human greed," he explains to his victims), McGinty rises to alderman, then mayor, and finally governor—with bribes, threats, and chicanery every step of the way...

...The Great McGinty (1940) is his tongue-in-cheek hymn to political graft...

...and a little lookin' out for the other guy, too...

...In a film that isn't purely symbolic (like Mr...

...His own words, repeated over and over and over, begin to sound absurd to him...

...Though plagued by melancholy and self-doubt, Ford's Lincoln emerges even at this early stage as a leader and unifier, settling legal disputes with Solomonic wisdom, diffusing a bitter dispute with a clever quip, declining to judge between apple and peach in a pie-eating contest—anticipating his reservation of human judgment on the nation's greatest crisis...

...Bulworth is a U.S...

...Though Stanton may have hitched his wagon to the star of bureaucratically administered compassion, he has no center but his own lust for power and glory, and will, when it suits him, jettison any of the programs and policies that are so dear to his followers—justifying every move in what one character calls that "tender-hearted voice" of his...

...Also, it doesn't hurt that they have a nice life in the gentlemen's club the Senate once was...

...It also teaches the important lesson that a man must attend to the state of his marital union before that of the federal union...

...Senator so wracked with guilt over his conservative politics that he contracts with a mobster to have himself assassinated, freeing him in the meantime to tell the truth about politics...

...Rising to governor, McGinty is finally secure in his social status and free from want...

...A second possibility, though, is that McKay simply lacks a center, that he holds his ideas casually, and, when forced to present them publicly, he finds them incoherent...