The President’s Analyst: Theodore J Flicker: 1967

Spying: ‘The last refuge of the incurable romantic.’

Long before Austin Powers hit our consciousness as the Bond spoof, there was James Coburn as Flint. This is an outing in much the same style as Flint, but with a different main central character.

JC is Sidney Shaefer – a psychoanalyst who has been chosen to help The President as the leader of the free world, bless him, needs a confidante – someone to talk to.

The film opens with Sidney listening to the outpourings of a client – a black guy on his couch talking about the first time he heard the word ‘nigger.’ That same guy is a secret agent and will crop up in the film as one of the many characters who will chase Sidney throughout in this hilarious, mad sixties satire.

Kooky is the best word to describe this film as the proceedings lean no way into logic – when Sidney is first told about his new job – by his own psychiatrist, he is being shown around a modern art gallery. Afterwards, Sidney walks around the city to what sounds like The New Seekers or Fifth Dimension singing in the background. The clothes are fabulous though and the movie does feel like Dr. No in its sense of period. Although the film is firmly tongue in cheek, it has a serious stab at the tenants of The Cold War psychology. Fear, paranoia and suspicion are poked at, as are concepts of normality. All wrapped up in a blanket of psychedelic mayhem.

From the moment he takes the job on, he is haunted and followed by agents from CEA and FBR (hardly disguised abbreviations), is watched, taped and generally driven around the bend with paranoia. To add to this a red flashing light appears whenever/wherever the President wants to see Sidney – which could be at any time at any place. A red beam of light on one occasion flashes in his face from a bowl of soup in a restaurant. Sidney is not allowed to talk to anyone: his girlfriend is taken away as Sidney talks in his sleep. His freedom and state of mind have been seriously affected – so he tries to escape this living hell to varying degrees of success and with often very funny consequences.

He meets an ‘average’ white all American liberal family during a walking tour of The Whitehouse and joins them. Sidney is now being hunted by The Russians, Chinese, The British and Nigerians along with the CEA and FBR. The liberal family has the mother who is a part of a Karate sect, and a child who tapes his telephone pleas to agents that he may be able to trust. The same agents want him dead and try to hijack him outside a restaurant: they are fended off by the karate adept liberal mother.

Sidney enters a hippy van for refuge whereupon he is invited by them to join them ‘to explore the last innocence and peaceful centre.’ Life with the hippies is peaceful; he loses the suit and adorns slacks and polo neck. His enemies are still out to get him and in one sequence with Sidney lolling around a long grassed field, one by one, assassins knock each other off in an attempt to be the one that kills Sidney. He walks away unharmed leaving numerous agents dead.

Sidney is captured though and kept on a boat by an agent that wants him to defect to Russia as it is the only way that Sidney can remain alive. In an amusing twist however, the agent succumbs to Sidney’s Point of View – as he points out to the agent that he really hates his father and that sailing would have been a better option as a career for a romantic. But Sidney cannot help him without giving the agent three to seven years analysis. Sidney is again captured by another interested party, the phone company.

In the zaniest plot at world domination ever devised, the phone company, through the mechanism of mechanical men in suits, Sidney is given the low down on how he is to convince The President to change legislation allowing the phone company to place a ‘cerebrum communicator’ inside humans. This will allow them to communicate without the expense of maintenance and will rid the world of their irrational dislike of the phone company.

The ending is as delightfully crazy as the entire film – an insane jab at an equally insane world. All delivered with that very idiosyncratic James Coburn grin.

Gail Spencer