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"It explains your utter lack of hostility--you can vent your aggressive feelings by actually killing people! It's a sensational solution to the hostility problem!"

A nearly forgotten satire of 1967, the film lampoons the FBI, the CIA, the vogue for psychiatric analysis of the time, and even the Phone Company. (It may need to be pointed out to a younger audience that AT&T, back then, was similar to Microsoft today: big, powerful, and arrogant.) In a time when American movies were pretty conformist, "President's Analyst" had a wide-open attitude in its mockery only topped by "Dr. Strangelove."

Like "Dr. Strangelove," you laugh the first time you see it at the funny lines and situations, but you keep re-watching it, because you notice funny touches in the characters, and the actor's preformances, and so it stays funny.

Coburn plays the title character, Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a psychiatrist who gets employed by the President of the US. When the stress of his job causes him to run away, it sets off a free-for-all among the spies of the world, who want to either kidnap him for what he knows--or kill him, before he can tell what he knows.

The film is definitely a product of its time, with hippies and happenings and drugs, but it also featured a uniquely paranoid view of politics that no one had ever seen in a movie before. Think "X-Files," done as comedy.

Two spies talking:
"How's Pierre?"
"You--hadn't heard?"
"Oh, no!"
--pregnant silence, then a shrug--
"Easy come, easy go."

"The President's Analyst" is also a film in which every cast member is pitch-perfect (particularly memorable are Godfrey Cambridge as a CIA agent and Severn Darden as a Russian spy), which makes Coburn's work, rising above them all, all the greater.

The film is available on VHS, but not DVD so far, and it's worth going to the trouble of finding.

If you're looking for something with James Coburn that you haven't seen, this one's a gem.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6410&reviewer=301
originally posted: 12/02/02 09:18:50
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