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TIME On Politics

All The Presidents' Movies

Musclehead or sex fiend--the image of the Chief Executive is no longer a winning ticket

By Richard Lacayo

TIME magazine 03-16-98

(TIME, March 16) -- Henry Burton, the campaign aide with a troubled conscience, is lying on a hotel bed watching a movie on TV. It's the last moment of Shane, the Mount Everest of the heroic western, and a desolate little boy is crying to the hillsides, "Shane, Shane! Come back!" Henry cries out in return, "And run for President!"

Well, what can you do but cry when you've devoted yourself to a candidate like Primary Colors' Jack Stanton--charming, idealistic in some ways, but more than a little slippery? That's the kind of presidential timber we've been getting in the movies lately. Men apt to cut a few moral corners, and then a few more, until all the right angles are as smooth as they are. Men with the scruples of the off-screen President in Wag the Dog, who is caught in a scandal with an underage girl. Or of President Gene Hackman in Absolute Power, who has sex so rough with the wife of a major contributor that she wounds him with a letter opener. That leads his Secret Service agents to burst into the room and shoot her dead. At least for once the cover-up isn't worse than the crime.

It's odd that so much has been made of Bill Clinton's friendships with the Hollywood crowd. It doesn't seem to have done him much good as far as movies are concerned. Whatever else his legacy may be, Clinton will be remembered as the man who was in the White House when Hollywood decided to release one film after another that makes the place a cross between the Playboy mansion and Dracula's castle. Maybe as some kind of compensatory gesture, the movies have also lately given us the President as cartoonish action hero: Harrison Ford in Air Force One, Bill Pullman in Independence Day--the Commander in Chief as somebody who can do a nice head butt. Musclehead or sex fiend--that's not much of a choice. Before long the only guys suitable for the part will be Jackie Chan and Larry Flynt.

It's nothing new for movies to expose corruption in American politics. When Mr. Smith went to Washington in 1939, he found Gomorrah. But the President, whether real or fictional, used to get gentler handling. In 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy, when George M. Cohan, played by James Cagney, meets Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President was played by an actor, seen largely from behind, who sounded so mature and wise that he might as well have been Moses. Two decades later, in Sunrise at Campobello, there is Roosevelt again, this time played by Ralph Bellamy as the last word in ripening decencies. Nobody in those days thought of making a movie about F.D.R. and his sometime mistress Lucy Mercer Rutherford. Or about Dwight Eisenhower and his wartime companion Kay Summersby. Or about J.F.K. and...well, whomever. The Kennedy film Hollywood did make was PT 109.

No such luck for Clinton. What we get now is movies in which the President is a man in thrall to his own libidinal fumblings, Commander in Chief of the banana republic. Maybe the Gennifer Flowers episode of Clinton's '92 campaign gave Hollywood the psychic go-ahead it needed to make an assault on old pieties about the presidency. The very next year the movies gave us Dave. That was the one in which Kevin Kline is an amiable presidential look-alike who fills in when the real President (named Bill!) is sidelined by a stroke that he suffered while (hmmm...) fooling around in a Washington hotel with (uh oh!) a White House aide. Two years later, in The American President, Michael Douglas is a widower, which means his bumpy courtship of lobbyist Annette Bening is within the rules. All the same, by letting us follow the happy couple into the First Bedroom, even that White House-friendly movie crossed another threshold. On the other side of that threshold were movies like Wag the Dog. And still to come, if it ever gets produced, is Sacred Cows, with a script by the unblushing Joe Eszterhas, writer of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, about a President caught in sexual congress with a cow.

Of course, the movies started driving toward all this long before the Clintons came along. In Frank Capra's 1948 State of the Union, Spencer Tracy plays a straight-talking businessman having an affair with Angela Lansbury. A newspaper magnate and political kingmaker, Lansbury decides to push Tracy into a presidential run. That means getting his estranged wife, played by Katharine Hepburn, to agree to act the contented spouse on the campaign trail.

Acknowledging that a White House contender might have a roving eye was daring enough in those days. The real twist, however, was that Tracy, the flawed husband, would still make a great President, especially in comparison with the corrupt political professionals around him. For a while, they persuade him to mount the standard campaign of dealmaking, double-talk and false promises, until Hepburn brings him back to his senses and to her. But at that point he drops out of the race. Daring or not, State of the Union played by the unwritten rule: A movie can argue that an errant husband may have his virtues (especially if remorse turns out to be one of them), but it has to stop short of letting tainted goods into the White House.

Sixteen years later, the rule still held. In The Best Man, a 1964 adaptation of Gore Vidal's play, Henry Fonda is the thoughtful but philandering candidate whose main rival is the unscrupulous Cliff Robertson. At the party convention, Robertson digs up some dirt on Fonda and uses it. Fonda gets some on Robertson but doesn't use it, proving he's the best man, even if not the best husband, but ending his chance at the nomination. He manages to thwart Robertson by other means. With both flawed men out of the running, the Oval Office remains, in our imagination at least, a clean, well-lighted place.

Around this time, budding curiosity about the President's private life started to converge with a more serious threat to his image. By the early 1960s, the cold war had reduced the Commander in Chief to a cog in the nuclear-terror machine, a man who might be compelled by the momentum of rapid response and first-strike capabilities to launch a war he didn't want. Which is precisely what happens to the Presidents played by Henry Fonda in Fail-Safe and Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, both released the same year as The Best Man.

Before long, the Vietnam War proved what those movies predicted, that some events are larger than the power of Presidents who set them in motion. Then Watergate drove the point home, opening the way to All the President's Men, probably the first film in which a real President figures as the villain. And once you've had Nixon the man, you eventually get Nixon the movie, Oliver Stone's version of the White House biopic as tormented case history.

So by the time the Clintons came to Washington, the stage was set for movies that treat the President as one more plaster saint. Blackmailing an opponent, the step that Henry Fonda rejects in The Best Man, doesn't bother Jack Stanton in Primary Colors. But Stanton is neither a two-dimensional figure of fun nor a murderous bogeyman, and this is why Primary Colors marks an advance over most presidential movies of the past and present. He's a mixed bag, a stinker who does some good in public life. Unlike Tracy or Fonda, he gets to go to the White House. And he gets the rest of us, with all our misgivings, to go along for the ride.

The French, who offer one model of how to think about the private life of public figures--ignore it--made the movie that best sums up the peculiar intricacies of moral judgment. It is Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, in which a character says, more or less, "The terrible thing about life is that we all have our reasons." That's not an endorsement of amorality. It's a summary of the facts on the ground. What is so bewitching about moral compromise, after all, is that we enter it, as Henry Burton does, half willingly. Even Shane is not blameless. He's a former gunslinger who comes to the rescue of the homesteaders with blood on his hands. Because they need his help, they take his hand, with the same mixture of regret and relief with which so many people take Jack Stanton's. If Primary Colors moves American movies a step deeper into that complicated moral territory, then hooray for Hollywood.

In TIME This Week

Cover Date: March 16, 1998

True Colors
A Primary Roll Call
"Primary Colors" A Tale Of Two Bills
All The Presidents' Movies
Will Betty Currie Stick To The Script?
The White House: Getting The Story Straight
The Nonsense Stops Here: Profile of Judge Johnson
Purloined Papers At The State Department?
Now It's Paula Jones' Turn
Hizzoner The Hall Monitor: Rudy Giuliani
Mr. Gates Goes To Washington
Bill Gates' Diary
Harassed Or Hazed?
The Notebook: Oh...That Clinton Personality





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