Search - The President's Analyst on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Mild Violence, Adult Situations, Questionable for Children, Profanity Movie Release: 1967 DVD Release: 06/08/2004 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV - Closed Captioned Edition: Special Collection Audio Tracks: English Subtitles: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 42 mins Studio: Paramount Members Wishing: 9 Genres: Comedy, Political Satire, Spy Comedy

The President's Analyst is James Coburn, whose position makes him privy to any number of delicate government secrets. Thus Coburn becomes a most desirable prize for several secret-agent organizations, including the CEA and the FBR (we know who these folks are really supposed to be, even though the phony names were crudely dubbed onto the soundtrack after the film was completed). When Coburn becomes expendable, he finds a pair of strong allies in the form of likeable political assassin Godfrey Cambridge and gay Soviet spy Severn Darden. The main plot involves an insidious, unnamed concern that wishes to harness Coburn's talents in order to brainwash the president -- and everyone else in America -- into submission. The President's Analyst is a terrific, on-target satire of virtually every sacred cow of the late 1960s; the satire was so potent, in fact, that when the NBC network broadcast the film in the early 1970s, it was compelled to remove the picture's punchline. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

James Coburn - Dr. Sidney Schaefer
Godfrey Cambridge - Don Masters
Severn Darden - Kropotkin
Joan Delaney - Nan Butler
Pat Harrington, Jr. - Arlington Hewes

This reviewer feels a little like he's died and gone to heaven -- that was his reaction seeing the 2.35:1 letterboxed image on the opening shot (depicting New York City's garment district) of Theodore J. Flicker's The President's Analyst (1967). One of the most subversive movies to come out of a major studio, the comedy has been shown in pan-and-scan (i.e. full-screen) form on channels like American Movie Classics for a decade, but it never made it to laserdisc in any form. And here it is on DVD, anamorphic image intact -- widescreen picture (with 16 x 9 enhancement for widescreen monitors), good sound, and its hues and sharpness bringing back its 1967-vintage imagery with a clarity that usually only exists in one's memory. At the time of its release, The President's Analyst was a little too piercing and subtle (at the same time) to find the audience it should have; most people wanted the clarity and simplicity of the Flint movies that James Coburn had starred in, not the low-keyed, patient, but ultimately savage, political satire of The President's Analyst, with its all-too-serious overtones. The script here may have been filled with laughs (some of them very nasty) at the expense of our culture and government, but what felt uncomfortably real in 1967, amid the Vietnam War and a the condition of living under a government that found itself increasingly under siege and out-of-step (and even more so in the years and decades that followed) was the all-too-real paranoia. Viewed at the time of this DVD release, the film still recalls the same raw nerve, perhaps as a consequence of seeing it in the midst of another unpopular war being fought under false pretenses, with another Texas politician in the White House under dubious circumstances....

Paramount has done a very good job with this disc, though one wishes they'd been more ambitious. If The Criterion Collection had released a DVD of this movie, they'd have gotten director/writer Theodore J. Flicker to do a commentary track, maybe with some help from cinematographer William A. Fraker. But, as to what is here, it's impossible to complain -- the detail is superb right down to the skin textures, and the restored brightness to the color gives the Washington, D.C., and New York-shot location footage (of which there is a lot, including a shot of Coburn in the torch of the Statue of Liberty, which the government would never allow today) a freshness and vibrancy that no prior home-viewing edition has come close to matching. The assault and chase scene on a Greenwich Village street, capturing what McDougal Street looked like in 1967, is worth the price of admission, and the psychedelic segment featuring the band Clear Light and the Barry McGuire segement are...well, astonishing. The 102-minute movie has been given a reasonable 19 chapters, and the soundtrack has been mastered cleanly, if at a slightly low volume, in Dolby Ddigital mono that sounds good over speakers. Alas, there is no trailer included -- one would have liked to have seen how this movie was marketed at the time of its release -- and the only subtitles or audio track present are in English. The disc opens automatically to a very simple two-layer menu, offering access to all chapters and the few options there are. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide