THE MOVIE EDGAR J HOOVER KILLED

The President's Analyst is an American satirical comedy film written and directed by Ted Flicker, starring James Coburn, with cinematography by William A. Fraker, and a musical score by Lalo Schifrin. The film has elements of political satire and science fiction, including themes concerning modern ethics and privacy, specifically regarding the intrusion of the telecommunications monopoly, working with the US Government, into the private lives of the country's citizens. The film was released theatrically on December 21, 1967. Although initially not a commercial success, the film was reviewed favorably, eventually achieving cult film recognition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst

Psychiatrist Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is chosen by the US Government to act as the President’s top-secret personal psychoanalyst, from a referral by Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge), a Central Enquiries Agency (CEA) assassin who vetted Schaefer while undergoing his own psychoanalysis. The decision to choose Schaefer is against the advice of Henry Lux (Walter Burke), the under-five-foot-six-inch director of the all-male Federal Bureau of Regulation (FBR). ("Lux", like "Hoover", was once a famous make of vacuum cleaner.) Schaefer is given a home in affluent Georgetown, and assigned a comfortable office connected to the White House by a secret tunnel. From this location he is to be on-call at all hours, to fit the President's hectic schedule.

However, the President's Analyst has a unique problem: there is no one he himself can talk to about the President's ultra-top-secret and personal problems. As he steadily becomes overwhelmed by stress, Schaefer begins to feel that he is being watched everywhere until he becomes clinically paranoid; he even suspects his sweet girlfriend Nan (Joan Delaney) of spying on him as an agent of the CEA. All of Schaefer's paranoid suspicions eventually turn out to be true. Still worse, Schaefer has a habit of talking in his sleep.[3]

Schaefer goes on the run with the help of a "typical" American family who defend him against foreign agents attempting to kidnap him off the street. He escapes with the help of a hippie tribe, led by the "Old Wrangler" (Barry McGuire), as spies from many nations attempt to kidnap him for the secret information the President has confided to him. Meanwhile, agents from the FBR seek him out on orders to '"liquidate" him as a national security risk. Eventually, Schaefer is found and kidnapped by Canadian Secret Service agents masquerading as a British pop group. Schaefer is rescued from the Canadians and an FBR assassin by Kropotkin (Severn Darden), a Russian KGB agent who intends to spirit him away to the Soviet Union. Kropotkin has second thoughts about his plan, following a psychoanalysis session with the doctor during which Kropotkin begins to come to terms with his unrealized hatred of his KGB-chief father. Now feeling he needs the good doctor's help to continue his self-analysis, he instead returns him to US soil.

Kropotkin arranges a pickup with his trusted CEA colleague Don Masters, but Schaefer is kidnapped again, this time by TPC (The Phone Company), a far more insidious organization than the FBR or KGB, which had been secretly observing him. Taken to TPC headquarters in New Jersey, he is introduced to its leader (Pat Harrington, Jr.), who wants Schaefer's help in carrying out their plan for world domination. As the TPC leader makes his presentation, a camera closeup reveals electronic cables connected to one of his feet, revealing that he is actually an animatronic robot.

TPC has developed a "modern electronic miracle", the Cerebrum Communicator (CC), a microelectronic device that can communicate wirelessly with any other CC in the world. Once implanted in the brain, the user need only think of the phone number of the person they wish to reach, and they are instantly connected, thus eliminating the need for The Phone Company's massive and expensive-to-maintain wired infrastructure. For this to work, every human being will be assigned a number instead of a name, and have the CC prenatally implanted. Schaefer is "requested" to assist the TPC scheme by blackmailing the President into pushing through the required legislation.

Masters and Kropotkin use their superspy abilities to come to Schaefer's rescue. They hand Schaefer an M16 rifle that Schaefer gleefully uses on The Phone Company's security staff. The trio emerge victorious from the ensuing bloodbath, but months later, as Schaefer and his spy friends are enjoying a Christmas reunion, animatronic executives from TPC are seen look on approvingly at a secret monitor, while "Joy to the World" plays in the background.
Cast[edit]

James Coburn as Dr. Sidney Schaefer
Godfrey Cambridge as Don Masters
Severn Darden as V. I. Kydor Kropotkin
Joan Delaney as Nan Butler
Pat Harrington, Jr. as Arlington Hewes
Barry McGuire as Old Wrangler
Jill Banner as Snow White
Eduard Franz as Ethan Allan Cocket
Walter Burke as Henry Lux
Will Geer as Dr. Lee Evan
William Daniels as Wynn Quantrill
Joan Darling as Jeff Quantrill
Sheldon Collins as Bing Quantrill
Arte Johnson as Sullivan
Martin Horsey as 1st Puddlian


FILM
Its Prophetic Own: The President’s Analyst
Published 12 years ago June 6, 2008 By Vadim Rizov


Forty-one years down the line, and I think The President’s Analyst has aged slightly better than The Manchurian Candidate. John Frankenheimer’s classic of prototypical American paranoia anticipated (or seemed to anticipate) the Kennedy assassination freakily enough to necessitate its withdrawal immediately afterwards, but The President’s Analyst never bothered anyone besides Hoover’s F.B.I., who showed up knocking at Robert Evans’ office to demand cessation of production, then bugged his phones in revenge when he didn’t. To most, it didn’t seem like anything more than amiable, non-threatening satire. Big mistake: as anti-corporate a film as Gremlins (the alleged Christmas family comedy which ended in the trashing of a department store under red and green flashing lights), The President’s Analyst evaded attention by tackling a target (corporate greed) way before it was fashionable. What might have seemed like a cop-out in the anti-LBJ/Vietnam years now seems dead-on.

There’s a good bit of tedious spadework required to get there: the first half-hour of The President’s Analyst is as lame as a contemporary SNL sketch, extending one joke too far. Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is the last word in au courant psychiatry, c. 1967, banging a gong between sessions to clear his mind, demonstrating his up-to-dateness by being comfortable with every last sculpture in the Whitney. (Coburn being Coburn, he’s not entirely on-board: he wipes his eyes in discreet disgust when his patients aren’t looking.) Chosen as the President’s personal shrink (writer/director Theodore J. Flicker wisely avoids showing his fictional chief—a clue as to which way the misdirection is headed), Coburn loses it bit by bit: first from the flashing red lights that go off at any time and place to announce the president’s in need of him, then when he starts noticing all the spies around him. Like the old joke goes, he isn’t paranoid: everyone really is out to get him.

The first half-hour dabbles in mild paranoia and oh-those-crazy-agencies jokes: the “FBR” and “CEA,” respectively. (The stand-out is a serious monologue, delivered directly to the camera, from CEA agent Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) on “the day I learned about niggers”—delivered straight to the camera, beating Medium Cool to the punch by two years.) Things take a sudden turn for excellence when Coburn makes a run for it—first hiding out with a couple of proud New Jersey suburbanites (William Daniels and Joan Darling) who proudly announce themselves as good liberals: “We’re for civil rights. We’ve done weekend picketing.” (So much for the same year’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner changing everything.) Then it’s off with a hippie band—all the while being pursued by seemingly every Cold War pawn in the book, including the competing American agencies.

This is where the twist comes: this is a movie in which every government agency is ultimately ineffectual, and everyone seems to know it besides the agency bosses. The Soviet agent, one Kropotkin (Severn Darden), is on BFF terms with Masters, and the two effectively team up to save Coburn. Ideology? Forget about it, shrugs Kropotkin: “Every day your country moves closer to socialism and mine moves closer to capitalism.” It hasn’t quite worked out that way, at least the former part, but it’s as appropriately cynical a contemporary response as any. Coburn manages to turn the tables on his would-be Soviet captor through rote psychoanalysis (“All my life I’ve been miserably unhappy,” Kropotkin marvels, “but I always thought it was my Russian soul”); counter-culture and psychedelia will save the world. All forces bond together, finally, against the ultimate enemy: The Phone Company.

It would, perhaps, be irresponsible to suggest that corporate greed is responsible for 100% of the ills of daily life. But it’s tempting: walking out of a screening of Michael Clayton, I heard one man tell his viewing companion, “Things like that happen every day and we don’t even know about it.” I doubt there’s as many contract killers in Westchester County as either he or Tony Gilroy thinks—but it’s tempting, and who knows. The finale of The President’s Analyst puts all the blame there: it suggests, quite literally, that America is run by a bunch of soulless corporate robots. And I can’t say I disagree. Forty-one years late, The President’s Analyst has come into its prophetic own.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Reeler, Nerve, and, oddly enough, Salt Lake City Weekly.
https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/its-prophetic-own-the-presidents-analyst/


Murder of a Movie-How J. Edgar Hoover Killed "The President's Analyst" 

Bayside Productions Trailer for our new documentary about comedy director Ted Flicker.

A in-depth behind the scenes documentary about all the problems director Ted Flicker ran into making his 60's satire, 'The President's Analyst' The film, Ted and the studio got into trouble with the FBI over how bureau personnel were portrayed-especially J. Edgar Hoover. And after Flicker defied the studio execs and Hoover he got into big trouble and was blacklisted for a while. He switched to TV and created 'The 'Barney Miller Show', got rich and left LA for Santa Fe where he created the third act of his creative career. James Coburn stars. David Ewing director /editor.

One of most charming and clever political satires of the '60s almost didn't make it to the screen intact. Director Theodore J. Flicker's background in improv comedy provides cohesion to a wild scenario that pissed off everybody from the CIA to the FBI. James Coburn spoofs his Our Man Flint image as a paranoid psychiatrist who ends up battling Our Real Enemy - The Phone Company. http://www.trailersfromhell.com


THIS TRAILER IS THE LINK TO THE FULL LENGTH MOVIE
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.



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