THE CANDIDATE

The Candidate

Saturday, September 4th 2004 at Creek Park in San Anselmo

Showtime: 8:00 pm

Sponsored by

SF Connection

Marin Art & Garden Center, Ross/Sites in Sausalito Cunningham, Sonoma County: Corbit's Garage. Oakland, Alameda County: The Paramount Theater was used for Robert Redford's character's campaign headquarters. Webster Street Drive-In. Santa Rosa, Sonoma County: Howarth Park. Schlumberger Gallery.San Jose, Santa Clara County: Eastridge Mall.

Michael Ritchie 1972

The Candidate, which veteran Golden Age of Television director Michael Ritchie made in 1972, was part of a wave of increased awareness of the “packaging” of political candidates. This was an era when the Pocket Books mass market paperback of Joe McGinniss's “The Selling of the President 1968” (about how Richard Nixon was packaged like a product by his campaign manager in order to get elected and reverse the mistakes of the 1960 election against Kennedy) was still popular in the bookstores. At that time, selling candidates like deodorant was a fairly new and shocking concept for the public. Today, every sophisticated voter understands it, and so at first glance, the ideas at the foundation of The Candidate may seem like old hat. But that's like saying Elia Kazan's incredible A Face in the Crowd is a dated film. Not in your dreams - or in your worst nightmares. We may be showing The Candidate because of its Bay Area connections - but it is exactly the right film to see in this election year.

The late great Ritchie's (he died, alas, too young, in 2001) satiric wit was never sharper, or put to better use, than in this film. In his other best work, he focused on beauty pageants (his 1975 film Smile is still the best take on the subject), Little League baseball (The Bad News Bears is better than you remember, and you probably remember it being pretty good), psychotherapy (The Couch Trip), tabloid America at its most peachy-clean (The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom) and even private eye movies (Fletch). But The Candidate is arguably his most important film; his most intelligently perennial. Perhaps because it stars Robert Redford, I think of it in the same heartbeat as that paranoid political triptych, Alan Pakula's All the President's Men and The Parallax View (in which Warren Beatty played the Robert Redford part), and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor. Not that The Candidate is a political thriller, exactly, but it does belong to that group of 1970s films that defines for me the pre- to post-Watergate era.

Redford plays idealistic candidate Bill McKay, reluctantly drawn into a senatorial race against incumbent jerk Crocker Jarmon (played with relish by Don Porter, a veteran actor many of us older folks remember as Gidget's dad on television). Jarmon isn't the only jerk; McKay's dad (Melvin Douglas) is a venerable old-fashioned corrupt political retiree whose support Bill would rather not actively have. Making up McKay's entourage are two great character actors, Allen Garfield and Peter Boyle. Both are terrific to watch. Boyle comes from his knockout performance two years earlier in the very controversial (at the time) film Joe, where he had played a redneck hard hat who buddies up to an upper middle-class suburbanite. In The Candidate, playing a totally different character, he gives us a hint at his tremendous range as an actor. On the horizon is his bravura performance as The Monster in Young Frankenstein, and a few years later, his gem of a characterization as Wizard in Scorcese's Taxi Driver (the latter proving there are no small roles, only great character actors). He's been in over 70 films since (not to mention television).

Ritchie's film is full of cameos; both politicians and news commentators play themselves, creating a sense of realism and a freewheeling documentary style. The result was clearly the predecessor to Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's Tanner '88, a cable television series that followed a candidate (Michael Murphy) on the campaign trail during a real election year, using video verite techniques, featuring cameos by real candidates and commentators, faux political commercials, etc. But Ritchie did it 16 years earlier, and in 35mm. See how many of these cameos you can spot in The Candidate: Senators Alan Cranston, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern, Mayor Sam Yorty, and news commentators Van Amberg, Howard K. Smith, and Mike Wallace. You can't miss “celebrity supporter” Natalie Wood when she shows up at a McKay fundraiser, but you won't see Barry Sullivan (the wonderful film and television actor), who narrates the McKay TV commercials, or Broderick Crawford (a perfect choice) who narrates the Crocker Jarmon commercials. Neither is, of course, ever seen on camera.

The visual documentary style mentioned above borrows both from the cinema verite “camera on the shoulder” technique of the Maysles brothers (Salesman) and Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies, and Basic Training, which had just come out), as well as from the shooting of spot news. Ritchie's cinematographers Victor J. Kemper and John Korty emulated this style to great effect to give a sense of “in the moment” as we follow McKay's campaign behind the scenes.

Speaking of which, while the local locations used in principal photography are our main reason for including this film in our schedule this year, it has another Bay Area connection: John Korty is a local treasure, one of the great documentary and fiction film producers we have here in Marin. His distinguished career spans decades, and scores of projects (and includes not only producing but writing and shooting). Just a few highlights of his career will be enough to give you an idea: Go Ask Alice, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, adaptations of John Updike's story “The Music School” for PBS' The American Short Story, and Lanford Wilson's play The Redwood Curtain for Hallmark Hall of Fame, the documentary Who are the DeBolts?, and a personal favorite of mine, the animated fantasy film Twice Upon a Time. Currently, John runs Take 2, a small cinematheque in Point Reyes Station, dedicated to showing all the best movies. Support it!

Victor J. Kemper, DP on The Candidate, worked on John Cassavettes' indie masterpiece Husbands and the Sidney Lumet/Paddy Chayevsky film The Hospital before teaming with Ritchie, and later went on to shoot other beautiful-looking and visually anarchic films: The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Dog Day Afternoon, Audrey Rose, Magic, …And Justice For All, as well as many others.

The fast-paced style of The Candidate also has to do with the editing, which is actually in contrast to the leisurely editing style of, say, Fred Wiseman. Editing chores fell to Robert Estrin, who went from this project directly to Terry Malick's incredible film Badlands. And Richard Harris, the film's other editor, moved on to Francis Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, and later returned to work with Ritchie on Smile and The Bad News Bears.

Besides Ritchie and the actors, however, highest kudos for The Candidate's success go to screenwriter Jeremy Larner, who, also wrote the novel that inspired Jack Nicholson to direct his first film - Drive, He Said, and would collaborate with Nicholson on that screenplay. Here, though, Larner presents a script that would win both the Oscar for Best Screenplay and the Writer's Guild Award - with good reason. He wrote an important film, composed of memorable moments that transcend their time: McKay being challenged by an angry voter at a urinal, where he has no defenses; a battle of rhetoric between McKay and Jarmon at the scene of a devastating fire (a set piece that shows not only the power of the media, but also how, in certain circumstances, power will always beget power); numerous scenes showing how television can't help but manipulate reality, and how we as audience can't help but be complicit in that process.

And then there's the final scene, considered by many to be one of the most powerful political statements made in a Hollywood film. When the circus is over, and everyone packs up to leave, only one question remains. And it remains to this day, hanging in the air, linking that particular political moment in time with this one. As was so eloquently put in a later, but not unrelated political film, what we need to determine is whether the dog wags the tail or the tail wags the dog: when our elected officials are the ones asking the question The Candidate leaves us with, it's a chilling moment indeed. When we, the electorate ask it, there's the possibility of hope.

-- Kenn Rabin