FANTASIA OBSCURA: Would You Write In Bob Newhart for President on Tuesday?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, politics is easy; comedy, however, is really hard…
First Family (1980)
(Dist.: Warner Brothers; Dir.: Buck Henry)
They say laughter can be a good tonic when things go wrong, though in the post-Watergate years, it seemed laughing at the government and the Oval Office was damned near difficult to pull off. For whatever reason, Hollywood films left observation to television comics on Saturday Night Live and shied away from looking at the Presidency between Nixon’s resignation and Reagan’s inauguration; a casual search often ends up resulting in only these two genre-ensconced titles, Americathon and this film.
This film finds President Manfred Link (Bob Newhart) presiding over an administration in crisis. His election four years ago was won against candidates for President and Vice President who both died in car crashes yet still got 30 million votes even though they were dead. And he’s looking at a tough re-election campaign with a special advisor who doesn’t offer great advice, Feebleman (Fred Willard), and a press secretary, Bunthorne (Richard Benjamin), who’s not that great with the press, having to manage the message while keeping the press distracted from the alcoholic tendencies of the First Lady, Constance (Madeline Kahn), and the desperate-to-be-deflowered 28-year-old Presidential daughter Gloria (Gilda Radner).
In the midst of this, the American Ambassador to the UN, Spender (Harvey Korman), is desperate to close a deal during an upcoming major yet unspecified vote and needs to curry the favor of the fictional African country of Upper Gorm. This leads to the Ambassador arranging a last-minute invitation for Ambassador Longo (Julius Harris) to a State Dinner at the White House, which gets immediately followed up by a state visit by Link and his family to Upper Gorn to meet her leader, President Kalunda (John Hancock).
Kalunda has what Swift would call a “semi-modest proposal” for Link: in exchange for 1,500 white Americans, who would be moved to Upper Gorm so that the country can have an instant lower class to abuse, thus making them a great power, America would get some truly fantastic fertilizer, stuff that makes celery grow as tall as trees and carrots the size of a large canoe. However, once the treaty is entered into, at that point things start to get weird and off-track, and not in a good way.
The fact that the Links are closet bigots and are having problems having to deal with Africans might have better resonated back when memories of Nixon’s playing races against each other were fresh. Hearing jokes about the lack of African-Americans coming to the White House at the end of the second Obama administration, however, is just painful now, and the whole premise of a narrow-minded man as President needing to think beyond his next election has been done far better elsewhere during and since that time.
It’s not for lack of trying, considering the talent involved. Some of the brilliance Henry has demonstrated in writing the likes of Get Smart and What’s Up, Doc? shows up in a few gags here and there, such as President Link’s pre-recorded messages to be played in the event of a nuclear attack:
The cast is certainly an A list roster of talent, with Newhart, Radner, Willard, and Korman having done some strong comedy-TV work, with Kahn and Benjamin noted for their recent movie roles. Somehow, it doesn’t gel, even with Henry’s script (and a brief appearance he makes as a fly-by-night pastor asked to give a convocation), which leads people to conclude it was Henry’s direction that could have allowed it all to flutter away. The fact that this was the second feature he directed, as well as the last, gives credence to the theory.
Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is with the American body politic. When we deal with a political crisis by making fun of it, exaggerating the worst elements in the hope that in so doing, we think we can look at the results and say, “Hey, it can’t get any worse, right?”
And then it does, and the jokes lose something as we suffer the next round…
NEXT TIME: Thankfully, Murphy’s Law never occurred with our nuclear weapons, at least in real life; here, however…
