The Candidate

Though I have seen this film many times -- sat through it twice in a row when it first came out -- I haven’t watched in a while, and couldn’t resist when I saw the title while scrolling the TiVo listing of upcoming movies. Robert Redford and Michael Ritchie’s follow up to Downhill Racer is certainly one of the arguments for the early ’70s as the last golden age of Hollywood. It remains fresh and startlingly prescient about the unholy synergy of politics and media. Joe McGinniss had already written The Selling of the President but The War Room was twenty years off. Writer Jeremy Larner had been with RFK in ’68 so he knew his way around the scene. For Redford as the telegenic candidate for senator from California, there is a built-in meta-level about the leveraging of physical appeal into a political role. Melvyn Douglas is perfectly cast in the supporting role of the candidate’s former-governor father. Peter Boyle and Allan Garfield set the mold for the Carvilles and Aileses to come. This would be fun to pair in a double feature with Warren Beatty’s Bulworth. (1972, HBO/T, r.) *9*

Michael Ritchie makes for an argument against the auteur theory. He went on to complete a sort of trilogy on the American scene with Smile, a broad but deep satire on teenage beauty pageants. Then he had a big hit with Bad News Bears (which is not among my favorite baseball films) and never made another lasting film in three decades of regular work. There may be personal reasons for his decline from a super start, but perhaps it indicates that the tenor of the times, the liveliness and risktaking of the environment in which movies are produced, can be as much a factor in their worth as the director’s sensibility and skill. You could credit Redford as producer too, but he wasn’t involved in Smile.