Tonight on TCM, The Best Man airs, the 1964 political drama that plays like a suspense thriller. It’s one of the best political movies ever made and recalls a time when political conventions actually made a difference. In the very same year, Henry Fonda, star of The Best Man, also starred in another politically charged thriller, Fail Safe. Movies like that don’t get made much anymore, and not just because impactful political conventions and nuclear brinksmanship with the Soviet Union don’t exist anymore. They don’t get made because the audience may not be there these days. Maybe they never were.
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The political drama at its finest usually relies heavily on suspense. The Best Man has it in spades. The bulk of the movie takes place at the convention to decide the party’s nominee with William Russell (Henry Fonda) as the presumptive choice, though the president (Lee Tracy) is unsure whether he should endorse Russell or his rival, Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson). As the writer of the play and movie, Gore Vidal, himself noted, Russell was based primarily on Adlai Stevenson, Cantwell on Nixon, and the president on Harry Truman. Cantwell’s ruthless brother, played by Gene Raymond, was based on Bobby Kennedy. Each of the nominees jockeys for position with the president who likes Russell better but admires Cantwell’s decisiveness more. Cantwell, however, sure that the president will endorse Russell, plays his cards to early in an attempt to smear Russell’s image in the president’s mind and the president ends up endorsing neither. That sets the stage for both sides to make decisions on what to use on the other, when to use it, and when to pull it back, if ever. It’s a great film and everything relies on the backroom deals and accusations and bickering that the convention audience never gets to see while the movie audience sees it all. It didn’t do very well at the box office, not even cracking the top 25 for that year. It’s not a movie that got written up in film books and mentioned so rarely by anyone in the seventies and eighties world of movie criticism that when I saw it for the first time in the late eighties, it was a revelation. I never knew such a great politically charged film even existed. Sadly, not many exist period.
When people talk about great political movies, titles like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington inevitably come up and it’s certainly a good one, though not a particular favorite. I never cared much for Frank Capra’s brand of sentimental movie making and, indeed, he was one of the original directors tapped for the film version of The Best Man. His ideas on how to change up the script, however, showed just how unqualified he was to do the job. Instead of (SPOILER ALERT) having both Russell and Cantwell back out and leave the nomination up for grabs by a presumably uncorrupted candidate, Capra’s idea was to have Russell dress up as Abe Lincoln, give a rousing speech to the convention, and become the people’s nominee. Oh, dear Lord. Gore Vidal was, to say the least, dumbstruck. Of course, Vidal, author of the original work, stood his ground and eventually got a director he liked, Franklin Schaffner, who would go on to direct Planet of the Apes and win an Oscar for directing Patton.
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Other political dramas that come to mind range from All the President’s Men to Primary Colors to The Contender. The first one on that list is clearly the best but focuses on the reporters doing their work rather than the politicians doing theirs. That would be handled in the tv movie, The Final Days, starring Lane Smith as Nixon. Nixon himself is responsible for a good deal of political dramas and comedies, from Secret Honor to Dick. And, of course, Anthony Hopkins was nominated for an Oscar for playing Nixon in Oliver Stone’s film of the same name. Stone made another not very good presidential movie, W, with Josh Brolin doing his best impersonation of the 43rd president. But honestly, from the lackluster Wilson with Alexander Knox to the equally lackluster The Reagans, movies about actual presidents have never done much for me, or anyone quite possibly. I don’t care much for Sunrise at Campobello either. No, the best political dramas always deal with the inner workings of deal making and closed door negotiations. Movies like The Best Man mentioned at the top of the piece or Advise and Consent, made just two years earlier.
Advise and Consent is about the confirmation process for the president’s nominee for Secretary of State. And that’s exactly what makes it so watchable! It’s not about the life of a president, or the particulars of a scandal that happened while the president was in office. No, it’s about the process, just like The Best Man and that’s what so many political dramas don’t do. Too many political dramas seem to think of it as either a thriller (The Contender) or a biography (all the rest). A great political drama is about the process, the wheeling and dealing we don’t see out in the open. And that’s where, for all its dripping sentiment, I would still take Mr. Smith Goes to Washington over any of those dull presidential biopics.
The early sixties seemed to be a golden age for the kind of political movie that doesn’t get made anymore, or ever really. From The Best Man to Advise and Consent, to thrillers like Seven Days in May and Fail Safe, to the brilliant satirical comedy Dr. Strangelove, it was a bounty for those of us who wouldn’t mind seeing more movies like that more of the time. I don’t know if that will ever happen. Nowadays, with news online and off covering every detail of what is happening on Capitol Hill around the clock, it may be difficult to get an audience to pay to see fictional characters doing the same thing. Maybe that’s why the fictional political world of House of Cards deals more with murder and other high crimes rather than examining the process of democracy. Audiences think they see the process on the news every day so fiction must give them something juicier. What they don’t know is, and as The Best Man and Advise and Consent prove, the process, when dramatized well, is as exhilarating as anything you will ever see in an action or adventure movie. But the audience isn’t casting their votes for it and in politics, when you don’t get the votes, you don’t get the job.