Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We're used to seeing actors endorse political candidates, but not like this: in an interview with that distinguished cultural journal Parade, Daniel Craig sizes up the American candidates for president and decides which of them is best-suited to take his job. After asking Craig about which Hollywood "tough guy" he would most like to emulate (“The obvious choice for me would be Bogart. Not only because of that ease he had with his unique take on masculinity, but also—and this is much more important—because he got to sleep with Lauren Bacall.”), interviewer Kevin Sessums hits him with the big one: “Who do you think would be the better James Bond—Barack Obama or John McCain?” As Sessums reports, "Craig doesn’t hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because—if he’s true to his word—he’d be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond’s boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'”

In other election season movie news, Reuters is reporting that a majority of people who responded to a Moviephone.com poll voted Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One as their favorite movie president, coming in ahead of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. Trying to explain this, Moviefone's Scott Robson says, "It seems everybody is looking for a commander-in-chief who can come in and take command. Our readers voted with their hearts at a time when you have the economy going down the tubes, but in an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass." It will be remembered that presidents Ford and Freeman stood up to Gary Oldman in a Satanic goatee and a big fucking rock from space, respectively. Others who made it onto the top ten include Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!, and Jeff Bridges in The Contender, who, respectively and with varying results, stood up to alien attackers, more alien attackers, and Gary Oldman in an Antonin Scalia haircut. E. G. Marshall in Superman II finished out of the money entirely, proving that if you balance the budget but also kneel before invading Kryptonian supermen, one guess which act is the one that everyone remembers.

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President/David Carradine as President Frankenstein, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

In many ways, Sandy McCallum's "Mr. President" in the sci-fi satire Death Race 2000 was a political leader far ahead of his time. He was a charismatic evangelical in tune with the religious right (he began all his presidential addresses with the line "My children, whom I love"); he remained sequestered in his vacation home even in times of crisis (what is Mr. President's fabled Winter Palace in Beijing but a slightly more grandiose version of the big ranch in Crawford?), and most importantly, he struck home with the American people by isolating and identifying the sole cause of all our national woes, foreign and domestic: the hated French! Still, every great leader's time must eventually pass, and when Mr. President finally lost his life in a freak automotive accident, his successor (likewise ahead of the curve: a popular athlete who parlayed his celebrity status into a career in politics), the wonderfully named President Frankenstein, took over. At first, America was worried — the new president, with his outspoken First Lady and his program of progressive reform, seemed like he might be some sort of bleeding-heart liberal — but our minds were eased when his first official act in office was to run over pesky news media personality Junior Bruce with his car. America loves you, President Frankenstein!

Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans, THE CONTENDER (2000)

President Evans is a supporting character in this dull message movie about the trouble his female vice-presidential nominee (Joan Allen) has in getting approved, but he's also the movie's wild card, a slick charmer who isn't actively opposed to doing the right thing whenever possible but mostly seems interested in winning with a minimum of confrontational hassle. His hobby is torturing the staff of the White House kitchen by testing their ability to serve him anything he asks for at any hour of the day; at one point he's spotted wandering the halls and ignoring the person talking to him while munching his latest snack and muttering, "Shark steak. Fuckin' shark steak sandwich. . ."

Henry Fonda as The President, FAIL-SAFE (1964)

This grim melodrama, in which American bombers nuke Moscow because of a technical error, opened some ten months after Dr. Strangelove, an unusual case of the straight version of a story coming after the parody. Actually, this version is fairly funny if you watch it now in the wrong spirit. The nameless president winds up averting World War III by ordering a nuclear strike on New York City to make it up to the Russians, even though the First Lady happens to be in the Big Apple. The movie also came out the same year as The Best Man, in which Fonda played a presidential candidate too pure in heart to develop the killer instinct needed for the job. Fifteen years later he would play the U.S. president again, this time in the disaster movie Meteor. (And let's not forget that one of his early roles was as Young Abe Lincoln in the John Ford classic.) Maybe the real question posed by Fail-Safe is, if Hollywood is such a bastion of liberal bias, then how come every time Fonda, the movie star known as the embodiment of liberal humanism, got cast as the leader of the free world, half the planet wound up in danger of obliteration?

Franchot Tone as The President, ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

When Otto Preminger's Washington melodrama opened, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther glowered at it through his lorgnette and wrote that the filmmakers' "intense and deliberate projection of a cynical attitude toward the actions of politicians extends right up to the President of the United States, whom they frankly portray in this fiction as a man of peculiar principles. He is made (in a tasteless portrayal of a sick, testy man by Franchot Tone) to be tolerant of cheap conniving and the telling of lies under oath." Translated into English, this means that Tone's character is one of the few movie presidents one can imagine actually running the country, a tough, hard-bitten old son of a bitch who knows how to play the game. Unfortunately, we all have our bad days, and he comes to grief after he makes the mistake of trying to appoint — it's him again! — Henry Fonda as Secretary of State. Tone's president, worn out from political machinations and Fonda's high-minded dithering, ultimately succumbs to a heart attack, leaving the country in the hands of his vice-president, Lew Ayres, who makes Hank Fonda look like Solomon crossed with Sean Connery.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore, INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and Gene Hackman as President Alan Richmond, ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Taken together, these two films, originally released a little more than six months apart, go a long way towards summing up the Clinton presidency as it was filtered through different fantasy lenses in the popular culture of its time. Pullman's president is, like President Bartlett on The West Wing, a fantasy of an improved Bill Clinton, the Clinton that some disappointed observers wanted him to be: a sensitive liberal-minded family man, but with a record of military heroism (in the first Gulf War) and the ability to keep his dick in his pants. When the movie opens, he's struggling to keep his job as the media and his political enemies paint him as spineless and ineffectual, but the extraterrestrial invasion gives him the chance to show what he's made of: he dusts off his flight suit and kicks a little alien butt, albeit only after the destruction of the White House and the death of his First Lady. (She's played by Mary McDonnell, who wound up getting her own TV presidency after robots took their turn trying to wipe out the human race on Battlestar Galactica.) President Richmond represents Clinton the defiler, the rampaging amoral deviant unfit for polite society, let alone high office; the film's director-star, Clint Eastwood, has to take matters into his own hands and bring about justice after he's seen Richmond's Secret Service bodyguards kill a woman who was trying to defend herself from a violent sexual assault at POTUS's hands. The cover-up is handled by the president's evil, female chief of staff (Judy Davis), a Hillary even he couldn't bring himself to marry. Oddly enough, Absolute Power also laid the seeds for a future TV presidency: one of Richmond's murderous goons is played by Dennis Haysbert, who later became the martyred President David Palmer on 24.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Check back tomorrow for Part 3!

The Screengrab : the contender

Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2