TWO GREAT POLITICAL MOVIES

As it's been another tumultuous week of political corruption and in-fighting in both Britain and America I figured it would be worth shouting out two of my favorite political movies of all time.  

What both Mike Nichols's "Primary Colors" and Preston Sturges's "The Great McGinty" have in common is that they both weaponise humour as a tool to disarm the audiences into understanding deeper truths about politics in the stories told on screen.

After all, it's not just in movies that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down but in politics, too.

PRIMARY COLORS (1998)

This 1998 film by Mike Nichols is criminally underrated in my opinion, especially when compared to less subtle and weaker political movies of recent years such as  "Vice" (2008) and "W." (2008). The screenplay for Nichols's movie is like all the best episodes of The West Wing combined yet doused with paraffin and ready to go up in flames at any minute. No surprise then that the genius writer/director Elaine May was a co-writer on 'Primary Colors' helping adapt Joe Klein's original book of the same name along with the original author. It's quite brilliant yet disturbing how the film seduces you, just like the American public, into falling in love with Jack Stanton (clearly Bill Clinton) and yet slowly sticks a knife into your heart, twisting it deeper and deeper as the movie switches pitch halfway through its running time to move expertly from comedy to tragedy.

At the heart of the film's premise is the idea of how a political candidate can fight a clean campaign with any sense of morals or integrity left intact at the end of it, especially in this instance where Jack Stanton has a litany of allegations and charges against him that threaten to thwart his political ambition to become President of the United States of America.

John Travolta gives one of his most multi-dimensional performances as Jack Stanton demonstrating what appears to be authentic, home-spun wisdom in his dealings with the public while privately being led more by his penis than his brain.

Both Billy Bob Thornton, and especially Kathy Bates, turn in career-best performances in this movie as two contrasting media consultants for Stanton's presidential campaign which is constantly in threat of falling apart.

If there is any standard of actual truth in the film then it is upheld in Kathy Bates's portrayal of Libby Holden who calls herself "the dustbuster" and challenges both Jack Stanton and his wife Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson doing her best Hilary Clinton impression) to be as transparent about their past as they can with her so she is prepared to defend any incoming attacks from the media and their political opponents.

But Libby will ultimately have her heart broken by the double standards of the Stantons and pay the highest personal price for her attachment to their campaign whereas Henry Burton, the young political consultant played by Adrian Lester, manages to navigate enough world-weary pragmatism to stay the course all the way to the White House with Jack and Susan.

Having watched the Clintons' many corruption scandals play out over the past three decades the film now seems both prescient of this time and of all time. For anyone over the age of ten knows that politics and corruption were ever thus entwined and if they don't? Well then, they're probably politicians. ^^

THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940)

“This is the story of two men who met in a banana republic. One of them was honest all his life except one crazy minute. The other was dishonest all his life except one crazy minute. They both had to get out of the country.”

Orson Welles cited Preston Sturge's 'The Great McGinty' (1940) as a major influence in his preparation to make 'Citizen Kane' (1941) and although Sturges's debut feature is a far less lofty and grandiose movie than 'Kane' it shares a similar brazen swagger and confidence in dealing with major themes of politics, corruption, and hubris in America.

The film begins when the Depression-era down-and-out McGinty makes his first movie into the shady world of American politics, exploiting a votes-for-money scam under various different names in order to help Mayor Wilfred Tillinghast win his campaign. Impressed that McGinty managed to vote 37 separate times in the same city on the same night, the entrepreneurial hobo is given a job by the machine that organised the scam voting as an enforcer collecting payments from various businesses around the city.

From enforcer to alderman to the mayoral candidate standing (ironically enough) against the now scandal-ridden Tillinghast, McGinty unwittingly becomes the face and puppet for the machine. However, when he gets married to his secretary (mostly for the optics) and becomes a stepfather to his wife's children from another marriage McGinty finds himself conflicted between trying to do the right thing for the people and being pressurized by the shady folk who helped get him elected in the first place.

A rags to riches to rags story, 'McGinty' is effortlessly due to the economy in which it depicts the rise and fall of the down-to-earth protagonist of the film's title and shows the perils of pursuing noble values when your rise to power has been built on lies.

It makes a perfect double bill with 'Primary Colors' as in both films the central characters share similar folksy charm, guile, and human fallibility in equal measure though McGinty is overall more decent than Stanton if for no other reason than he knows truly what it is to suffer at the deepest level along with the common man and woman.

If only a few more of our politicians could say that, eh?