In Election Movies, Playing By A Rule of Three
CorrectionAn earlier version of this story misidentified the director of the film "All the President's Men." The passage has been corrected.
Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate — a contender for Best Election Film, according to two prominently placed sources within NPR
Watch List: The Candidates
NPR asked the presumptive nominees of the two major parties to name their favorite political flicks. Their answers:
Barack Obama (D)
- The Candidate
John McCain (R)
- The American President
Dustin Hoffman, left, and Robert Redford pursued the Watergate plumbers — and the story of the century — in All the President's Men.
Watch List: The NPR Six
Members of NPR's political team also submitted their favorites:
Correspondent Peter Overby
- All the President's Men — My beat requires that I list this one first, although the political side is overshadowed by the journalistic thrill of the hunt.
- A Flash of Green — Indie film with Ed Harris, Blair Brown and Richard Jordan. Developer battles local environmentalists, with (initially) aimless reporter caught in the middle. Filmmakers usually go for the flash-bang in politics; writer-director Victor Nunez (working off a John D. MacDonald novel) is more subtle and, from my experience, gets closer to reality.
Political Editor Ken Rudin
- The Manchurian Candidate — Tension, drama, horrific and shocking events, great Cold War drama, truly the feel of a convention — but also instances of bad acting, ridiculous fight scenes.
- Advise and Consent — Best example of drama behind a Senate confirmation hearing; personal trauma and angst.
- The Lives of Others — Not American politics, but a brilliant look at East Germany before and after the fall of communism.
- Duck Soup — Hail Fredonia!
- The American President — Lobbying and romance, something you usually don't find anywhere in the same sentence, unless you're Peter Overby.
Reporter Audie Cornish
- Election — Who hasn't met a campaign/legislative staffer with a (Tracy) Flick-ian sense of ambition? The politics of the yearbook committee are very close to that of a paper/newsroom — minus the underage sex, of course. And the "third party" candidate is the most entertaining since Perot's charts.
Correspondent Robert Smith
- Election — Popularity, ego, image, pettiness and jealousy — nothing much has changed since high school. And am I the only one who saw a little Tracy Flick in Hillary Clinton?
Vox Politics Blogger Evie Stone
- Dr. Strangelove — "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here ... this is the War Room!"
Correspondent Ina Jaffe
- The Great McGinty — A comedy by Preston Sturges. A bum wanders into the headquarters/nightclub of a big-city ward boss. It's Election Day and they pay him to vote. He votes a lot, all over town, and makes a lot of money. He becomes the go-to guy for the machine, and eventually they run him for governor, thinking they can control him. He ultimately defies the machine and wins the respect of the woman he loves. This movie makes me totally nostalgic for my home town of Chicago — except the part at the end where he defies the machine.
Correspondent Scott Horsley
- City Hall — With Al Pacino and John Cusack — especially the funeral scene. And I guess it's cheating, but what about the two-hour finale of The West Wing?
Perhaps unwisely taking my cue from King Lear, who proposed dividing his domain into three parts — one of the more boneheaded political moves in world literature — let me propose a three-way divide of Hollywood, as a way of understanding how its myth makers deal with the politics of election movies.
Tinseltown long ago recognized the drama inherent in elections: sharp battle lines being drawn, a rising arc to tension, a denouement with clear winners and losers.
And filmmakers were also quick to understand the cinematic benefits of concentrating not on speeches and issues but on political skullduggery — behind-the-scenes trickery, attempts to massage messages, desperate ploys to rig election returns.
The result is that while movies with a generically political bent come in all shapes and styles, election movies are almost always about process — specifically, about efforts to manipulate either (a) the media, and thereby the public, (b) the candidate or (c) the process itself. A few notable examples:
Manipulating The Media
Manipulating The Candidate
Manipulating The Process
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