Hollywood hustings

Hollywood may be liberal, but movies about the US electoral process tend to lampoon both Democrats and Republicans. Donald Clarkeassesses past, present and future election films

SCARY movies come out in late October. Films featuring fat men in red suits emerge in December. Hollywood has, however, always been somewhat cautious about releasing political films in election season. The sodomites, drug addicts and bomb throwers of southern California are clever enough to launch their exercises in indoctrination when the watchdogs of impartiality are at their least attentive.

Commissar Michael Moore, the Leni Riefenstahl of latter-day Communism, unleashed Fahrenheit 9/11a good five months before the 2004 election.

Warren Beatty, that notorious smoked-salmon Trotskyite, squeezed out Bulworthin 1998. Beatty's unpatriotic political comedy, dealing with the supposed need for a return to 1960s radicalism, thus had time to percolate unnoticed through the voters' veins and spur dangerous levels of support for the traitor Gore.

This year, however, Hollyweird has decided to unleash its anti-American propaganda at a crucial hour. On October 17th, just two weeks before the polls open, Oliver Stone dares to release a film about the current president entitled, simply, W. The film's trailer suggests that Stone and Josh Brolin, the film's star, may caricature George Bush as an underqualified, white-knuckle former alcoholic with an unsure grasp of the facts.

Just last week, Swing Vote, a left-wing romp starring Kevin Costner, was sneaked into Irish cinemas without a press screening. This harmless enough film, influenced by the same events in 2000 that inspired the recent TV movie Recount, imagines Costner as the single voter who can decide the result of a presidential election. Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper (both rare Hollywood Republicans, incidentally) play the candidates who are forced to tailor their policies to the whims of one unreliable redneck.

By the time the next president is sworn in, Swing Votewill have been swept away with the bunting and the discarded chads, but the film, for all its insubstantiality, does have value as a representative manifestation of Hollywood's surprising cynical attitude to the electoral process.

Notwithstanding the influence of old-school conservatives such as Howard Hawks and Frank Capra and the industry's tolerance of the Communist witch-hunts, it is probably fair to say that Hollywood has generally leaned to the left. That inclination became more marked during the 1960s, but the folk in the Hollywood Hills were always more likely to vote Democrat.

Yet, when one considers the best films dealing with elections, one discovers that, rather than arguing for liberalism, they tend to wish a pox on all relevant houses.

Those films that do make an effort to sell us a virtuous, electable candidate end up being as drippy, unbelievable and trite as Rob Reiner's The American President.

• Swing Voteis on general release. W.opens on November 7th. Recountis screened on More4 tonight at 9pm

70 years of election movies

MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

Even Frank Capra, poet of the picket fence, turned cynical when addressing US politics. In Mr Smith Goes to Washington(1939), in which Jimmy Stewart becomes a senator as the result of a coin toss, Washington is portrayed as a combination of snake pit and stock exchange. That film does not, it is true, have to do with elections, but peruse a list of great movies on that subject and you will rapidly be overcome by a nausea of cynicism.

HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO

We would, of course, expect Preston Sturges to wield the knife. The blissfully acerbic director made his name with films such as The Great McGintyand The Lady Eve, entertainments marinated in cynicism, and when he came to fleetingly address the electoral process with Hail the Conquering Hero, he once again did so with a curled lip.

Made in 1944, the film found a young man, rejected by the army, returning to a home town that erroneously believes him to be war hero. Before long, and despite his lack of qualifications, he is adopted as a candidate for mayor. John McCain - though a genuine war hero and an experienced senator - may not find Hail the Conquering Heroas hilarious as did contemporary audiences. Sturges' demonstration of how one, largely irrelevant biographical detail can become the most significant weapon in an election campaign remains potent today.

THE LAST HURRAH

Sturges' point was repeated and expanded upon in John Ford's somewhat underrated The Last Hurrahin 1958. Set among the Irish-American wards of a northern city, the film sees Spencer Tracy running as mayor against a younger, more photogenic candidate. He loses. It was only two years later that Richard Nixon, jowly and sweaty, lost a crucial debate - and the election - to a fresher, more telegenic John F Kennedy. This is another film that John McCain, grey and hunched, may wish to have banned from the campaign bus.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

The year before Kennedy was assassinated, Hollywood was already re-imagining US electoral politics as a sideshow in the war between corrupt ideologies. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidatehas a US soldier being brainwashed by communists to assist the election of an idiotic senator. The film's most pungent conceit is to make the senator a version of the communist-baiting Joseph McCarthy. In an era of looking-glass wars, The Manchurian Candidatepointed out that extreme political orthodoxies often end up looking very like one another.

THE BEST MAN

In 1964 Gore Vidal brought his play The Best Manto cinemas and offered another take on the wretched compromises demanded by democracy. Though perhaps the most cynical person mentioned here, Vidal comes closest to offering us a political hero one can root for without feeling like a boob. Directed by Franklin J Schaffner, The Best Manfinds Henry Fonda's basically decent liberal locking horns with a Nixonesque Republican played by Cliff Robertson. Once again, however, the film has a sour message. By doing the right thing, Fonda secures the defeat of both men. No hope here, then.

MEDIUM COOL

If American film-makers were prepared to view the election process with such a jaundiced eye in the relatively united post-war years, what would they do with the political turmoil that began in the 1960s? Less than one might have expected.

Scenes shot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention helped colour Haskell Wexler's great Medium Cool, and hip movies made various swipes at Nixon that year, but Hollywood has been strangely reluctant to dramatise the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Nixon's re-election in 1972.

Perhaps the activities of the buggers, the saboteurs and the black propagandists were already too bizarre to interest satirists.

THE CANDIDATE

The year 1972 did see the release of Michael Ritchie's The Candidate, in which Robert Redford plays an empty smile in a good suit that somehow finds itself running for president. It's an entertaining, sly film, but, in retrospect, it seems to move through a markedly less sinister environment than that inhabited by the real politicians of the era.

At any rate, mainstream treatments of elections in subsequent years have tended to be somewhat less savage than the work of Frankenheimer, Vidal and Sturges.

BOB ROBERTS

One exception might be Tim Robbins's splenetic Bob Roberts(1992), The film studies the tale of a right-wing folk singer as he runs for president against an older liberal incumbent, played by our old chum Gore Vidal.

Robbins wrote some excellent songs and did a good job of conveying the brimstone in his character's veins, but the film is far too simplistically partisan and, most damagingly, it forgets that the politicians to watch out for are those that seem the least threatening.

ELECTION

The best summation of all Hollywood's suspicions of democracy came in the form of a movie about the campaign for president of a student body in a Nebraskan high school. Released in 1999, Alexander Payne's Electionfinds a self-righteous, manipulative student (Reese Witherspoon) infuriating Matthew Broderick's teacher and causing him to persuade a dumb but nice jock to stand against her in the election.

All the criticisms of democracy made in the films mentioned above come together in the struggle between Witherspoon's Tracy Flick (a Nixon in her fury, but a Clinton in her enthusiasm) and Chris Klein's Paul Metzler (a George W Bush in his vacuity, but a John Kerry in his ineffectualness).

Mind you, entertaining as Electionwas, it didn't prepare the public for the absurdity of the 2000 election.

Who will play Sarah Palin?

We hope that some bright director will get his claws into this year's extraordinary election. Some of the more surreal turns suggest that David Lynchmight be the man for the job, but I fancy the Coen Brotherswould manage the right balance between absurdity and import. They would certainly have great fun encouraging Frances McDormandto lose defiantly as Hillary Clinton in a brief prologue.

Will Smithhas enough charisma for Barack Obama and, like that politician, he knows that presentation matters at least as much as substance.

Any number of craggy character actors could make something interesting of John McCain, but the part surely cries out for the bubbling eccentricity of Michael Gambon.

What of Sarah Palin? Tina Feyhas recently turned the Alaskan moose annihilator into an unsettlingly squeaky mannequin on Saturday Night Live, but there is, surely, something more ominous lurking behind that confident, creationist grin. I think we may need to call upon the digital boffins at Industrial Light and Magicto make sense of her.

Oh, and we haven't mention Joe Biden, you say. Well, who has?