The Candidate (1972)

I don't know, maybe we can use a line or two out of context.

Downhill Racer might have been a personal triumph for Robert Redford, but it was far from a commercial hit and it appeared that Redford’s post-Sundance shine was beginning to fade. Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) or Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970) also failed to make much of a mark, and the Pollack-directed snowy sorta-kinda-Western Jeremiah Johnson had suffered from weather delays and a complete lack of interest from Warner Bros., who had shelved the movie in late 1971 and only decided to release it in December 1972 after a warm reception at Cannes. Meanwhile, Redford’s relationship with producer Richard Gregson was being tested by Gregson’s ambitions for their production company Wildwood. Gregson wanted to capitalise on Redford’s stardom; Redford wanted to make the movies he wanted to make. Ultimately Redford would buy out Gregson “with $25,000 I didn’t have” and the two would remain friends, if not business partners.¹

And what kind of movies did Redford want to make? Well, basically, something that spoke to him, something that would obsess him enough to risk a couple of years of his life. The bee then buzzing in his bonnet was the American political landscape, in particular everyone’s favourite used car salesman, Richard Nixon. Nixon had recently refused to debate the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, apparently because there was a third candidate (George Wallace), which struck Redford as “incomprehensible arrogance in the face of a country in such turmoil.” He commissioned Pete Hamill (most recently mentioned here as the screenwriter of the godawful Badge 373) to write a script about “character, national politics, and the vested interest” while he went on a research binge, using his star power to get in with political columnists and hang around campaign offices. What he learned was gold. There were allies within the system: “While Nixon was over in China working his realpolitik, these guys slid underneath and were the brains behind the National Environmental Policy Act, the Energy Production and Recovery Act, everything that matters in calling a country a country.” This, he believed, was a story worth telling, but Hamill wasn’t the man for it.

Enter Jeremy Larner, the author of Drive, He Said (1964) and principal speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, an experience he later turned into a book (Nobody Knows), which caught Redford’s eye. Here was someone with intimate knowledge of political campaigns, as well as writing chops. Much to Larner’s surprise, he got the gig. The script originated from a series of index cards detailing key moments in the campaign, which Larner, Redford, and Michael Ritchie then arranged into a loose narrative. Larner was then tasked with filling in the blanks and the characters. While Redford went off to do The Hot Rock (1972), Larner beavered away on the screenplay.

The Candidate, like Downhill Racer before it, is fundamentally a story of failure, or at least Pyrrhic victory. California Republican Senator Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) has ruled the roost for three terms with little to no real competition. The race appears unwinnable, so political consultant Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) persuades community lawyer Bill McKay (Redford) to run with the promise that he can say whatever he likes. Liberal Bill manages to elbow his way past his Democrat competition to the nomination, but the election campaign requires a modicum of moderation – a dilution of one’s values, so to speak – and McKay finds himself struggling to put his message across as he contends with the manipulations of his own team, the inherent disingenuity of the campaign process, and the machinations of the wily old-school Jarmon. Thanks to an endorsement from his governor father (Melvyn Douglas²) and the unions, McKay pulls victory from the jaws of defeat, but is left shellshocked, asking Lucas, “Marvin, what do we do now?”

The question is never answered, but the audience likely comes to its own conclusion: what happens now is death by a thousand compromises, with only the potential for minor wins as a cog in the political machine. McKay may hold true to whatever values he has, but the country and the Democratic party aren’t interested in him acting on them: all they want is a winner. And here’s where The Candidate subverts expectations: sure, we expect McKay to win in the face of insurmountable odds – this is still a Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford, after all – but we don’t necessarily expect that victory to be entirely hollow. We also don’t expect to have our traditional protagonist split into two characters. While McKay is literally the face of the movie and undergoes a meaningful change, the real protagonist is arguably Peter Boyle’s Lucas. Lucas is the one we first meet, the one who gets the story going, and it’s largely his influence and actions that progress the plot. McKay may think he’s in charge, but Lucas is the one pulling the strings for one purpose only: to win the election. As Ritchie put it: “I think the point of view is the political shark. It’s not Redford, because he doesn’t see what’s coming.”

In this respect, that ending is a happy one: Lucas does a great job, doesn’t compromise too much, and asks for little in return apart from an expense account, a thousand dollars a week, and the satisfaction of a job well done. He’s also in a position of power hitherto denied him with the previous candidates; at the end of the movie, McKay turns to him for advice, apparently adrift in his own victory. And there’s the feeling that while McKay’s career may be dogged with compromise, he will at least have one, just as long as he listens to his most trusted adviser. Peter Boyle isn’t the most endearing of actors – he had a tendency to play proletarian blowhards like the title character in Joe (1970) or knuckleheaded grifters like Barry Fenaka in Slither (1973) – and his Marvin Lucas is pretty inscrutable, but Boyle’s presence is a solid contrast to Redford’s sometimes unravelling McKay, a man so immune to the cynicism of others that he can reply to the grumpy assertion that “politics is bullshit” with an insouciant “I was wondering what it was.”

And this is where The Candidate really shines. It’s rare for a political satire to be bipartisan without losing its bite; it’s even rarer that such a satire is funny. Larner’s script wisely positions Crocker Jarmon (one of the great names) as a highly competent incumbent, as capable of patrician soundbites as he is getting the drop on McKay – notably in the wildfire scene, where Jarmon helicopters in to steal McKay’s thunder. It’s easy to imagine an electorate favouring Jarmon as a safe pair of hands as well as deriding him as a stuffy old career politician. And McKay is never portrayed as anything other than a decent, intelligent idealist who’s in way over his head. He isn’t some paradigm-shifting political thinker; he’s just some dude with good, liberal notions and little idea how to translate them into action. And Redford is perfect in this kind of role. Just as Warren Beatty always excelled at being the best looking, dumbest guy in the room, Redford’s best performances have a level of ambiguity about them that make us think there’s a brain behind that pretty face of his. As George Roy Hill later remarked, “there’s a lack of resolution that makes Redford special.” He’s not quite a blank slate, but he’s blank enough – distanced enough – to make an audience lean in. This can be a problem: ambiguity can result in projection. In the political sphere, Ethel Kennedy (Robert Kennedy’s widow) remarked to Redford that she wasn’t a fan of the movie because she believed politics was “the highest calling” (and clearly thought the film disparaged that) while Dan Quayle infamously believed that it was a campaign manual, prompting Larner to write an op-ed reminding him that it wasn’t a “how-to, it’s a watch-out!”³

As for the chuckles, the movie has plenty. What could easily have been a dry cautionary tale is spiced with the kind of offhand quotable dialogue that makes The Candidate prime rewatch material:⁴ a glum speechwriter responds to a bad reaction to one of his lines with a comically morose “Well, I can kill myself, I suppose …” and Allen Garfield’s political ad man Howard Klein is a bristling font of one-liners when he’s not weirdly hitting a bag of lollipops with a toffee hammer.⁵ Ritchie is also in fine form as director, populating the crowds with the kind of faces you just don’t see in movies anymore, careful to undermine the film’s idealism with frustrating reality: when the camera crew try to catch McKay playing basketball with some Watts kids, those kids see a bunch of white guys running their way and hightail it; McKay’s visit to a medical centre is stymied by a screaming kid, his mall speech by a malfunctioning microphone; and the preparation for the ticker tape parade is a cacophony of people collecting their lunch orders.⁶ Even McKay’s big inspiring speech, complete with soaring score, becomes redundant bullshit the more he repeats it, leaving him punchy in the back seat of the car, rambling about how you can’t “play off black against old, young against poor.” As for the electorate, both sides are portrayed with the same kind of gentle cynicism: the Jarmon voters tend to be belligerent and entitled, the McKay voters a mix of quasi-liberals and oversexed political groupies. In the end, the movie suggests that while Lucas and Klein’s tactics might seem condescending, they need to be, because the vast majority of voters wouldn’t know their arse from a hole in the ground.

The Candidate opened to generally decent reviews, with some notable exceptions: Judith Crist was lukewarm, even though she partly changed her tune after a lunch with Redford, and Andrew Sarris was particularly dismissive, saying that “Redford fancies himself so superior to the electoral process that he ends up with a completely fatuous characterisation of a politician. I think Nixon can be beaten in 1972,⁷ but not by reluctant virgins and pure idealogues.” This feels more like a reaction to praise of the film rather than the movie itself, and his follow-up piece in August 1972, a response to Phil Tracy’s elegant rebuttal, reads more like a disgruntled critic railing against his colleague’s extensive experience than a piece of film criticism.

That The Candidate inspired this kind of conversation is remarkable enough – there are very few movies that manage to inspire such granular argument – but it remains something of a period piece, almost quaint in a time when A Face in the Crowd (1957)⁸ feels like the more apt analogy, and when the laughter inspired by satire sounds more resigned than radical. As Ritchie put it: “The way Bob conceived it, [McKay] was the encapsulation of ‘the moment’ just after Eisenhower. He was a reduction of all the innocence and naivete that drove the youth revolt of the sixties. The suits were the corruption. McKay was every kid who ever burned a flag on campus or stuck a flower in the barrel of a gun. He was Bob: the guy who believed an individual can change the system. But then gets eaten by the system once in it.”

The difference, of course, is that while the system might eat the individual, at least that individual existed in the first place, and was doing something more than whinging on social media.⁹ Because for all its cynicism about the system and the campaign process, The Candidate is still a largely optimistic film, capable of giving us something to cheer about, even if we are mostly cheering ourselves.

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Next Up: “This beauty pageant’s about to get ugly.”

1. Gregson’s wife, Natalie Wood, appears in The Candidate as herself, which makes for a nice little This Property is Condemned reunion.

2. Yes, that Melvyn Douglas, highly accomplished actor of stage and screen, grandfather to Ileana Douglas, and husband to Helen Gahagan who, amongst many other things, was the one to coin Nixon’s “Tricky Dick” nickname and the original movie “She who must be obeyed.”

3. And furthermore, “You’re what we’ve got to watch out for.”

4. One of the reasons for this might be that Larner was constantly writing, even on set. As assistant director Michael Davies put it, Larner was there to “draft, redraft, find a new scene, lose a new scene, find an angle, stick in a commercial, take out a name or a face or a place.” Sounds exhausting, but it ended up winning Larner an Academy Award, so …

5. Klein is based heavily on David Garth, who made commercials for Mayor Lindsay. He was by Larner’s account “obscene, shocking, entertaining”, and when he attended a screening with all his friends, they immediately recognised him in Garfield’s character. He apparently left the cinema promising to murder Larner.

6. Most if not all Larner insisted happened in real life, including a moment where McKay is handed a hot dog and a Coke and then, when his hands are full, sucker-punched by a member of the public.

7. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t. Nixon won in a landslide against George McGovern (who hated The Candidate).

8. Out of this guy’s remit, but a must-watch, even if the ending doesn’t quite work these days.

9. For the record, I count myself among the whingers.