Kind of fun. An episodic, jet-propelled satire of just about everything in the contemporary newspapers. The President of the US (Lyndon B. Johnson at the time, briefly glimpsed walking his hound dogs on the White House lawn) is a troubled man. He recruits a psychoanalyst (James Coburn). Johnson was REALLY troubled. Troubled enough to summon Coburn at all hours of the day or night by means of hidden, blinking red lights. The red lights and buzzers interrupt Coburn while he's in sessions with other patients, while he's entering elevators, while he's making love, while he's headed towards the urinal. It drives him nuts, and he finally takes off on his own to escape the burdens.
Alas, the word gets out that the president's analyst is free. He knows so much that every secret agency in the world -- from China and Russia to Canada -- are out to find and kidnap him and send him to what he calls "a brain laundry." Worse, the "CEA" and the "FBR" know this, and they set out to kill him before the others can get him.
The chase takes everyone from Washington, through New York and New Jersey, to the Midwest. Nice to see Greenwich Village again, as it was then, watching Coburn run in and out of the Cafe Wha?, which was on, what, West Fourth? The Cafe Wha? was a phenomenon of the psychedelic age and a lot of the targets here are -- blissed-out hippies and so on.
Nobody -- no social position, no attitudinal set, no object, no entity of any kind -- is spared. William Daniels and his family live in a disgustingly neat and revoltingly decorated middle-class tract home in Seaside Heights. They're liberals. We know they're liberals because Daniels makes a point of telling us. The only thing is, his home and car have .44 magnums stashed in them because they are surrounded by gun-crazy right-wing fascists who might attack them.
The chief of the "FBR" is named Lux, a brand of vacuum cleaner, just like Hoover. Hoover had what amounted to a fetish for tall, impressive agents, so Lux is about five and a half feet tall, and all of his agents are even shorter than he is.
That height business is typical of the jokes. You have to (1) notice it, then (2) interpret it. With some of the other jokes, you might not get past (1). For instance, there is a scene in which Coburn is boffing a hippie chick in the middle of a field and he is stalked by a killer. The killer is killed by an agent of some other government. He in turn is killed by still a different agent, and so on. And as the serial assassinations go on, the weapons used become more and more ridiculous -- from shooting, to strangling, to a blowgun, to poison gas, to a fish net, and finally a pitchfork. It's more ludicrous than funny, I guess, but someone went to some trouble to think of that sequence of weapons.
Competent performances by about all concerned, especially Severn Darden as a Russian agent. Joan Delaney, Coburn's girl friend, looks and acts like a model. She has a whispery, pre-teen voice, and she walks with that half-flailing slink that models have developed for the runway.
It's not a zany laff riot but it's quietly amusing and it is nicely paced, with few pratfalls and a lot of gags that are almost subliminal, especially now that their targets have been almost lost in the mists of antiquity. You might enjoy it more if you'd been around and aware in 1968.
Alas, the word gets out that the president's analyst is free. He knows so much that every secret agency in the world -- from China and Russia to Canada -- are out to find and kidnap him and send him to what he calls "a brain laundry." Worse, the "CEA" and the "FBR" know this, and they set out to kill him before the others can get him.
The chase takes everyone from Washington, through New York and New Jersey, to the Midwest. Nice to see Greenwich Village again, as it was then, watching Coburn run in and out of the Cafe Wha?, which was on, what, West Fourth? The Cafe Wha? was a phenomenon of the psychedelic age and a lot of the targets here are -- blissed-out hippies and so on.
Nobody -- no social position, no attitudinal set, no object, no entity of any kind -- is spared. William Daniels and his family live in a disgustingly neat and revoltingly decorated middle-class tract home in Seaside Heights. They're liberals. We know they're liberals because Daniels makes a point of telling us. The only thing is, his home and car have .44 magnums stashed in them because they are surrounded by gun-crazy right-wing fascists who might attack them.
The chief of the "FBR" is named Lux, a brand of vacuum cleaner, just like Hoover. Hoover had what amounted to a fetish for tall, impressive agents, so Lux is about five and a half feet tall, and all of his agents are even shorter than he is.
That height business is typical of the jokes. You have to (1) notice it, then (2) interpret it. With some of the other jokes, you might not get past (1). For instance, there is a scene in which Coburn is boffing a hippie chick in the middle of a field and he is stalked by a killer. The killer is killed by an agent of some other government. He in turn is killed by still a different agent, and so on. And as the serial assassinations go on, the weapons used become more and more ridiculous -- from shooting, to strangling, to a blowgun, to poison gas, to a fish net, and finally a pitchfork. It's more ludicrous than funny, I guess, but someone went to some trouble to think of that sequence of weapons.
Competent performances by about all concerned, especially Severn Darden as a Russian agent. Joan Delaney, Coburn's girl friend, looks and acts like a model. She has a whispery, pre-teen voice, and she walks with that half-flailing slink that models have developed for the runway.
It's not a zany laff riot but it's quietly amusing and it is nicely paced, with few pratfalls and a lot of gags that are almost subliminal, especially now that their targets have been almost lost in the mists of antiquity. You might enjoy it more if you'd been around and aware in 1968.