Word: antonios
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Fortunately, Emile De Antonio's Millhouse is as funny a documentary as its subject matter warrants. Beginning with The Last Press Conference of 1962. De Antonio weaves back and forth through the checkered career of the unsinkable Richard M. in an indefatigable attempt to discover what makes this public man run. There is the 1964 congressional campaign in which the Bank of America quietly assists young Richard in his smear attacks on Congressman Jerry Voorhis: Nixon's prosecution of Alger Hiss, along with his clever use of closed congressional hearings ("I am holding in my hand a microfilm of very...
...Antonio relies on the generally available newsreel footage and television kinescopes to tell his story (and also material not so generally available, to judge by bits like a series of commercial out-takes Nixon made in '68). The result is a kind of modern-day equivalent of Citizen Kane. For Millhouse takes one step further Pauline Kael's argument that Kane's News of the World search for the meaning of "Rosebud" is a conscious parody on the Henry Luce operation that had supplanted Hearst's more idiosyncratic satrapy: in Millhouse, electronic journalism has become the dominant mouthpiece...
...throwing for himself a stag party. (The ends to which men must resort to hear their praises sung in an ostensible democracy!) And there is that unforgettable moment at the '68 Republican Convention in which Dick exhorts the following to "win this one for (the dying) Ike," which De Antonio intercuts with Pat O'Brian appealing to the Notre Dame football team to "win this one for the Gipper," the Gipper being played by young man Ronald Reagan. Nowhere a hint of Nixon's own private rosebud, although I think the statement by an old friend of the Nixon family...
...himself admits, Richard Nixon has a face that invites caricature. But lately the lampooning of the President has expanded far beyond the cartoonist's drawing board and become a minor genre of the arts. Documentary Film Maker Emile de Antonio has compiled MilLHouse (TIME, Oct. 18), a wickedly derisive splicing of Nixoniana. Novelist Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate) has come forth with The Vertical Smile, a politico-sexual farce whose hero, Duncan Mulligan, is a Wall Street lawyer, transvestite and presidential candidate known, lest anyone miss the point, as "Funky Dune...
...when it works, De Antonio's sense of juxtaposition can be lethal. News film of Nixon's 1968 nomination acceptance speech ("Let's win this one for Ike") is intercut with footage of Pat O'Brien in Knute Rockne advising his lachrymose squad to "win one for the Gipper"-their hospitalized teammate, who, with anachronistic irony, was portrayed by Ronald Reagan. De Antonio is also shrewd enough to know when Nixon is his own worst enemy, and he devotes a long section of Millhouse to the Checkers speech alone. Reciting his list of assets, attempting...