Word: jarmon
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...main problem is simple: for a film constructed like a character study, it lacks a developed hero. Bill McKay, crusading San Diego lawyer son of an old-time machine-politics California governor, is chosen by Democratic organizers to run in a senatorial campaign conceded to the Republican incumbent, Crocker Jarmon, McKay stands for all the right issues--welfare, socialized medicine, ecology; Jarmon for all the wrong ones--law-and-order, budget-cutting, the rights of American individualists. (The filmmakers have not mentioned Vietnam in a vain attempt to reduce the chance of incipient outdatedness...
Apart from its serious pretensions, the film is consistently entertaining. Larner's dialogue is deadly accurate: it takes a sharp ear to pick up the proper colloquial uses of such Yiddishism as "schmuck" and "kischkes"; to imitate to perfection varying political jargons, from Jarmon's "the individuals made this country great" to McKay's "we're all in this (mess) together"; to invent speech idiosyncrasies which seal characters' fates for us, like a noxious emcee's "unequivocably...
...acting is also topnotch. Robert Redford's McKay is a perfect seemingly sexless but actually hungry, American idealist; MeIvyn Douglas is fine as his corrupt father; Don Porter, veteran of fatherly roles in TV sitcoms, is well-cast as Crocker Jarmon--rhetorically smooth, with the sincerity of a born exhibitionist and a rockribbed physical facade. But Peter Boyle steals the show as Marvin Lucas, McKay's mysterious New York-based campaign manager. Lucas is tough, and smart, and flexible, a Madison Avenue superman; but in his own oily way we feel he cares more seriously than anyone else...
Eventually he trounces Jarmon on the strength of his charisma alone. The last scene of the movie shows him looking conscience-stricken as he rummages about for his shattered ideals...
Ritchie and Larner stack the cards by making all McKay supporters well-fed suburban liberals or eager youths with a renewed faith in the electoral process. Jarmon's people are loud, right-wing, wrong-thinking rednecks who are not even photogenic. Neither the authentic political atmosphere nor canny performances by Redford, Boyle and Porter go far to cut through the basic glibness of the film. Ritchie incorporates numerous television political commercials and makes a point of their smooth dishonesty and wily distortion. None, however have less substance than The Candidate...