Word: mckay
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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...
...main thematic line is straightforward: as McKay comes ever-closer to winning his prize, he must rely ever-more on TV and other mass media to win his audience, in the process becoming less of a statesman, but a potent show-biz vote-getter. However, whether director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Jeremy Larner feel this process necessary, and McKay's actions morally justified, is unclear. In the context of easy ironies that the film develops, in which all men are power-hungry or venal on a solely personal level, it is foolish to invoke moral considerations at all: though...
...McKay never does believe in the American political system--he accepts the senatorial match as a joke, on the condition that he'll be able to speak his mind fully, and when he wins the California Democratic primary, and the nature of his campaign changes, we're never quite sure why he goes along with...
...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...