OUR MAN FLINT
Between 1966 and 1967, James Coburn practically
made a career of screen cool. His spy pics
Our
Man Flint
and In
Like Flint out-Bond Connery's Bond and trash Dean Martin's Matt Helm
in a gale of demonic horselaughter. Dead Heat On A Merry-Go-Round (1967,
with Camilla Sparv) is a nicely bent caper film, but it is The President's
Analyst, released the same year, that yolks the Flint cool guy to the most
extreme variety of mid-Sixties paranoia and ultimately pushes the gong-banging
Coburn over the top and beyond the freaking pale.
The riff: Jim's a mild-mannered professional, a Washington shrink who answers his country's call by agreeing to become the President's personal analyst. Once he starts doing his duty, he's kidnapped ... by unknown "enemies" who wrongly assume he's privy to the Prez's innermost thoughts and secrets. Coburn wrangles free, fleeing along a hellish escape route, collecting adversaries as he goes. By mid-film, he's pursued by Russkies, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, D.C. cops, and the White House janitorial staff. His girl, his best friend, and all acquaintances have either fled his side or stayed on as duplicitous double agents, faking him out in the most chilling evocation of over-the-shoulder paranoia since those pods started popping in The Body Snatchers.
He drops in and out of sight and scenes, including a brief stay with a band of flower children (led by Barry McGuire, fresh from "Eve of Destruction" duty), runs through a dozen jungles until he emerges as the Ultimate Paranoiac - hair-trigger nerves, rabbit reflexes, a bullshit detection system that bores through every come-on and setup thrown at him. Pressure molds Coburn's humble shrink into a bobbing and weaving paragon of cool that makes his Flint roles resemble a badly inked cartoon.
Ultimately, he gets to confront the root source of all this trouble -- bigger than the CIA, more powerful than the FBI or the microbe-toting Russkies. In their futuristic subterranean headquarters, Mr. Jim faces the Enemy: faceless, multi-national corporate America. And the script doesn't pussyfoot. We're not talking some gray flannel general caricature of Big Business, all Babbittinspired and sifting like a duck. The enemy, the great subverter of faith and morals, says The President's Analyst, is... the phone company! It's the grand dame Ma Bell herself, with all her codes and hidden charges, unmanageable cords, dangling clauses disguising taxes within taxes, tolls, irritating tones and sexless recorded voices. Go ahead and dial.
The scenario flips the wig and closes the film in short order, but the revelation - as tongue-in-cheek and chilling as it simultaneously manages to be - lingers, like Coburn's cool heroics, and earns Analyst enough extra chips to make it easily outstack the heartiest contenders.
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