SUMMER OF BLOOD: NEW HOLLYWOOD HORROR - THE DEVIL INSIDE

1968, the bright dividing line between contemporary and classic horror - in the autumn of that year, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead brought terrifyingly explicit violence and gore to the genre and things change forever. But that groundbreaking horror classic was beat to theaters by a few months by a film whose seismic impact on the genre was just about as different as it possibly could have been. Rosemary's Baby - for of course that is the earlier release to which I refer - is subtle, classy, refined, and restrained in all the places that NotLD is raw, loud and punishing, but it too showed that horror could be something nobody had tried since at least Val Lewton's tenure at RKO: it is a horror film that's also a smart, urban drama for and about adults, a deliberate consideration of human behavior under extreme stress that just happens to involve a coven of Satanist witches. It is the movie that triggered a generation of smart horror by smart filmmakers invested in psychological realism and character-driven storytelling - without Rosemary's Baby, it's that much harder to imagine The Exorcist, and without The Exorcist, the subsequent history of grown-up horror looks massively different and largely empty. It's not overreaching to claim for Rosemary's Baby that it belongs in the company of the natal films in what would later be called New Hollywood Cinema - it has their pessimism and their grounded sensibility, even if unlike all of the other important New Hollywood seedlings, it lacks a home-grown director.

It was the first American production helmed by Polish émigré Roman Polanski, though it very nearly wasn't, and it is one of the most fascinatingly awful "what if?" exercises in cinema to daydream about what Rosemary's Baby might have looked like. For not only did it very nearly find itself directed by a true-blooded American, that American was none other than William Castle, the great huckster who'd made a name for himself in the late '50s and early '60s with horror movies that hinged on a single, highly ludicrous interactive gimmick that cropped up in the last act. He'd evolved out of that phase of his career by the mid-'60s, and not for the better; a Rosemary's Baby under Castle's direction would be competent at best, and the worst is best not to contemplate. Paramount felt the same way, and bought out the option on Ira Levin's novel that Castle had snatched up when the book was still in galleys, leaving Castle the dignity of staying on as the movie's producer, the most incongruous title in his entire filmography.

And so the studio brought in Polanski, who had left the Communist bloc behind to make a trio of horror or horror-esque movie in the United Kingdom, starting with 1965's Repulsion. That film was surely the primary qualification for getting him Rosemary's Baby; both movies are psychological thrillers about a woman's growing feeling of confusion and paranoia centered on the threatening physical space of her apartment. The primary difference being that Repulsion is ultimately about unreliable self-awareness, while Rosemary's Baby presents its threat as entirely real, and its protagonist's mental disintegration is shown as the result of the abuse she receives from others.

Almost a half-century of influence later, there's no reason to be precious about the film's plot: this is the one where a meek housewife is impregnated by Satan, as facilitated by a coven of Manhattan witches. She's Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), late of Omaha, Nebraska, and with her ineffective actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), she's newly arrived in the Bramford, a gorgeous old New York apartment building overlooking Central Park. It's a building of grim and violent history, none of which bothers the Woodhouses overmuch when their previous landlord and good friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) tells them all about it with enormous relish, though we know better - we heard the freakishly minor-key lullaby with a mindless female vocal la-la-ing over over it in the opening credits (Krzysztof Komeda's score is all variations on that lullaby, and it is creepy as all hell), and we've been noticing the pile-up of broken, erratic compositions that Polanski and cinematographer William A. Fraker use to film the interiors of the Bramford, starting with a disorienting tilt down to the floor of an elevator. And when the thin walls dividing the Woodhouses from their next-door neighbors, the Castevets, let the young couple hear some manner of guttural chanting late at night, we're not as quick as they are to dismiss it.

Meanwhile, the septagenarian Castevets, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) start to insert themselves as very present members of the Woodhouses new life, not entirely welcome. That starts to shift when Guy becomes infatuated with Roman's wild tales of a long life, well-lived, which happens right as his acting career starts to pick up following a bizarre accident that leaves an actor friend of his blind and Guy with the other man's part. At this point, the Woodhouses begin to seriously talk about having a baby, and on one of their target nights to conceive, Rosemary blacks out - following too many drinks, says Guy, but the conspicuously chalky-tasting mousse that Minnie made for the couple earlier in the night says otherwise. That night, Rosemary has a peculiar series of bad dreams, one involving a surrealist boat excursion, the other involving a cluster of nude people - including both of the Castevets and Guy - gathered around as a black figure with talon-like hands and reptilian red eyes rapes her. A month later, she's pregnant - Guy having sheepishly confessed to fucking her during her intoxicated night - and the Castevets arrange for her to get a phenomenal deal from their good friend, New York's finest obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy). And all is well, if you don't count the lancing pain that Rosemary constantly feels in her abdomen, or the way that she loses weight in her body and face, her skin growing pale and damp until she looks like a pregnant skeleton padding around. And this starts to convince her that maybe, possibly, her neighbors and husbands have some seriously ulterior motives regarding her and her unborn child.

Polanski adapted Levin's book himself, the first of his movies from a published source; the rumor goes that he wasn't aware that he had the legal right to actually deviate from the source material, which led to Rosemary's Baby being one of the most faithful adaptations in cinema history. And this leads to the only significant flaw I can point to in the entire movie: the pacing isn't great. It's well past the 40-minute mark that Rosemary finally has her demonic encounter, and almost an hour beyond that before she starts to openly wonder if there's something paranormally wrong with her. The film ends up at 136 minutes, and they are not boring minutes by any means. But there are places where the point has been made, and it would be nice if Polanski trusted that we knew what was going on. Because it's not really hard to figure out what's going on.

That being put out of the way, I have not a single meaningful complaint about one of the best-shot, best-scored, and best-acted supernatural thrillers ever made. Long before anything has happened in the plot that's plainly threatening (the first "scary movie" moment is the sound of the black mass being chanted in the Castavets' apartment, 16 minutes into the movie; the next isn't until her rape nightmare), the way that Polanski frames the inside of the Bramford has given the movie all its necessary horror bona fides. The shot of Gordon sitting on a bed, half-obscured by a doorframe, is well-known; but it's merely one of a countless number of shots of doorways in the film, all of them used to present half-seen and obscured spaces, to make the geometry inside the Woodhouse and Castavet apartments feel both sprawling and discontinuous. The interiors are deeply unsettling, without any need to fall back on typical haunted house design or lighting. It's just wrong, in a way that we can detect because of how Polanski shows it to us; Rosemary, can't see things the way we do, which explains and excuses how long it takes her to notice the terrible things around her.

Despite or because of her limited perspective, Rosemary is the film's not-at-all-secret weapon, one of the great protagonists in all horror; and Farrow's performance is one of the great marriages of character and actor in the genre. Set in 1966, the film is cosmopolitan enough for Rosemary to already be a bit of a throwback: a perfect doormat who allows herself to be guided by everyone around her, anxious to put her husband forward as the locus of her identity (she chirpily recites "He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross, but now he's doing television and commercials" enough times for it to qualify as her mantra), and interested in nothing but having Guy's babies. This isn't as transparently a feminist parable as Levin's The Stepford Wives, but there's no missing the subtext of a movie in which a pathetically cheery woman relies entirely on the wisdom of her husband, her doctor, and her older friends, only to find that they are all working actively against her. The first sentence out of Guy's mouth is a lie (inadvertently, but still); Minnie Castevet blows past Rosemary every time the younger woman tries to open her mouth - the energy differential between Gordon and Farrow is astonishing and drives so much of the film - Sapirstein barks orders at her that resemble cult indoctrination, and even her first and less-Satanic obstetrician, Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) dismisses all her believes and hands her over to the the official men in her life. The horror of the film is hardly "the Satanists have put a grotesque Satan-baby in my body", which is appalling enough, it's "in my moment of need, all the people I have trusted to keep me safe and emotionally well have turned out to be exploiting me," which is decidedly worse on account of being more grounded and everyday. This is an early example of the beloved '70s genre "you can't be too paranoid to stay ahead of the people trying to kill you", but with a specifically gendered twist that makes it even more sociologically acute.

None of this is necessary to appreciate the film on its basic level as a visceral depiction of an out-of-sorts world. The claustrophobically tight compositions of the backs of heads and too-small doorways, the alarming contrast between Minnie's garish clothes and the brown-grey-black palette of the majority of the film, the blasts of electronica on the soundtrack, and Farrow's effortless ability to diminish herself in the frame, to look ever smaller and more damageable, all build terrifically to creating a constant sense of wretched rottenness in the world. And yet, there's also a rich variety of tones that Polanski employs in putting the terror across: chatty melodrama and pungent black comedy (mostly in the last scene and the strait-laced goofiness of the Satanic ritual in the rape sequence) both interrupt the pressure-cooker tension of the horror. It keeps Rosemary's Baby varied enough that it never really goes slack or loses focus across its undeniably overlong running time, and makes it one of the most compulsively watchable of all horror films, in addition to being one of the most urbane and intellectually precise.

Body Count: 2, with the admission that "How many people die in Rosemary's Baby?" is a question that really does not need the asking.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1975: In which the quickly-changing world is subjected to enthusiastic, if wildly clumsy satire

1975's The Stepford Wives has long since become one of those movies for which the twist ending of its central mystery has become the single thing that most people know about it. This is never a fair place for a work of narrative art to find itself, but it's especially unfortunate for this film, which is good in almost all ways until the twist ending, which makes a complete hash of the social commentary that is one of the film's two main reasons for existing. I shall return to that point; even though the twist ending is the only that most people know about the film, it's still the ending, and I'd like to hold off on spoiling a 39-year-old movie as long as possible.

The film, based on a 1972 novel by Ira Levin (whose Rosemary's Baby traffics in similar "the life of a paranoid housewife" themes, and was also turned into a rather more effortlessly successful movie seven years prior), dives right into the ramifications of Woman's Liberation, the major social progressive activity of the 1970s as the Civil Rights Movement was in the 1960s, though one which perhaps resulted in fewer clear-cut victories. Still, it was successful enough to make The Stepford Wives feel like a thematic visitor from another civilisation, with far different expectations about the importance of rigidly-policed gender roles. For one thing, even the most outspoken feminists in the film don't actually go so far as to think that women should be employed outside the home; the story's battlegrounds are set entirely around what they do with the time that they spend not having paying jobs.

Our outspoken feminist for the evening is Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), who has recently moved with her husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), and their two daughters, Kim (Mary Stuart Masterson, Peter's daughter), and Amy (Ronny Sullivan), from the lively and dangerous world of New York to the soothing bedroom community of Stepford, Connecticut. We ken long before Joanna admits as much that this was Walter's choice, believing as he does that life in the suburbs is far more rewarding than the hectic, filthy life of an urbanite - "I just saw a man carrying a naked lady", says one of the daughters as they leave, speaking of a garden-variety pervert with a blow-up sex doll, to which Walter pleasantly notes, "That's why we're moving to Stepford", telling us from the first minutes that Stepford is the place without naked ladies, and that will be important.

As it turns out, Stepford is more sterile and unforgivingly blank than Joanna's worst nightmares. All of the men in town belong to a thing called the Stepford Men's Association, which seems to exist largely so there's a place that women absolutely can not go; and virtually all of the wives of those men are freakishly docile, not just by '70s standards, but by the most alarmist caricature of the Eisenhower '50s. Obsessed with cooking, housecleaning, and nothing else, the Stepford wives are like soulless, sexless objects, and only another recent transplant, Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), matches Joanna's attitudes, or shares her belief that something is seriously amiss with this town and the incomprehensibly retrograde gender attitudes it fosters.Eventually, Joanna and Bobbie stop just noticing this weirdness and begin to investigate it; and eventually, Joanna figures out what's going on, for all the good it does her.

That gives us enough to go on; the best and most lasting parts of The Stepford Wives have very little to do with what is discovered about the rotten underbelly of Stepford, and everything to do with the woman discovering it. The film in its present state came about as the result of not always friendly wrangling between director Bryan Forbes and screenwriter William Goldman, the latter of whom had some very accurate complaints about what Forbes's decisions did to the story's internal logic, particularly the decision where he cast his talented but somewhat dowdy wife Nanette Newman as head Stepford wife Carol Van Sant. But we'll get to the film's rickety narrativity in due course; there's so much of it that actually works, quite splendidly, that I'm reluctant to give into Goldman and confess that yes, this actually is kind of half-baked and illogical when all is said and done.

Forbes, whose career highlights aren't remotely as well-known as they should be, was first and above all a terrific director of actresses: in The L-Shaped Room, from 1962, he pulled the first truly great performance out of Leslie Caron; and in The Whisperers, from 1967, he helped the legendary Dame Edith Evans along to what is likely the very best screen performance of her estimable career. He was also, specifically, great at positioning his wonderful leading ladies in the context of thrillers about warped domestic spaces: The Whisperers, again, with Evans going slightly, slowly insane in her run-down flat, and 1964's Seance on a Wet Afternoon, with a sterling Kim Stanley as a demented psychic who perpetrates a kidnapping to prove her skills. The Stepford Wives fills both roles wonderfully: in it, Ross gives an absolutely superb performance that's miles beyond anything she does in her best-known roles, as the milksop girl in The Graduate and the charmingly bland woman spoiling the homoeroticism between the leads of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And she does it in part because the film so obligingly presents her as the very Rosemary-ish woman who finds herself trapped in a town that seems obviously, oppressively "off" to her, even though virtually nobody around her seems to reealise it.

Forbes doesn't play things subtly: he and the great cinematographer Owen Roizman soak the film in jagged shadowy interiors harshly contrasting with eye-bleachingly bright, saturated exteriors, both of them suggesting something very artificial and threatening; and the film also boasts a remarkably dated but even more remarkably successful score by Michael Small that uses some of the most banal, '70s TV-movie cues to establish the soporific ordinariness of Stepford, and then its increasingly vile secrets, as the score begins to have minor-key counter-melodies and electronic orchestrations creeping around the edges to inform us, sonically, that All Is Not Well.

It's a fine, if somewhat overworked paranoia thriller from the era that genre was at its best; Ross's increasingly frantic but reliably strong-willed performance makes her an ideal subject for the mechanics of the film, which is where it works best. And in every detail of the production design, the music, and the costuming, it uses the visual language of the kind of soppy films pandering to women in an ironic, biting way, clearly underlining its angry, satiric goals: this life, this kind of filmmaking, is the sort of box that a certain kind of men want to keep women locked away in, docile and unchallenging and in no way politically dangerous.

And back we thus come to the satire, which is clearly the main takeaway from the movie, even though it's a much, much better thriller than social commentary. As you know - as I know, long before I watched the movie - as the post basically up and tells us - the Stepford wives are robots, made by the mysterious Dale Coba (Patrick O'Neal), who used to build audio-animatronics for Disney. And this is the point Goldman made, and every hetero* male critic has made since, and we're all of us completely right: if you give the kind of conservative, woman-threatened man the movie portrays the ability to replace his wife with a completely docile robot clone who will uncomplainingly do every thing he wants, it's not going to be wearing hilariously demure dresses that go right up to the neck. It will be wearing skin-tight miniskirts that barely contain it's enormous, imbalancing breasts. And it won't have time to take care of the house, the kids, and the cooking, because of the sheer quantity of blowjobs it performs in the course of a normal day. For Goldman, this meant that all of the Stepford wives should also be caricatured, gorgeous trophy wives; casting Newman scotched that, and the movie had to become suddenly very contrived and inapt in its central satiric message as a result (though the fake Joanna does have curvier hips and larger breasts than Ross naturally possesses). Even if we conceive that the chauvinist's dream in the '70s was for a parodic version of the '50s to come back, it certainly wouldn't have come at the expense of the Sexual Revolution, which benefited men every inch as much as it benefited women.

Regardless of the specifics, it doesn't make sense except strictly in the realm of symbolism and metaphor, a flaw that didn't affect Rosemary's Baby, which was metaphorical and internally coherent within the universe the film was creating. Forbes's atmosphere and theatricality do an excellent job of putting the reveal over with enough intensity that the logical holes are hard to spot: the confrontation between Joanna and her new replacement is tremendously captivating horror filmmaking.

And besides, whatever intellectual cheats it has to take to get there, the important part is less "what's going on?" than "what does it it mean for our characters?" Joanna and Bobbie are extraordinary movie heroes, sharply-written and brilliantly performed. As long as the film remains in a horror/thriller mood, presenting their discovery of the sheer scale of the entrenched anti-woman worldview they're facing as a sort of Kafka-esque nightmare, it works beautifully. Intellectually, it could be a lot sounder, but its rhetorical skills are of secondary concern to the way it all feels, and it feels bone-chilling. Not the tightest paranoia thriller, not the most persuasively horrifying in its implication, but far better than the generally soft reputation it has suffered from ever since the '70s, and a fine work of craftsmanship from a director whose thrillers are some of the best that you've almost certainly never seen.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1975
-Hotshot kid director Steven Spielberg almost fails to make the first movie to ever break $100 million at the box office, Jaws
-After years in the making, Robert Altman brings to the big screen the long-awaited Nashville, with 24, count 'em, 24 of your favorite stars
-Edgy animator Ralph Bakshi makes Coonskin and immediately embroils himself in racial controversy

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1975
-Belgium's Chantal Akerman creates a new feminist visual vocabulary with which to showcase three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
-The simmering Australian New Wave bursts out in its full form with Picnic at Hanging Rock, a cryptic anti-mystery by Peter Weir
-Sholay becomes among the highest-grossing films in the history of Indian cinema, past, present, or future

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THRILLERS ABOUT THE PRESIDENT'S STAFF

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: a twofer! With Paranoia, we have a thriller about a man whose job has unexpectedly thrust him into the shadowy world of espionage; with Lee Daniels' The Butler, a film about the life of one of the President of the United States of America's most trusted employees. Put them together, and you OBVIOUSLY have a '60s counterculture comedy with James Coburn. It could be no other way.

Almost as though it knew that its function to later generations would be as an immensely particular time capsule, The President's Analyst opens with a shot that's so proudly mired in the aesthetics at the moment of its creation (it could have come from anywhere in the 1967-'71 window; it happens to be from 1967, which I suppose makes it a trendsetter) that it's indistinguishable from parody. We start on a super-close, grainy shot of a rippling American flag, and ZOOOOOM back to a wide shot of a New York street corner, with the building upon which that flag was located all the way in the distance; then we ZOOOOOM in close to an obviously Up To No Good sort of fellow standing on that corner, having a cloak-and-daggery conversation. Ain't no zoom like a late-'60s zoom, I always say.

As things progress, we arrive in the company of Greenwich Village psychotherapist Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn), a man well-liked by his clients, but especially by a fellow named Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge), who on this particular day reveals to his doctor a dream that he had, about a racial bullying incident from his childhood (it was when Masters first realised that the color of his skin made other people dislike him), and from there seamlessly glides into admitting that he's an agent with the U.S. intelligence-gathering organisation CEA (like its rival and sister agency, the FBR, the CEA was thus renamed in post-production dubbing, when it turned out that openly mocking the two real intelligence agencies in the United States was a good way to make enemies), and he hasn't been coming to Sidney for his own good, but because he's been assigned to vet therapists for the President of the United States himself.

Sidney jumps at the job, but problems start to crop up immediately: like how FBR director Henry Lux (Walter Burke) is convinced that his girlfriend Nan Butler (Joan Delaney) is a security risk, and after hardly any time in the job, being assaulted constantly by questions about his ability to keep a secret in light of his tendency to talk in his sleep and all, the President's analyst starts cracking up himself, convinced that he's being watched constantly (which he is), and that his life is in danger if he steps out of line even a little bit (which it is). So, politely shanghaiing a group of White House tourists, he disappears into the American countryside, and immediately becomes the target of the intelligence agencies of every nation in the world, with Masters and his old friend, the Soviet spy Kropotkin (Severn Darden, who doesn't even attempt a Russian accent, which is probably for the best), leading the charge to find Sidney and capture him. Or kill him. Or flip him. For his part, Sidney's cross-country trek has led him to run afoul of a most nefarious conspiracy even bigger than his wild paranoid fantasies ever suggested.

For a movie that never has anything in mind but to be a fleet, comic romp through the Cold War political scene and parody the paranoia thriller genre that hadn't technically been invented yet, The President's Analyst is shockingly difficult to parse, though some of that has more to do with watching it in the 21st Century, where it becomes a much weirder experience than it could have been in '67. Watching the movie, there is literally no chance of mistaking it for anything but a product of its time: not even a skillful pastiche of late-'60s filmmaking like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery is that good, and the sheer glut of period-specific details dates The President's Analyst as much as any movie has ever been dated. There are aesthetic matters, like the zooms, the reliance on dissolve-heavy montages, the funky, poppy Lalo Schifrin score (and, in particular, the way the cinematography, score, and dissolves frequently work together to create what I can only call '60s funk music videos). There are plot matters, like the way that Sidney's flight takes him through a perfect cross-section of '60s types, including the obvious layover with some particularly dumb hippies (though it's safe to call it a left-wing comedy, The President's Analyst has absolutely no qualms about making fun of everybody in every direction), and the fact that the whole movie begins with the President of the United States needing a psychotherapist, which admittedly, could have been a plot point in the '50s as well. But it wasn't. There's the presence of Coburn, an actor whose comedies in the decade firmly established him as the perfect hybrid of countercultural instincts and arch-capitalist cool. There's the score, which I already mentioned, but I don't think you can possibly overestimate how fucking mired in 1967 Schifrin's score is. Have I mentioned lately that I adore Lalo Schifrin? Because it's not something you can ever say too many times.

This is the very opposite of a timeless movie, I mean to say, though it still has immense charm if you're not turned off by the very stuff of counterculture-era American film comedy, and that's a hugely defensible position to hold. They can be strenuously wacky, shrill things. But in this particular case, I find that Coburn's calm, intellectual presence keeps the silliest cartoon aspects in check, if indeed the way he grounds the film doesn't end up making the silliness work better: since it therefore exists in a world that has reality and context, instead of spilling this way and that without focus or wit or skill. The whole film, in fact, feels cooler (in both senses: hip, and subdued) than most other movies on the same model, with Cambridge and Darden giving unusually laid-back performances, and the best humor (like a sequence with a stern FBR agent correcting a boy in points of etiquette) is always played straight, rather than as slapstick.

There are problems here and there: there's an extended Beatles joke that, in the particulars, is at least two years out of date, the hippie scene drags, and Masters's therapy session includes a piercing, brutal discussion of a boy's awakening to racism in the world that is vastly out of place in a comedy, excepting that it is about the cultural climate of 1967, and The President's Analyst is deeply concerned with wallowing in that culture. But for the most part, writer-director Theodore J. Flicker (who almost exclusively worked in TV sitcoms - this was his first movie, in fact - and there's a faint mustiness of the television to his camera set-ups with DP William Fraker, who was just about to plunge into brilliance with Rosemary's Baby, the very next year) has a clean, efficient style that keeps the plot bubbling along, while giving the actors plenty of space to breathe and react and find the comedy, rather than pouncing at jokes. It's simply, breezy fun, but it always works, and that is always worthy of praise, not least in '67, when breeziness was often achieved with leaden joylessness.

All of that's well and good, but here's the really bizarre thing, and part of what makes watching it in 2010s so alarming: The President's Analyst is a shattering, merciless satire, and for all its impenetrable period trappings, it feels like it's speaking to the present day as much as to the moment of its creation; moreso, even, since the film's fantastic prediction about mobile communication technology seems so less ludicrously extreme than it did in the 1960s.

Breezy as it is, light as it is, silly as it is, this is a scorched-earth assault against the surveillance state, and the way that power is grabbed under the fig leaf of "we need to do this for your protection", shading into the even more vile "we're doing this for our profits, which you will surely not deny us, because you're not a pinko, are you?". It's mocking everyone across the board, from law-and-order fetishists, who blithely destroy the fact of personal freedom to preserve the notion of personal freedom, to self-described liberals who act just like the conservatives they claim to oppose, only with an ugly veneer of sanctimony on top of it. The President's Analyst finds American society - and Western society, and the world in general - broken and stupid, and instead of getting angry, it decides to laugh at everything miserable and awful, stripping it of its power by mocking it and making it seem like silly cartoon shenanigans.

Clearly, this is not an approach that worked; we still have a version of the society that The President's Analyst identifies. But for identifying the irrationality in human political behavior that was making the world such a dodgy place in the '60s, and continues to make the world a dodgy place now, the film is intelligent far beyond anything it looks like its doing; and by trivialising the people and beliefs it finds dangerous, it is an uncommonly brave political comedy. No, the film is not for all tastes, and carving out the satire from the loud period trappings takes work. But this kind of broadly likable, good-humored film being used as the vector for sharp, insightful satire is the kind of thing that simply does not happen anymore, and it's quite amazing to look back in time and seeing it done so remarkably well as it was in this instance.

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TONY SCOTT: ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998)

I'll tell you what one does not expect of a thriller produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Tony Scott, and starring Will Smith, released in 1998 when Smith, for one, was at his all-time most commercially marketable: that it would predict, so casually that it's almost banal, one of the biggest U.S. domestic policy shitstorms of the mid-'00s. And even take sides! A mere fifteen years later, it's largely the case that movies which want to make any money at the box office are scrupulously careful not to possess real-world political ramifications (after all, it's not just partisan Americans, but a whole world full of people that contemporary Hollywood is trying to appease), but Enemy of the State, made by some of the most money-oriented people in that decade, just hops right on into the messy business of how many personal freedoms are sacrificed in the name of "national security", painting a terrifying (and technologically dubious) portrait of how many different ways the U.S. government can monitor its citizens' behavior, without ever considering that the audience might not be on board with that sentiment. Which, this being prior to 2001 and all, was a fairly safe assumption to make, and that's actually the most startling thing about watching the movie: in '98, this wasn't really "political" filmmaking at all, given that a surveillance state wasn't something most reasonable people were thinking about all that much.

But the era was still rich with political paranoia thrillers: it was the decade kicked off by JFK, with The X-Files holding court as one of the predominant cool TV shows for intelligent people. And Enemy of the State slots nicely into that genre, updating the paranoia films of the '70s so overtly that it even has Gene Hackman in a supporting role as a character blatantly meant to remind us of his protagonist in the genre masterpiece The Conversation, from 1974 (and Jason Robards, of All the President's Men, kicks off the whole story by getting murdered). If Enemy of the State is plainly not as good as the best of the films its copying, that has everything to do with the change in emphasis between the mid-'70s and the late-'90s, for the biggest difference between this film and its models is an extreme new insistence on action sequences and glossy, surface-level appeal; it is a movie that is entertaining before it is thought-provoking, and it was exactly the opposite case back in the heyday of the paranoia thrillers. Still, being more of a popcorn movie than an intellectual argument doesn't inherently mean that Enemy of the State thus can't be intellectual at all, and if it's certainly shallower than All the President's Men, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, or The Parallax View, it's just as certainly more successful than most '90s updates of the form, like The Pelican Brief or Conspiracy Theory. If nothing else, Scott and his frequent editor Chris Lebenzon did an uncommonly phenomenal job of building the movie such that it had exactly the right sense of frayed, barely-coherent pacing that lets this film, uniquely among its brethren, suggest the feeling of endless paranoia and confusion of its main character through primarily cinematic, not just narrative, means.

One of the most atypical elements of David Marconi's script is that it runs two mostly tandem plot threads, so that we're actually able to keep ahead of the protagonist for nearly the whole time: we know what's going on and how he gets involved long before he does. Briefly, the NSA has a sympathetic congressman trying to push through a bill that will give the agency largely unchallenged authority to spy on anybody under any pretext, and the very principled Republican representative Phillip Hammersley (Robards) is the chief stumbling block. So mid-level NSA director Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight) has Hammersley killed, and with a lack of imagination positively criminal in a man with the control over camera surveillance that Reynolds is about to demonstrate, Reynolds is unaware that he's been captured on tape by a bird researcher, Daniel Zavitz (Jason Lee). Running from everybody the instant that he figures out what happens, Zavitz is able to sneak his equipment into a shopping bag in possession of an old college friend, Robert Dean (Smith), who doesn't notice anything. Therefore, when shockingly thorough intimidation tactics start assailing the Dean family, he assumes it has to do with the union case he's serving as lawyer for; just a bit of angry mobster blowback. Eventually, it becomes clear that this is much bigger than that, but it still takes a lot of run-ins with many NSA thugs played by an assortment of wholly capable character actors before he starts to piece together exactly what the hell is happening.

There's a rulebook to wrong man thrillers, and Enemy of the State largely follows it without pushing in any new directions. But there's still considerable pleasure to be had in that, when the rules are being followed with as much zest and energy as happens here: I've already mentioned Lebenzon's editing, but it's bringing it up again, simply because it's such a tremendously important part of what gives the film it's delirious feeling, jagged without being discontinuous, fast-paced without being unpleasantly hectic. Of course, that wouldn't be enough without good material to work with, and the film already does a fine job through camera movement (which prefigures the kineticism of the Jason Bourne movies without their aggressiveness) and sound design of creating the kind of constantly-moving, constantly threatening world where the editing can do its best work.

For this, above all, a fast movie. Not endlessly so: at 132 minutes (140 in the unrated cut that I haven't seen, nor can I understand why I'd want to), it's certainly bloated, taking a little bit too long to actually get to "Will Smith running from the bad guys", and then taking even longer to pair him up with Hackman's twitchy off-the-grid survivalist, which is a shame, as Hackman is easily the highlight among a cast of people who largely stand in the place of humans rather than bring them to life (which has to do mostly with how little screentime anybody gets), and his interplay with Smith is probably the most fun thing in a movie that, for all its momentum and excitement, is typically a little too serious and intense to really count as "fun" (indeed, Smith himself is largely kept stern and grim, depriving us of his greatest skill as a movie star, a sardonic grin and terrific way with dialogue that sounds like he's making it up on the spot). It's a little too stretched out in the beginning, but only a little; and once the action starts ramping up it's easy to forge the first act, if not entirely forgive it.

From that point on, Scott and company keep things moving fast enough that there's no time to stop and smell the plot holes (arguably, a more important skill in a movie of this sort than avoiding the holes in the first place), blasting through the somewhat pacey character scenes (there's a subplot about Dean's affair some years ago that goes nowhere, with the ordinarily reliable Regina King, as his wife, not given nearly enough material to make it stick; happily, then, the director simply plows through and doesn't belabor it as much as the screenplay's structure would apparently indicate), and staging the action scenes with impressive force. A dubious, one might even say corny ending is beyond anybody's means to fix it, but like everything else about the film that's bad, it's over quickly.

Patently, the film is no classic - it says a little about the culture that produced it, but not enough to be a great time capsule - and there's not nearly enough of Smith's typical charisma to put Dean over as a great protagonist on the order of the very best wrong men of cinema. But as a simple thriller that wants only to excite and intensify, it's one of the better ones that the late '90s produced, and its political prescience means that's aged better than virtually anything else from the same time. It works, and it will probably still work just as well a generation from now, and that's all there is to it.

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