The Candidate (1972 film)

The Candidate
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Michael Ritchie
Produced by	Walter Coblenz
Written by	Jeremy Larner
Starring	Robert Redford Peter Boyle
Music by	John Rubinstein
Cinematography	Victor J. Kemper John Korty
Editing by	Robert Estrin Richard A. Harris
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	June 29, 1972 (1972-06-29)
Running time	109 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

The Candidate is a 1972 American film starring Robert Redford. Its themes include how the political machine corrupts and the need to dilute one's message to win an election. There are many parallels between the 1970 California Senate election between John V. Tunney and George Murphy, but Redford's character, Bill McKay, is a political novice and Tunney was a seasoned Congressman.

The film was shot in Northern California in 1971. Peter Boyle plays the political consultant Marvin Lucas. The screenplay was written by Jeremy Larner, a speechwriter for Senator Eugene J. McCarthy during McCarthy's campaign for the 1968 Democratic Presidential nomination.

Plot

Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle), a political election specialist, must find a Democratic candidate to unseat California U.S. Senator Crocker Jarmon, a popular Republican. With no big-name Democrat eager to enter the seemingly unwinnable race, Lucas seeks out Bill McKay (Robert Redford), a thirty-something, married, attractive man, totally removed from politics. Despite being the son of former governor John J. McKay (played by Melvyn Douglas), Bill has never been interested in politics and instead acts as a lawyer for liberal causes.

Lucas gives McKay a proposition: Jarmon cannot lose; and since the race is already decided, McKay is free to campaign saying exactly what he wants. McKay accepts to have the chance to spread his liberal values and hits the trail. With no serious Democratic opposition, McKay cruises to the nomination on his name alone. Lucas then has distressing news: according to the latest election projections, McKay will be defeated by an overwhelming margin. McKay counted on losing but not on being "humiliated, so he broadens his message to appeal to more voters.

McKay travels the state, with his liberal statements eroding each day. This approach lifts him in the opinion polls, but he has a new problem. Because McKay's father has stayed out of the race, the media speculates his silence is an endorsement of Jarmon. McKay begrudgingly meets his father and tells him the problem, who tells the media he is not endorsing Jarmon, simply honoring his son's wishes to stay out of the race.

As McKay continues to do as he was told, he gains in the polls until he is only nine points down. Jarmon then proposes a debate. McKay agrees to give tailored answers, rather than his real opinions. At the debate, the candidates trade barbs. Just as the debate is ending, McKay has a pang of conscience and blurts out that the debate addressed no real subjects, such as poverty and race. Lucas is furious as this will hurt the campaign. The media try to confront McKay backstage but arrive as John J. McKay congratulates his son on the debate. Instead of reporting on McKay's outburst, the story becomes the reemergence of the former governor to help his son. The positive story, coupled with McKay senior's help on the trail, further closes the polling gap.

On election day, McKay wins. In one of the movie's famous scenes, he escapes the victory party and pulls Lucas into a room while throngs of journalists clamor outside. McKay asks Lucas, "Marvin ... What do we do now?" The media throng arrives to drag them out, and McKay never receives an answer.

Cast

• Robert Redford as Bill McKay
• Peter Boyle as Marvin Lucas
• Melvyn Douglas as Former California Governor John J. McKay
• Don Porter as Senator Crocker Jarmon
• Allen Garfield as Howard Klein
• Karen Carlson as Nancy McKay
• Quinn K. Redeker as Rich Jenkin (as Quinn Redeker)
• Morgan Upton as Wally Henderson
• Michael Lerner as Paul Corliss
• Kenneth Tobey as Floyd J. Starkey
• Natalie Wood as Herself
• Chris Prey as David
• Joe Miksak as Neil Atkinson
• Jenny Sullivan as Lynn
• Tom Dahlgren as The pilot
• Gerald Hiken as The station manager
• Leslie Allen as Mabel

Analysis

The film highlights many criticisms of modern day American politics, such as the importance of money and the emphasis on the image of political candidates. In particular, the degeneration of McKay from an idealistic public-interest lawyer working for then-unpopular or little-known causes (the young environmentalist movement, civil rights for Latinos, integration through busing) and strong opinions on all issues into a construct of his campaign, dominated by idiotic little slogans (most notably "Bill McKay: the better way") and a road-weary nervous wreck, to boot.

The titular candidate is politically disaffected. It is revealed that he has not registered to vote and does not have a clear political message to communicate. But there are issues in which he is interested ("saved some trees and got a clinic open" as Lucas badly explains) and this opportunity presents a public platform and the facility to be in a position to communicate his ideas. In agreeing to run, after Lucas guarantees that he will lose, he makes what Ian Scott describes as a ‘Faustian pact’, which will inevitably lead to his ideology being submerged during the process of campaigning.

McKay naively believes that Lucas will let him go where he wants, do what he wants, and say what he pleases. As the narrative progresses this promised freedom evaporates, his ideology becomes eroded and he is compromised. His "straightforward stands on issues" are blanded out in interview rehearsals, he is revealed to be pro-choice on abortion but advised to say that he is considering what his position should be. When he goes off message and presents his own ideas, particular at the end of a television debate with his rival, it is treated with the same collective horror as a basketball player dropping the ball at a crucial moment of a game.

Despite some early scenes in which the candidate strolls onto a beach to talk off the cuff to youngsters about environmental issues and doing walkabouts in Watts (recorded footage of which are used in television commercials throughout the campaign), by the end of the film, he stands on soap boxes working a pre-prepared speech in front of middle class garden parties and factory workers. McKay changes his message to suit the social classes he talks to in order to win votes. He is even quoting the campaign slogan in the stump speech.

McKay becomes corrupted, but it is largely his own choice. In a key scene, he is called into Lucas's war room and, shown the results of a poll in which he is losing badly, he asks why that is so important since he was going to lose anyway. "Lucas asks him if he really wants to be humiliated. McKay answers, 'That wasn't part of the deal.'" Even when he makes attempts to distance himself from the process, he "collapses into helpless laughter while trying to tape a television statement; he mocks his own stump speech" and sits in the back of the campaign car mocking his stump speech ("this country cannot house its houseless"), it is clear that he cares for his own image, especially in the eyes of the voting public.

When a rumor suggests that his father, kept out of the campaign till now by his son, is backing Jarman, his rival, he immediately pays him a visit in order to get a statement released. Indeed, his descent into politics becomes a cliché, it is visually hinted that he is going to be late for an important meeting with a labour leader after a brief romantic tryst with a campaign worker. "There is a sexual compromise for the candidate and an association between sex and power.". In the closing moments, he is chaste. "I wonder if anybody understood what I was trying to do," to which is father replies, "Don't worry, son, it won't make any difference."

Unusually, in a film so steeped in political and electoral process, the iconography usually associated with a campaign, and in particular the stars and stripes, appear only at certain key moments in order to demonstrate the corruption of the candidate. Unlike Tim Robbins's Bob Roberts (1992) in which the American flag is fetishised to the point of parody with the titular Roberts in one key image standing naked but for a flag wrapped about his form, McKay is distanced from even the colors through much of the film. It is worth noting that the poster for the film has Robert Redford front and center with the flag in the background, which is an odd choice considering its lack of an appearance throughout much of the film.

His campaign banner is in green and yellow and at the rallies organized by his own campaign team, red, white, and blue are nowhere to be seen. The only deployment of the flag itself in the film happens almost subliminally during an archive television commercial for his Republican competitor. When the colors finally appear, draped over a car during a tickertape parade with McKay standing in the center, they emphasize that the candidatels approach has utterly changed: in these late, successful, stages, he has embraced the standard iconography of a political campaign and is aligning himself with expectation.

One central message of the film is that the business of campaigning has overridden the condition of taking office. At the end of the film rather than being "triumphant in victory: Bill McKay is only confused." The weakness is that the spectator does not clearly see the consequences of the campaign.

As Scott describes, "The dilemma for the director was to answer these charges of media power and sound bite manipulation, not simply pointedly to allow campaign guru Lucas to fly off to his next candidate as if going to a sales meeting" just after the oft-quoted line from McKay: "What do I do now?" Monaco agrees that it is not "enough to excuse the film by explaining that it works in a Brechtian way, to ask questions rather than to answer them. Brecht always implied answers."

It has been reported that upon viewing the film, Dan Quayle came to the conclusion that he was more handsome than Robert Redford and that he would be well equipped to win a campaign to enter the White House. Ironically, the future vice-president of the United States, perhaps inadvertently, highlights one of the themes of the piece: that no matter the ideology or interests of the candidate, the business of political campaigning is driven by image.

Reception

The film was widely acclaimed by both critics and the public and contributed to Redford's ever increasing fame. New York Times (June 30, 1972) reviewer Vincent Canby applauded Redford's performance and commented that "The Candidate is serious, but its tone is coldly comic, as if it had been put together by people who had given up hope." Christopher Null, from filmcritic.com, gave the film 4.5/5 and said that "this satire on an American institution continues to gain relevance instead of lose it."

Awards

The film won a Best Writing Oscar for Larner and was also nominated for Best Sound (Richard Portman, Gene Cantamessa).

External links

• The Candidate at the Internet Movie Database