Monday, Sep. 24, 1973

Presidential Folly

By JAY COCKS

HAIL! TO THE CHIEF Directed by FRED LEVINSON Screenplay by LARRY SPIEGEL and PHIL DUSENBERRY

A satiric thriller about presidential conniving and conspiracy in Washington? Two years ago, when Hail! to the Chief was made, no distributor would touch it; the movie seemed to fall somewhere between poor taste and treason. Now, post-Watergate, it has had no trouble finding a distributor; it seems to fall somewhere between poor taste and topicality. Moral: for some moviemakers, it is safer to be accused of quickie exploitation than of insight or prophecy.

Chief is structured, rather cleverly, as a send-up of John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964), in which a sometimes violent plot was enacted within hailing distance of the White House. Here, the President (Dan Resin) is turning the Secretary of Health's cherished VISTA camps into prisons for political dissenters. "Not concentration camps," the President hastens to reassure his Secretary (Richard B. Shull). "Detention camps -this is America."

The Secretary is astonished to watch the President develop into a cryptofascist who plans to undermine the legislative arm of the Government and suspend elections -"just this once." The Secretary joins the Vice President (Willard Waterman), the President's spiritual counsel -the Rev. Jimmy Williams (Joseph Sirola) -and other advisers in a plot to remove the Chief Executive by literally blasting him out of office.

Chief rattles along on the intricacies of its plot-and-conspiracy narrative, but its humor is dispensed with all the subtlety of a bazooka blast. In the middle of an important conference, the President accepts a Paris call from "Henry," who places a rush order for some Reuben's cheesecake. The Rev. Mr. Williams assures a troubled Chief that "in times of distress, prayer is a powerful laxative."

Director Levinson, a former cartoonist and animator, gets off a few broadly effective visual gags (the president of the steelworkers union taking a bubble bath in his hard hat), but he has all the ironic sense of a divorce-court magistrate, and the sort of teary sentimentality that allows him to present scenes of federal troops sacking a hippie camp in slow motion while Judy Collins sings Amazing Grace on the sound track. Nevertheless, one admires the vigor, if not the style, of his attack.

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