Theodore J. Flickner should get some credit after the fact: The President's Analyst is nothing if not original, for its time anyway. Take the topic of analysis, of the psychological profession, and put it to use in a political satire on the Cold War and the period of total paranoia. And casting James Coburn was a wise choice as he's an untapped source of comic potential (sometimes with just a smile or grin with those big pearly whites of his), often in subtle bits of acting and facial movements. But it's unfortunately not quite as successful as it could've been; the potential here is wide and great in skewering, for example, LBJ and his plunging-America-into-Vietnam administration. While the filmmaker does go after the paranoid aspects pretty well- and does something almost half-clever in not ever showing the president let alone his analyst sessions- at some point it veers off into strange and dated territory.
For the latter, I mean the stuff involving the phone company. Maybe things were different with those times of the phone company acting like total wastes of space, but nowadays its hard to relate to that skewering, particularly if you didn't live in that time period. It's still kind of interesting with the robots attached to the wall as scary bureaucrats, but one would rather see either the wacky on-the-run theatrics of Coburn's character (i.e. following the Mr. Feeney actor on his way to Seaside heights) or the oddly subtle scenes like with the Russian spy on the ship or even those Roger Corman-style exploitation scenes with the hippies (one of them, with the assassins killing each other off in the grassy fields, is the maybe the funniest scene in the movie).
So it's worth seeing, but it's more of a 'rental' kind of thing than rushing out to buy or seeing on a re-release at an art-house. It is, up to a point, like how one critic described it as "Philip K. Dick meets MAD magazine", but that being said it's only with so-so PKD and MAD.
For the latter, I mean the stuff involving the phone company. Maybe things were different with those times of the phone company acting like total wastes of space, but nowadays its hard to relate to that skewering, particularly if you didn't live in that time period. It's still kind of interesting with the robots attached to the wall as scary bureaucrats, but one would rather see either the wacky on-the-run theatrics of Coburn's character (i.e. following the Mr. Feeney actor on his way to Seaside heights) or the oddly subtle scenes like with the Russian spy on the ship or even those Roger Corman-style exploitation scenes with the hippies (one of them, with the assassins killing each other off in the grassy fields, is the maybe the funniest scene in the movie).
So it's worth seeing, but it's more of a 'rental' kind of thing than rushing out to buy or seeing on a re-release at an art-house. It is, up to a point, like how one critic described it as "Philip K. Dick meets MAD magazine", but that being said it's only with so-so PKD and MAD.