The President's Analyst (1967, Theodore J. Flicker) (Patreon)

77/100

Second viewing, last seen 1998. Like Joe Versus the Volcano, this feels like the product of a fully formed, utterly unique comic sensibility that would never again achieve such undiluted delirium (though I haven't seen Flicker's other films, none of which has any kind of reputation that I'm aware of). I'd somehow forgotten that it blithely ignores its ostensible premise, keeping the President entirely offscreen and conveying the therapy sessions via recurring shots of Dr. Schaefer exiting the room, his anxiety level ramped up a little following each successive visit. (Coburn's hilarious paranoid jump-and-crouch at one point makes me wish that he, not Lee Marvin, had starred in Cat Ballou.) Rather than an executive-branch forebear of Analyze This, mining gags from a commander-in-chief's neuroses, we get sheer random goofiness that ultimately fingers AT&T (more or less) as the source of all the world's problems. Flicker establishes controlled chaos from the jump, using Lalo Schifrin's jazzy, decidedly heterogeneous score to leap among wildly different moods throughout the film's opening sequence; he's also down for grandiose visual humor, e.g. cutting mid-zoom toward the faraway Statue of Liberty to a close-up of Schaefer, then pulling back to reveal that he's now in the statue's torch. Love the parade of outlandish compositions when Schaefer and his own therapist meet at the Whitney. Love the flashing red alert light that sometimes dominates the entire screen and sometimes emanates from a particular object, like a bowl of soup in a restaurant. Love the initial kidnapping attempt that goes awry because the "ordinary" couple Schaefer befriended turn out to be a left-wing gun nut and a karate student. There are even a handful of choice one-liners, as when Schaefer raves that government-sanctioned execution is "just a sensational solution to [his patient's] hostility problem." 

Flicker cut his teeth in the same improv group as Mike Nichols, and cowrote his debut feature, The Troublemaker, with Buck Henry; despite a considerably more antic disposition, I can see a certain resemblance—in the combination of formal aggression and performative deadpan—between this film and The Graduate, which was released literally on the same day (and which remains one my all-time favorites, anniversary-year takedowns be damned). What's slightly odd here are Flicker's occasional nods at a darker, more serious tone, none of which really go anywhere or amount to anything. Early on, he not only has Godfrey Cambridge's CIA (sorry, "CEA") assassin deliver a lengthy monologue about learning what the n-word meant, but orchestrates a slow dolly around Cambridge that ends with his body completely obscuring Coburn's—the inverse, racially, of a similarly pointed shot in Sirk's Imitation of Life. It's powerful stuff, but the movie otherwise has no discernible interest in civil rights, preferring to satirize the Summer of Love (which was probably in full swing during the shoot). Likewise, the FBI (sorry, "FBR") spying on an American civilian via his girlfriend—who's apparently strongarmed into doing so, given that she sheds a silent tear after recording his phone call—generates neither laughs nor outrage. It's not even an important plot point, really. Just something that happens. Missed opportunities like these hold the film back from real greatness, and I also can't deny that Flicker's inspiration flags significantly around the time that Schaefer awakens on the Canadian yacht (though he rallies for the gloriously wacked-out Phone Company climax, obviously). You get a lot of leeway, though, if you can crack me up with nothing more than an unexpected music cue and your lead actor's sudden manic grin.