As faithful readers can attest, we have something of a Nixon obsession here at Mid Century Cinema. And, kind of like one of Jerry’s girlfriends speaking of George—we don’t like him. (Don’t care much for that Henry Kissinger, either, but that’s another matter.)
Thus the following “programing note”—we have an article in the new (Spring 2018) Cineaste: “Who Knew It Could Get Worse: When Nixon Haunted the New Hollywood.” A preview of the piece is available on-line here; it includes our favorite paragraph:
“What is astonishing, however, is that the parallels between Nixon and President Trump underscore how much farther still we have fallen. Say what you will about Nixon—one of the great American villains of the twentieth century—he was nevertheless eminently qualified for the nation’s highest office: experienced, thoughtful, literate, generally polite in public settings, fluent in politics and policy, sophisticated in his command of international relations (if in practice blood-soaked and immoral), and, notably, whatever his failings, he was not an idiot. Nixon was a vulgar racist but he knew enough to keep such shameful qualities private (his supporters were shocked by the Nixon they heard on the tapes); he was an inveterate liar but did not traffic in the Orwellian lie (insisting that the facts were different from the plainly visible truth); it is very likely that Nixon wrote more books in his lifetime than Donald Trump has read.”
Over the course of the essay that follows we check in with thirty-five seventies films (many of which we have discussed on these pages), all of which were made in the shadow of the Nixon presidency—even if they seemed to be about something quite different.
