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Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1969 classic 'Z' ... is as bold, jagged, and modern as its one-letter title. No one, including its director, has ever made another film like it. A treatise on politics that's also a tightly woven pulp thriller... Z makes political intelligence seem chicer than skinny neckties.
In an unnamed country -- the relentless sunshine and zither-driven score suggest Greece, but everyone speaks French -- the power is in the hands of a military dictatorship. An activist leader, Zei (Yves Montand), arrives from abroad to lead a peace rally, provoking a riot and an assassination. In the aftermath of this unrest, a young judge is appointed by the state to hear the assassins' case, with the assumption that he'll buckle under pressure from the regime to make Zei's death look like an accident.
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Hollywood has long been fascinated with politics and has literally made hundreds of movies about both domestic and international political developments. Many of the movies I've included in this diary include such diverse themes as alienation, cynicism, intrigue, colonization, assassinations, revolution, and repression.
There's probably not much agreement as to what constitutes a "political" movie. This explanation is as good as any I've found
I think the first task is to figure out what, exactly, a political movie is. There are obvious choices like Robert Redford’s The Candidate and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Obviously political, those two. But what about Dr. Strangelove? Is that a nuclear war film or a political film? What about JFK? Is that a conspiracy theory film or a political film? Just because it has the name of a president as its title, there’s nothing particularly political about it, you know?
For my own list, I defined "political movie" as any movie that revolves around the world of politics, even if it’s not explicitly about politics. Dr. Strangelove makes the cut; JFK does not.
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The Candidate (1972)
This film ought to be much better known than it is. Robert Redford plays the idealist lawyer Bill Mackay who is persuaded by the political establishment to run for the Senate on the grounds that he cannot possibly win and so he can say what he wants. The trouble is, of course, that he starts to do much better than expected, he begins to compromise his political beliefs to win votes and, before he knows it, the machine has swallowed him whole.
The movie anticipates Clintonism in the States and Blairism in Britain -- where the spin often means more than the substance -- and the best scene is where the whole charade becomes so farcical that the candidate simply cannot stop laughing as he tries to record a television interview. Both the director Michael Ritchie and the scriptwriter Jeremy Lander were political campaigners in the 1960s and they have obviously brought some of their own experience to this incisive movie.
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Reds (1981)
How could a film about the struggles of the American far Left attract multi-million dollar finance from Barclays Bank and pull in large audiences in Reagan’s USA? "Reds" was a personal triumph for Warren Beatty -- then aged 45 -- who produced and directed this huge work, co-wrote the screenplay (with British Leftwing playwright Trevor Griffiths), and played the leading role.
At one level, "Reds" is a love story. It portrays the stormy affair and marriage between the American journalist, poet and playwright, John Reed (played by Beatty) -- the author of Ten Days That Shook The World -- and the feminist writer, Louise Bryant (played by Diane Keaton). But this grand romance is a Hollywood device to give popular flavour to the narration of the disintegration of the American Left and the birth of the Soviet Union.
(It) deploys the unusual device of intercutting throughout the movie interviews with 32 "witnesses, " people who actually knew Reed and Bryant or moved in similar circles. However, it is compelling viewing and the principal achievement is to present something of the excitement and idealism, as well as the factionalism and verbosity, of revolutionary politics.
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The Battle of Algiers aka La battaglia di Algeri (1966)
This movie is about the mid-to-late 1950s (1954-1962) struggle between the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French colonials in the capital of Algeria.
Shot in grainy, noirish documentary-style black and white and accompanied by an Ennio Morrocone orchestral score, this stylistic film told the story of the birth of Algerian independence from French colonial rule, the rise of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and the French response, by Colonel Phillipe Mathieu (Jean Martin, the film's only professional actor), to the group’s terrorist, insurgency, and propaganda campaigns. The film was unflinching in displaying the atrocities committed by both sides.
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Bulworth (1999)
There’s no doubting that Warren Beatty is a political animal... Beatty himself is Senator Jay Bulworth in the last stages of a re-election campaign backed by the necessary big business finance obtained in return for a cynical Bill-blocking operation, but the corruption of Congressional politics has now eaten so deeply into his soul that he makes some fateful decisions. Halle Berry -- in a grittier role than her appearance in "The Flintstones" – plays Nina, a poor black American who helps to reshape his vision.
The message is uncompromising: US politics has been totally corrupted by the campaign funding of corporate America and neither Republicans nor Democrats are prepared to fund the programmes necessary for disenfranchised blacks to move out of poverty and crime. But the format is new: this revolutionary message -- on two occasions, even the word "socialism" is used -- is delivered in the main through rap music. The movie’s intention is honourable, but do we really believe that, if a senior American politician came out against corporatism and called for public funding of anti-poverty programmes, voters would give him landslide support? Bullshit, Bulworth!
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Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Judgment at Nuremberg centers around a military tribunal in which four judges are accused of crimes against humanity for their actions during the Nazi regime. Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy), the chief justice in the case, attempts to understand how defendant Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) could have passed sentences resulting in genocide, and by extension how the German people could have turned blind eyes and deaf ears to the Holocaust. Doing so, he befriends the widow (Marlene Dietrich) of a German general and talks with a number of Germans with different perspectives on the war. Other characters the Judge meets are U.S. Army Captain Byers (William Shatner), who is assigned to the American party hearing the cases, and Irene Wallner (Judy Garland), who is afraid to bring testimony that may turn the case against the judges in favor of the prosecution.
The film examines the questions of individual complicity in crimes committed by the state... In the end, Janning makes a statement condemning himself and his fellow defendants for "going along" with the Third Reich and all four are found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
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The rest of the movies included in the diary poll are Malcolm X (1992), Being There (1979), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), All the President's Men (1976), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
Malcolm X
The Motorcycle Diaries
Being There (1979), subtitled "a story of chance," is a provocative black comedy -- a wonderful tale that satirizes politics, celebrity, media-obsession and television. The subtle film's slogan proclaimed: "Getting there is half the fun. Being there is all of it."
It is a placid fable about Chance (Peter Sellers), a reclusive, illiterate, passive and simple-minded gardener who is well-groomed, fed on schedule, and dressed in custom-tailored suits, has lived his whole sheltered life on the walled-in estate of an eccentric millionaire named Jennings (his father?). His only knowledge of the "real" outside world, an encroaching inner-city ghetto area, is through watching television. His meals have always been prepared by the estate's black cook Louise (Ruth Attaway).
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The Manchurian Candidate
Doctor Zhivago
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All the President's Men
It was Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein who uncovered the connections between the Watergate 'plumbers' and the White House and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman respectively are excellent as the two young men who unravel the complex truth. Alan J Pakula was the director of this absorbing work, but it is not always easy to follow the dialogue or the plot and it is more about investigative journalism than politics as such. We now know still do not know the identity of 'Deep Throat.'
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Hotel Rwanda
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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A Note About the Diary Poll
Many, many worthy candidates like Wag the Dog did not make the diary poll. In some instances, movies like Gandhi and Lawrence of Arabia have been included and much-discussed in recent diaries that I have written. So, this is not the best, greatest, or, even, the definitive list on great political movies. If your favorite movie isn't on the list, do mention it in your comments and tell us why you liked it.
A few helpful lists on political movies are