Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief

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Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief

by Mark Feeney

4.33 · rating details · 6 ratings · 1 review

Was it an omen? Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913. As Mark Feeney relates in this unusual and unusually absorbing book, Nixon and the movies have shared a long and complex history. Some of that historyand Hollywood's. From the obvious (All the President's Men) to the less so (Elvis Presley movies and Nixon's relations...more

Hardcover, 436 pages

Published November 22nd 2004 by University of Chicago Press

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Jun 29, 2011

Lily Bart rated it

I absolutely loved this book! Every chapter is full of insights into Nixon and the movies. Mark Feeney takes five movies Nixon is known to have enjoyed, and wrings out all kinds of fascinating connections between the story line and Nixon's own personality. Not only politics, but culture and sex and money and ambition and pain -- this book teaches amazing lessons on everything that shaped Nixon. Don't miss the sections on Elvis and Nixon as twin icons of un-cool!

My only complaint is ...moreI absolutely loved this book! Every chapter is full of insights into Nixon and the movies. Mark Feeney takes five movies Nixon is known to have enjoyed, and wrings out all kinds of fascinating connections between the story line and Nixon's own personality. Not only politics, but culture and sex and money and ambition and pain -- this book teaches amazing lessons on everything that shaped Nixon. Don't miss the sections on Elvis and Nixon as twin icons of un-cool!

My only complaint is that Feeney never brings Humphrey Bogart into the mix. The amazing and authentic "movie diary" at the end of the book makes it clear that Nixon screened both THE CAINE MUTINY and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE while in the White House. Why didn't Mark Feeney jump on the SCREAMINGLY obvious ties between Nixon and Bogey?

Look at Humphrey Bogart's face -- the mean, kicked around face of Richard Nixon. Look at the unshaved beard, the shifty, beady little eyes. Look at how every man Bogart ever played was a cold, paranoid loner at heart, often with a homicidal streak. It's much easier for me to see Nixon as the vicious small time prospector Fred C. Dobbs (in TREASURE) or as the frightened, incompetent naval officer Philip Queeg (in CAINE) than as the smooth, sexually confident insurance salesman played by Fred MacMurray in DOUBLE INDEMNITY.

Note how Fred C. Dobbs is convinced everyone is after him. Note how he's capable of holding on to sanity -- just barely -- until he finally strikes it rich. The fact of finally having gold is what makes him lose his fragile grip on reality -- just the way Nixon survived years of political exile but cracked up the moment all his dreams were within his grasp. By turning on his buddies in bandit country, Dobbs ensures his own downfall systematically. He commits all the most horrifying acts of betrayal, but in his tortured mind it's always a matter of self-preservation. ("No, not murder, partner, not murder, your mistake! I'm saving my life that you'd be taking from me!")Sound familiar?

And how could Feeney have skipped writing a chapter on Bogart's role as Commander Philip Queeg in THE CAINE MUTINY? Nixon is so obviously Queeg it's like the movie was an eerie prophecy. Queeg is a weak, shifty eyed nervous wreck pathetically masquerading as a heroic military commander. Queeg knows he's not the John Wayne type. And he knows his officers know it. He constantly feels menaced by "disloyal officers" and insists "from the first they were all against me." Queeg routinely lies and cheats in order to avoid taking responsibility for his own ineptness as a commander. ("Take the towline . . . defective equipment . . . nothing more!")Queeg longs to rouse and inspire with his speeches, but his attempts at frank man to man talk are pathetically hollow. ("I kid you not.")THE CAINE MUTINY is the best movie ever made about Watergate.

Humphrey Bogart would have been the most logical choice to play Nixon in a major motion picture. He understood Nixon and acted out his tragedy back when Nixon himself was just a young congressman from California. How did the brilliant Mark Feeney miss the Bogart connection? (less)

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