Kind of fun. An episodic, jet-propelled satire of just about everything in the contemporary newspapers. The President of the US (Lyndon B. Johnson at the time, briefly glimpsed walking his hound dogs on the White House lawn) is a troubled man. He recruits a psychoanalyst (James Coburn). Johnson was REALLY troubled. Troubled enough to summon Coburn at all hours of the day or night by means of hidden, blinking red lights. The red lights and buzzers interrupt Coburn while he's in sessions with other patients, while he's entering elevators, while he's making love, while he's headed towards the urinal. It drives him nuts, and he finally takes off on his own to escape the burdens.

Alas, the word gets out that the president's analyst is free. He knows so much that every secret agency in the world -- from China and Russia to Canada -- are out to find and kidnap him and send him to what he calls "a brain laundry." Worse, the "CEA" and the "FBR" know this, and they set out to kill him before the others can get him.

The chase takes everyone from Washington, through New York and New Jersey, to the Midwest. Nice to see Greenwich Village again, as it was then, watching Coburn run in and out of the Cafe Wha?, which was on, what, West Fourth? The Cafe Wha? was a phenomenon of the psychedelic age and a lot of the targets here are -- blissed-out hippies and so on.

Nobody -- no social position, no attitudinal set, no object, no entity of any kind -- is spared. William Daniels and his family live in a disgustingly neat and revoltingly decorated middle-class tract home in Seaside Heights. They're liberals. We know they're liberals because Daniels makes a point of telling us. The only thing is, his home and car have .44 magnums stashed in them because they are surrounded by gun-crazy right-wing fascists who might attack them.

The chief of the "FBR" is named Lux, a brand of vacuum cleaner, just like Hoover. Hoover had what amounted to a fetish for tall, impressive agents, so Lux is about five and a half feet tall, and all of his agents are even shorter than he is.

That height business is typical of the jokes. You have to (1) notice it, then (2) interpret it. With some of the other jokes, you might not get past (1). For instance, there is a scene in which Coburn is boffing a hippie chick in the middle of a field and he is stalked by a killer. The killer is killed by an agent of some other government. He in turn is killed by still a different agent, and so on. And as the serial assassinations go on, the weapons used become more and more ridiculous -- from shooting, to strangling, to a blowgun, to poison gas, to a fish net, and finally a pitchfork. It's more ludicrous than funny, I guess, but someone went to some trouble to think of that sequence of weapons.

Competent performances by about all concerned, especially Severn Darden as a Russian agent. Joan Delaney, Coburn's girl friend, looks and acts like a model. She has a whispery, pre-teen voice, and she walks with that half-flailing slink that models have developed for the runway.

It's not a zany laff riot but it's quietly amusing and it is nicely paced, with few pratfalls and a lot of gags that are almost subliminal, especially now that their targets have been almost lost in the mists of antiquity. You might enjoy it more if you'd been around and aware in 1968.

James Coburn is a psychiatrist selected for a major assignment: personal analyst to the President of the U.S. of A. At first, he's beaming with pride at this great honour, until he realizes that he has to be constantly on call. Suffering a nervous breakdown, he goes A.W.O.L. This proves to be too much temptation for foreign powers to withstand, as they send agent after agent to abduct Coburn and find out just what the President may have told him during therapy. Meanwhile, Coburns' own government doesn't want him divulging anything, of course, so now he's expendable.

Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, "The President's Analyst" is a very sharp and clever political satire, taking aim at so-called "liberalism", the hippie generation, the Cold War, etc. It's not necessarily always funny in a "ha-ha" sort of way, but it should continuously amuse the viewer, especially if they were alive during the era when this first was released. Its plot involves such agencies as the "C.E.A." and the "F.B.R.", not to mention the most heinous of them all: "T.P.C." Over 50 years later, it still works quite well, with top performances by all concerned. It further benefits from grand widescreen photography and a jaunty soundtrack composed by Lalo Schifrin. Best of all is the priceless left turn the film takes in the final act, when it shows us just who the TRUE villains are.

Coburn is always fun, and he shines once again in this performance. It's just hilarious to see him hiding out with the hippies, and wearing an appropriate disguise. (He also plays a mean gong.) He's very well supported by a clean-shaven Severn Darden as Russian agent Kropotkin, Godfrey Cambridge as amiable C.E.A. agent Don Masters, and the enticingly sexy Joan Delaney as Coburn's girlfriend. Other familiar faces include Pat Harrington Jr., Jill Banner, Eduard Franz, Walter Burke, Will Geer, William Daniels, Joan Darling, and Arte Johnson. In one interesting twist, we never do see the President on screen.

Good fun, and somewhat forgotten over time, although you CANNOT miss it if you enjoy a solid satire and / or are a big fan of the eternally cool Coburn.

Eight out of 10.

"The President's Analyst" is the sort of movie they wouldn't make today; it's a scatter-shot spoof without a mean-spirited bone in its body. It wouldn't even have been made a couple of years later. Richard M. Nixon, elected president in 1968 and at the top of Hollywood's "Enemy's List" would never have been treated as reverently and indulgently as this unnamed President (obviously LBJ, who was president when this movie was made).

James Coburn (flashing his trademark grin on many occasions) plays Dr. Sidney Schaefer, who is offered, an accepts, the post as analyst to the President of the United States. When he discovers the president now has someone to talk to about his problems and he himself (Schaefer) is denied the privilege because of the high degree of national security he's privy to, he grows increasingly paranoid and he finally escapes -- and is pursued by the secret service of every country in the world, including his own. He tries to deal with problems first by running away, then by facing them and defeating them by intelligence -- and, eventually, by delighting in raw violence.

The movie has culture and counter-culture in its cross-hairs. For instance, while the FBI and CIA are common fodder for satire, when Schaefer finds himself in a group of hippies, they utter vacuous phrases and sing songs with banal lyrics -- and even the hippies, mods and rockers are not what they seem. Though the FBR (based on the FBI, with every agent looking and talking like every other agent) is colored in less than friendly tones, when a young boy uses a derogatory ethnic term, it's an FBR agent who upbraids him and tells him not to use that word because "It's bigoted." A liberal New Jersey householder, trying to show how far he agrees with a liberal president, begins to grouse about the "right wingers" next door who put out a flag every day. "They ought to be gassed," he growls. Moments like these make the movie shine. Whoever you are, whatever your politics or nationality, you can't take offense, since everybody is in the movie's cross-hairs at some time. Even the Canadians.

**Spoiler Alert** The chief enemy in the movie, however, is not the Russians or the FBR or the right-wingers or the liberals or the hippies or even the Canadians, but a common enemy of all. Like the Soviet Union, this enemy is largely non-existent as such these days, but even in its present form it's something everybody loves to hate, whoever their provider.

Coburn is surrounded by a solid cast, chief of whom are Godfrey Cambridge and Severn Darden as friendly rival agents from different sides of the Cold War. They provide lots of laughs, as does Pat Harrington, who comes in late but makes the whole thing worthwhile. The happy ending is SO happy it's a scream, even considering the sting in its tail.