Other comedies that mock politics, politicians
“Viva la Libertà” and “Dave” are hardly alone in their zeal to send up politics. Film has produced a wealth of political satires. Here are a handful of titles, a small sample of comedies that aim to expose the pettiness, corruption, paranoia and worse of politics and politicians.
“The Great McGinty” (1940): Preston Sturges applies his madcap wit to politics in this lively satire starring Brian Donlevy as a tramp who begins his rise to power by casting multiple votes at $2 a pop and eventually becomes governor, only to discover that he does have a conscience, after all.
“The Great Dictator” (1940): Charlie Chaplin’s first talkie also uses the idea of twins as a Jewish barber is mistaken for his country’s anti-Semitic ruler in a cutting satire of Hitler and the rising Nazis, a film Chaplin began making in 1938 in answer to American isolationists.
“Our Man in Havana” (1959): This Cold War farce, an adaptation of a Graham Greene novel, stars Alec Guinness as a Havana vacuum cleaner salesman/spy whose fanciful reports are taken as truth both by his British intelligence handlers and the enemy agents who intercept them.
“The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” (1964): Alan Arkin’s breakthrough role was as a crewman on a Soviet submarine that stalls on a sandbar on the New England coast. Carl Reiner is one of the locals who greets the Russian visitors with alarm in Norman Jewison’s wacky Cold War comedy.
“The President’s Analyst” (1967): James Coburn is the charming center of this rollicking comedy as the shrink to the leader of the free world who becomes the targets of a variety of spies and assassins. Writerdirector Theodore J. Flicker lampoons everything from spy movies to international politics to the phone company in a wild tale in which a Soviet agent (Severn Darden) is far more trustworthy than anyone on Coburn’s own side.
“Wild in the Streets” (1968): Fourteen-year-olds get the vote, everyone over 35 is sent to camps and dosed with LSD, and a rock star rises to the presidency in this musical flower power-era satire seemingly inspired by the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
“Being There” (1979): Peter Sellers had one of his greatest roles in Hal Ashby’s gentle comedy as a sweet, slow-witted gardener who rises to the heights of Washington, D.C., social and political circles when
his simplicity is mistaken for wisdom.
“Brazil” (1985): Terry Gilliam gives a nod to “1984” in his wickedly funny dystopian fantasy that imagines a totalitarian government that is also the ultimate bureaucratic nightmare, particularly for Jonathan Pryce’s sadsack hero, a government worker bee with a broken air conditioner.
“Bob Roberts” (2002): Tim Robbins wrote, directed and co-wrote songs for this sharp musical mockumentary. He also stars as the titular folk-singing fascist millionaire running a smoke-and-mirrors campaign for the U.S. Senate, who hides his vicious ruthlessness behind a mask of bonhomie even as he tries to destroy his incumbent rival (Gore Vidal).
“Dick” (1999): Richard Nixon (a brilliant Dan Hedaya) befriends two 15-year-old girls (Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams) who know too much about the Watergate burglary to keep them quiet, which just creates bigger problems in this effervescent parody of the disgraced president, his minions and the scandal that drove him out of office.
“In the Loop” (2009): Peter Capaldi’s bravado turn as a spin doctor is one of the many delights of this sharp satire of Anglo-American relations as various stakeholders, including an antiwar American general ( James Gandolfini) and a bumbling British politician (Tom Hollander), consider going to war in the Middle East.