Gore Vidal, always one of our more honest and entertaining political insiders, provides a typically critical look at the closeted skeletons and backstabbing power plays behind a national presidential convention, where Henry Fonda and a young Cliff Robertson square off for their party's nomination. Fonda, more or less typecast as the more rational candidate, plays an admirable but unexciting character surrounded (thankfully) by a gallery of colorful eccentrics bordering on, but never quite reaching, the level of caricature. Chief among them is his rival, Robertson, a sleazy right-wing demagogue modeled, according to the author, after Richard Nixon, although his paranoid tirades would fit comfortably anywhere in the shallow soapbox of post-Reagan political discourse. Oscar nominee Lee Tracy and comedian Shelley Berman lend memorable support, but the real star of the film is Vidal's barbed wit and malicious political insight, none of which has aged a day, even while the old-style national convention depicted here has long since devolved into a meaningless charade of choreographed soundbites and corporate slogans.
Review of The Best Man
