Roger Ebert awarded an early four-star review to Ted Flicker's The President's Analyst, praising James Coburn's performance and the film's sharp satire of paranoia
The President’s Analyst, a late‑1960s oddity written and directed by Ted Flicker, mixes satire, spy pastiche and surreal comedy in a way that baffled moviegoers and delighted many critics. James Coburn stars as Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a New York psychiatrist summoned to Washington to be the president’s personal analyst. What starts as a single, high‑profile assignment quickly unravels into a madcap flight across a caricatured America—federal agents, corporate goons and foreign operatives all converge, and the film moves between farce, thriller beats and pointed social jabs.
At the time of its December 1967 release audiences largely shrugged. The picture’s refusal to fit a neat genre box—part political lampoon, part spy spoof, part absurdist sketch—made it a hard sell: trailers and posters struggled to capture its tone, and ticket sales reflected that confusion. Yet reviewers responded differently. Many praised Flicker’s appetite for risk and the screenplay’s willingness to lampoon institutions from government agencies to corporate monopolies (yes, even the phone company gets skewered).
Roger Ebert, recently hired at the Chicago Sun‑Times, gave the film one of his early four‑star reviews, a prominent boost that helped secure its place in critical discussion despite weak box office. Ebert admired Coburn’s comic timing and Flicker’s knack for blending broad slapstick with sharper social commentary—qualities that made the film feel both televisual and unpredictable. Flicker’s background on shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. shows in the film’s brisk, sketch‑like rhythm.
Critics also noted how the movie anticipated later anxieties about surveillance and corporate reach. Scenes that once read as overblown began to look prescient as conversations about privacy and business power intensified in later decades. That sense of foresight is a major reason scholars and programmers keep returning to the film: retrospectives, academic essays and festival screenings have quietly rebuilt its reputation.
Still, the gap between praise and popular success never fully closed. The President’s Analyst settled into cult‑status territory—admired for inventiveness but never embraced as a mainstream classic. For many, it’s a fascinating time capsule of late‑1960s political paranoia and comic daring: a film that tests tone and form, rewarding those willing to go along for the ride.
In short: Ted Flicker made a nimble, strange satire anchored by Coburn’s loose performance; contemporary audiences found it bewildering, while critics—none more influential than the young Roger Ebert—recognized its ambition. Today it survives less as a box‑office memory and more as a field of study, revisited for its style, its satire and its oddly timely concerns about power and privacy.