The Man (1972)

          A true ’70s obscurity that’s well worth tracking down, The Manis a whip-smart imaginary tale about the first black U.S. president. Built around a taut screenplay by Rod Serling and a commanding performance by James Earl Jones, the picture now seems quite prescient—believe it or not, the title character’s campaign slogan is “Change.” Based on a novel by Irving Wallace, the story presents a convoluted chain of events leading to the installation of Sen. Douglass Dilman as president. After the previous commander in chief and the Speaker of the House are killed in an accident, the sitting vice president exits the line of succession because he’s terminally ill. Thus, the presidency falls to the Senate’s pro tem president, Dilman. This doesn’t sit well with white power brokers including Secretary of State Eaton (William Windom), who has designs on the Oval Office, and Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith), an unapologetic racist from an unnamed Southern state. As a result, Dilman is a political target from the moment he takes power.

          Even potential supporters have issues with Dilman, simply because his ascension carries the weight of history. In one of the film’s best quiet moments, Dilman shares an exchange with his activist daughter, Wanda (Janet MacLachlan), the night he inherits the presidency. “They were expecting a black messiah,” Dilman says about African-Americans. Her reply? “What they’ve got is a black president—that’s more than they’ve ever gotten.” Then Dilman delivers the kicker, which resonates strongly in the Obama era: “I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.” The Man poignantly anticipates the gulf between dreams and reality that has been the source of so much anti-Obama criticism and disappointment.

          Yet The Man cleverly sidesteps the question of what a black president might do with a mandate, instead portraying Dilman as a dedicated public servant who inherits a racially charged mess. At the moment he takes the oath of office, a young African-American college student is under suspicion following an attempt on the South African defense minister’s life, and a minority-rights bill is working its way through Congress. Worse, domestic adversaries including Watson, Eaton, and Eaton’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife, Kay (Barbara Rush), forge political wedges with which to dislodge Dilman’s political standing, lest the accidental president decide he wants a full term.

          The Man is preachy and talky—Serling shares with Aaron Sorkin the debate-club approach to dramatic structure—but the plot churns with enough Beltway skullduggery to ground the speechifying in suspense. Director Joseph Sargent, a reliable TV-trained helmer, serves the material well by staying out of the way, and the acting is uniformly vivid. Meredith and Rush are believably loathsome as D.C. barracudas, Georg Sanford Brown lends fire as the impassioned college student, and the great Martin Balsam provides gravitas and warmth as the president’s chief of staff. The whole movie rests on Jones’ shoulders, however, and he meets the challenge with grace. Portraying an intellectual who has channeled his indignation into diplomatic rhetoric, Jones employs his formidable powers to convey charisma, strength, and wisdom—the very qualities that, decades later, distinguish the individual who changed history in the real world the way the Dilman character changed history in the reel world.

The Man: RIGHT ON

Chariots of the Gods (1970) & The Outer Space Connection (1975) & Mysteries of the Gods (1976)

          The notion that space aliens visited Earth in the distant past was the stuff of science fiction (and Scientology) until Swiss author Eric Von Däniken published his blockbuster book Chariots of the Gods? in 1968. Utilizing a sexy mix of conjecture, factoids, and pseudoscience, Von Däniken argued that because ancient civilizations accomplished seemingly impossible tasks (for example, building the Pyramids), “ancient astronauts” must have provided extraterrestrial assistance. Although considered a joke by the scientific community, Von Däniken’s book was quickly adapted into a German documentary movie, which was then re-dubbed into English and released in America as Chariots of the Gods—without the question mark, a telling detail. While it’s easy to imagine the movie thrilling audiences during an era rich with drugs and existentialism, Chariots of the Gods is thoroughly ridiculous, and quite dull, when viewed today.

          Comprising National Geographic-type footage of various locations around the globe, the movie is driven by wall-to-wall narration and cheap-sounding electronic music. The following excerpt from the narration captures the movie’s loopy perspective: “Hardly more than a thousandth of these ancient sources has given up its secrets. Moreover, what has been decoded calls for careful study to determine just what verifiable facts they contain. We should no longer permit ourselves to dismiss accounts of sky vehicles and traveling deities as sheer imagination.” In other words, who needs proof when we’ve got exciting theories? Things get really silly when literal interpretations of the Bible are offered as evidence of alien technology—what if Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by the world’s first nuclear bombs? At its worst, Chariots of the Gods succumbs to childish mental exercises: “If you multiply the height of the pyramid by 1 billion, it equals almost exactly the distance from the earth to the sun—a mere coincidence?”

          Chariots of the Gods was re-edited, and given a new Rod Serling narration track, to become a 1973 TV special called In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and Serling also narrated the 1975 theatrical documentary The Outer Space Connection. Dry and meandering, the movie rehashes ideas from Chariots of the Godsand wanders into other puzzlers that captured the popular imagination in the ’70s, including the Bermuda Triangle. Serling’s vocal work is as robustly eerie here as it was during his Twilight Zonedays, but the parade of unanswered questions and vague insinuations gets boring. At its goofiest, The Outer Space Connection features an interview with some beardy scientist who claims “It’s very possible that pyramid energy could be used to preserve tissues over extended periods of time, such as long space travel or cloning purposes.” Following The Outer Space Connection, yet another Chariots-inspired doc hit screens later in 1975, titled Mysteries from Beyond Earth and hosted by Hollywood actor Lawrence Dobkin, but that picture has mostly disappeared, probably for good reason.

          In terms of sheer kitsch, the most enjoyable “ancient astronauts” doc is Mysteries of the Gods—or, to cite the full title that reveals the movie’s secret ingredient—William Shatner’s Mysteries of the Gods. Yes, our beloved Captain Kirk leads the search for evidence that little green men once bivouacked on Earth. Originally filmed as a German documentary titled Botschaft der Götter (which was based on a Chariots sequel book by Von Däniken), the picture was refurbished for American audiences by adding Shatner’s narration and several long scenes of Shatner interviewing “experts” about life beyond our planet. The combination of Shatner’s campy performance style and the film’s low-rent electronic music makes Mysteries of the Gods entertaining despite the movie’s dubious assertions. Wearing tacky ’70s fashions, Shatner strolls around places like the Kennedy Space Center, listening to outlandish claims that alien visitations explain the Big Bang and the development of the human brain.

          In the movie’s most unintentionally hilarious scene, Shatner visits a woman who discovered a “crystal skull” among Mayan ruins. “We’ve used the modern airplane to come and see something very ancient, the crystal skull—it’s ominous, it’s awesome,” Shatner intones dramatically. Then, once he’s got the artifact in his hands, he says, “I’m trying to put myself back in time and space, back to when the skull was used for religious ceremonies. Can you describe to me [dramatic pause] how it was used?” By the time Shatner’s chatting with psychic Jeanne Dixon—who says that absolutely, definitely, for sure aliens will visit Earth in August 1977—Mysteries of the Gods has achieved liftoff as a masterpiece of reckless bullshit. Although the “ancient astronauts” genre is still going strong, with projects including occasional revivals of the Chariots of the Godsfranchise, nothing will ever capture the sheer ’70s-ness of the fad better than Shatner’s stupefying spectacle.

Chariots of the Gods: LAME

The Outer Space Connection: LAME

Mysteries of the Gods: FUNKY