Cinema: Old Hat in the Ring

• Share

The Best Man is Gore Vidal's behind-the-scenes melodrama about the in-fighting at a national political convention. A tantalizing game of who's who, peopled with characters who were composites of men in public life, the play bounced onto Broadway four years ago, timed for the 1960 elections. The 1964 movie version tries to be similarly topical, but the prototypes don't match any now around. Some of the dialogue still sizzles, but the effort to freshen it with references to integration only points up how out of date the Eisenhower-Nixon-Stevenson jokes are.

A more serious flaw lies in the film's slick casting. Lee Tracy delivers Man's best performance, repeating his stage role as a former President, a tough old war horse who is dying of cancer but savors a final taste of power as two party hopefuls battle to win his support. "There is nothing like a dirty, lowdown political fight to put the roses in your cheeks," snaps Tracy with cantankerous glee. The candidates before him are Cliff Robertson, a cutthroat crusader who adapts his convictions to the latest Gallup surveys, and Henry Fonda, the idealistic egghead. Fonda lacks the cheek, magnetism, and driving ambition to make his bid for high office seem more than perfunctory. Thus when Robertson threatens to release a medical report showing that Fonda once had a mental breakdown and is a habitual philanderer, it is obvious that Fonda will be too decent to retaliate by bringing up Robertson's own involvement in an Army homosexual scandal. Director Franklin Schaffner further dissipates the film's climactic confrontation scene with Robertson's old Army buddy, letting TV Comic Shelley Berman play the role mostly for laughs. Appearances by Edie Adams, Negro Singer Mahalia Jackson, Commentators Howard K. Smith and John Henry Faulk, and Vidal himself (as a Senator) range from agreeable to irrelevant. Margaret Leighton, at loose ends in a truncated role as Fonda's wife, somehow suggests that she is running for the throne of England.