The President's Analyst

James Coburn is a New York head-shrinker who has everything--a luxurious office where he practices on a Chinese gong between couchings, a patient (Godfrey Cambridge) who is a killer for the Central Emergency Agency, a delicious young bedmate (Joan Delaney), and the biggest smile in the American Psychoanalytic Association. He also has a psychiatrist of his own, who tells him one day that Coburn has mysteriously been picked to unburden the mind of no less a personage than the President of the United States. Presumably, as Kings once had confessors, Presidents now need analysts.

Coburn is delighted to find himself and girl friend installed in a little Georgian love nest in Washington, equipped with flashing red lights that summon him to the White House. But the shared anxieties of state soon give him a case of galloping paranoia, and as the President's analyst comes unglued, the movie swings off on a broad, bawdy, satirical spoof of such U.S. cult objects as secret-agentry, hippiedom, and the supposedly happy New Jersey household where Dad has his "car gun" and his "house gun," Mom takes karate lessons, and Sonny taps the family phone with his Junior Spy Kit.

What strings it all together is Coburn's hairbreadth escapes from a herd of foreign agents trying to kidnap him for the secrets in his head and the men from something called the Federal Board of Regulation trying to kill him for the same reason. Coburn romps spryly through the part, with the comic cooperation of Severn Darden as a friendly Russian spy with an Oedipal problem, and Walter Burke as the uptight head of the FBR who exhorts his faceless men (all under 5 ft.): "Kill him . . . the nation expects it ... think of your mothers." Coburn's most dangerous and ingenious pursuer, though, turns out to be an automated phone company and--the film's best real-life touch--it seems to be winning in the end.

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