I don't have a strong desire to review this movie but since only two others have done so, perhaps I had better give my review. The Candidate, like many other exploitation films from the 1930s on, pretends to address a "social problem"--in this case, corruption in Washington. Its taking-off point was the then-recent scandal involving Bobby Baker, an aide to congressman who was "exposed" as a pimp to Washington VIPs. In this film, the equivalent character is called Buddy Barker and the actor who plays him, Eric Mason, aside from being not very talented, is wrong for the part. He plays him like a road company version of Tony Curtis' Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success--appropriate for the Big Apple but the wrong vibe for D. C.
Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said after seeing Darryl Zanuck's film of his novel The Sun Also Rises, "Any picture where Errol Flynn gives the best performance is in trouble." What can you say about a picture where the best performance is given by June Wilkinson? On the evidence of her performance here I'd guess that, were it not for the cheesecake magazine stigma, she might have had a career as a conventional leading lady, along the lines of Joan Fontaine. Too bad she was stuck with the sleazy image! But of course with a picture like this a major part of its appeal is its sleaziness.
Buddy Barker introduces her to an earnest and slightly thick senatorial candidate, fairly well played by Ted Knight. Under his pomposity he's a caring guy, at least where June is concerned; he seems to have even fallen in love with her. The movie's idea of irony is panning over from a shot of he and June rolling bed to a shot of his campaign poster, which has a photo of him looking gutsy and the slogan "He'll conserve your heritage." (It seems obvious that he was cast for his resemblance to Sen. Barry Goldwater.)
The movie keeps cutting to a senatorial investigating committee which is almost as turgid as the real thing, but does provide the immortal line, "Do you intend to show this committee a STAG MOVIE produced by Buddy Barker?" And we get to see this little gem, or part of it anyway--which is the highlight of the movie. (It gets shown at about 116.40, for those who wish to skip the rest.) I have to confess to being unacquainted with stag movies, other than having read, some years back, a lengthy installment of Playboy's endless "Sex in the Cinema" series devoted to this phenomenon, for which the author must have done heroic antiquarian research, watching many an old stag movie at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. (In a late news flash, a print of a long sought-after stag movie starring Joan Crawford, circa 1923, has recently been found and is being preserved by the Kinsey Institute for future generations of researchers.) The one we get to watch here, titled "Steam Heat," involves June and an unappealing burlesque comic as a repairman who has come to fix her radiator which is not giving out any heat. When he does the trick, simply by banging on it, she is grateful enough to want to reward him! This little movie is marvelous, at once sleazy, sexy and outrageously camp. (It's a bit spoiled by cutting away to the senators on the committee--wooden actors--looking "concerned." Some of them shoud look as if they were enjoying it.) If only some of the imagination that went into "Steam Heat" had gone into the rest of the movie!
I can envision an alternate movie, one with more intelligence and wit, in which June Wilkinson's character, Angela, is presented as a blithe, high-spirited Zuleika Dobson thoughtlessly but quite unintentionally decimating Washington's self-important but--believe it or not--emotionally vulnerable senators and congressmen. (Unfortunately US senators are too hardened to be equivalent to Beerbohm's dreamy Oxford youths.)
Recommended for June's performance--and especially for "Steam Heat." -- Patrick O'Neill.
