The Movie Presidents of Election Years

London Has Fallen (Focus Features)

If there’s one thing I thought about while watching London Has Fallen, it’s “this movie is so stabby.” Second to that, though, I kept thinking about this year’s presidential election and what the candidates from both parties would look like running for their lives alongside Gerard Butler. I find it hard to picture any of the men or women currently down to live in the White House as aligning well with Aaron Eckhart’s President Asher, who is for the most part a very reserved character but able to be tough when needed. Everyone seeking election right now seems the opposite, boastful but probably not actually so great in a fight. Even with Butler’s protection.

The other significant fictional POTUS at the movies this year is Sela Ward’s President Lanford in Independence Day: Resurgence. Obviously a woman in the Oval Office on the big screen aligns with just one candidate in 2016 (now that Fiorina has dropped out): Hilary Clinton. It’s unclear yet, however, if Lanford will in fact be a conservative like the actress who plays her or more intently modeled after Clinton given that director Roland Emmerich has supported her as a candidate in the past. We have until the end of June (a month before the conventions) to see if the character is truly representative of this year’s election or its possible outcome.

The sequel also features the original movie’s now ex-President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), who was somewhat modeled after Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton (with a touch of JFK), then seeking re-election at the time of the movie’s release. What might have been interesting is if Whitmore’s wife was the POTUS of Resurgence, but of course she died rather dramatically on screen 20 years ago. Also, that would be way too on point. And a good way of potentially making it immediately dated. Movies can model their US leaders after sitting presidents, but they aren’t made quickly enough these days to be so directly aligned with figures seeking election.

MGM

In the past, Hollywood was faster, while politicians were apparently slower. As late as April 1948, Frank Capra’s State of the Union had an alleged impact on President Truman, who saw the movie at its premiere and then made more of an active effort to seek a bid for a second term. The movie is about a Republican candidate (played by Spencer Tracy), and while I’m certain he’s not based on anyone specifically — he originates in a 1945 play — his competition is said to be actual 1948 GOP hopefuls like Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft, and there’s reference to such real legislature as the Taft-Hartley Act.

The next big election year to see some notable fictional movie presidents was 1964, with the trio of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Seven Days in May and Fail-Safe. The first two were scheduled to come out the prior year but were delayed because of JFK’s assassination. Seven Days in May had full encouragement from the Kennedy administration, and although set a decade later, its President Lyman (Fredric March) is clearly modeled after the man in office during its production. Yet he looks more like his successor and then incumbent, Lyndon Johnson. All three movies deal with the Cold War, which was certainly an issue for the election, and two involve the start of a nuclear war. With GOP choice Barry Goldwater notoriously saying, “Let’s lob [a nuke] into the men’s room at the Kremlin,” he’d be aligned with the scary endings of Strangelove (where Peter Sellers’s President Muffley is actually modeled after continuous candidate Adlai Stevenson) and Fail-Safe.

MGM

In 1968, the most significant presidential movie — Wild in the Streets — was of course interested in the idea of a young representative of the counterculture for office (even younger than not-yet-assassinated hopeful Bobby Kennedy). In 1972, we got The Man, in which James Earl Jones plays the first US president not elected to that or the vice-presidential office. While not immediately relevant then, just two years later, Gerald Ford actually did become the first president with that distinction. For 1980, there was The Kidnapping of the President, one of the original presidential action thrillers, perfect for the year a cowboy became president in part thanks to another kind of international kidnapping, and Buck Henry’s satirical First Family, for which Bob Newhart’s President Link was inspired by various recent commanders in chief, and in which there’s another international kidnapping.

After a few presidential elections without a notable movie tie-in, Hollywood really upped its game in 1996. In addition to Independence Day‘s Whitmore, there was Mars Attacks‘ President Dale (Jack Nicholson), which arrived post-election, First Kid‘s President Davenport (James Naughton), who could have been associated with Bill Clinton solely in that he had a teenage child in the White House, and My Fellow Americans‘ President Haney (Dan Aykroyd), a Republican who has defeated a one-termer, who’d previously defeated a one-termer, hinting that Clinton could have had as short a life in the White House as George H. W. Bush before him (but it also came out after the election).