October 7th
The Candidate

The Candidate, released in 1972 by Warner Brothers, and directed by Michael Ritchie, is based on a screenplay by Jeremy Larner. The movie follows the political journey of a reluctant, idealistic candidate, Bill McKay (played by Robert Redford), who is persuaded by political operative Marvin Lucas (played by Peter Boyle) to run as the Democratic candidate for Senate in California, a race assumed to be unwinnable.

'"The Candidate…presents us with various individual lessons … the overall gist of which is that it’s not enough actually to be an attractive, smart young idealist; you need to become “the attractive, smart young idealist,” i.e. a certain media type that voters will recognize as such. The satirical point, you might say, is that creating even a true image takes careful crafting, and that this process has an undertow—the crafting itself induces cynicism, thus making the image at least a bit less true."

 Megan Garber, September 26, 2016. The Atlantic