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After Dark: The Candidate with Professor Steve Fielding
18 Plays10 days ago
In this After Dark special, host Joshua Paisley speaks with Professor Steve Fielding about the 1972 Oscar-winning film The Candidate, released just months before Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern. Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, a handsome young radical community lawyer picked to run an unwinnable California Senate race against an 18-year Republican incumbent—on the promise that since he can't win, he can say whatever he likes.
Professor Fielding explains how the film reflects the fractious Democratic Party of 1972, moving left with candidates like Eugene McCarthy while Nixon peeled away white working-class Democrats on racial lines. McKay resembles Robert Kennedy and especially John V. Tunney, the real 36-year-old idealist who won California's Senate seat in 1970. The scriptwriter Jeremy Larner had worked for McCarthy, and director Michael Ritchie had worked on Tunney's campaign—they knew what they were depicting.
The conversation explores McKay's journey from principle to product. At the start, asked about busing to integrate schools, he declares "I'm in favour of it." By the end, he says "we need to look into it." His campaign managers cut his hair, change his ties, edit his factory visits into dynamic clips while suppressing footage of angry Black women at a community hospital. The film shows the alienating reality of 1970s campaigning—the distorted shopping mall speech where he can't see or hear his audience, getting punched in a urinal, ticker tape parades—all still closer to real people than today's complete abstraction through screens.
Professor Fielding reveals the real John V. Tunney lasted just one term before being swept out in 1976, predicting McKay would likely do the same—or quit in frustration, wondering "what am I here for?" The film's most depressing insight isn't that villains corrupt candidates, but that the process itself inevitably does. It ends with McKay's famous line after unexpectedly winning: "What do we do now?"—a question he can't answer because he's no longer the person he thought he was.
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Transcript
Introduction of Guest Expert
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, my name is Joshua Paisley and welcome to the Observation Podcast After Dark. Today, i have the pleasure of welcoming back onto the podcast, Stephen Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham and author of the book, A State of Play.
00:00:27
Speaker
Stephen, good to see you again. How are you getting on? um'm I'm fine, thank you. Yes, I suppose Nottingham would like me to confirm I'm an emeritus professor, which sounds really posh, like it's got merit in it, but it's Latin for retired.
00:00:40
Speaker
But I do have, um I'm still kind of Nottingham University. Yeah, you're still, but for all our YouTube viewers, it's a bit of product placement right there. So
Discussion on 'The Candidate' Film
00:00:49
Speaker
in this episode, we'll be having a look at the Oscar-winning film The Candidate.
00:00:54
Speaker
Released in 1972, the movie follows a handsome John McKay, played by Robert Redford, who makes his bid for governorship of California. So Stephen, how handsome is Robert Redford?
00:01:07
Speaker
Oh, he's so handsome, isn't he? I mean, i mean but it was almost superfluous, you saying that he was playing a a handsome character. I mean, when did Robert Redford not play a handsome character? I don't know. Yeah, it is method acting, to be fair. Yes. So what what kind of, an audience who has never seen the movie The Candidate, what kind of character is McKay in? Can you give a bit of an idea of where the movie maybe goes? Yeah.
00:01:32
Speaker
well
Analysis of Bill McKay's Political Journey
00:01:33
Speaker
Well, Bill McKay is a young, radical community lawyer um who is picked up out of apparent oblivion by a campaign manager, one of those travelling campaign managers who goes and gets people into different seats or contests elections.
00:01:49
Speaker
and And this particular campaign manager decides that Bill McKay is the best guy to be the Democratic nominee for one of the two senatorial seats in California.
00:02:01
Speaker
And and he basically, it's it's it's presented to McKay as this is a race you can't win. No other Democrat really wants to be part of it because the Republican incumbent is so far ahead It's not even worth it. So if you can stand and it doesn't matter, you know.
00:02:20
Speaker
And so he has some objections and some reservations about politics, you know, with a capital P. We eventually learn that that's because his father um had been governor of the state and he's an old style semi-corrupt machine politician.
00:02:36
Speaker
So he's kind of induced to enter the race to be senator. and we follow And the film basically follows his journey from a principled... left-leaning young democratic candidate to being, well, that's, you know, it's not really going to be spoiler alert to find out what happens to him. Yeah, we can delve into that. I mean, just touching upon, you talked about the family and Bill McKay's father, John McKay, was also governor of California.
00:03:05
Speaker
This is something which is almost quite alien in Britain, this idea of family dynasties yeah in that way. which Why do you think there is such a difference there between American and UK politics, or if there is a difference?
00:03:18
Speaker
Well,
Comparison of Political Systems
00:03:19
Speaker
I think partly it's to do with, at least until relatively recently, the power of party in Britain compared to, because in the United States, parties have a much less um strong kind of existence.
00:03:32
Speaker
So I think there is a sort of a greater tendency for, you know, if you're part of of a of ah of a politician's family, probably the the way of getting in is is is actually much easier than you're a Labour or Conservative politician. There are various sort of hoops you've got to sort of go over go through. You go through a hoop, don't you? So that that might be one of the one of the reasons, I think. But, um I mean...
00:03:57
Speaker
I haven't actually ever looked at it statistically, but I think we do have a few sort of dynasties or brothers, sisters, husband, wives. But yeah, in America, i think it's ah it's a bigger thing. And i think increasingly so. In the 1970s, when this film was made, maybe not so much.
00:04:13
Speaker
But there were the Kennedys, of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, we'll talk a little bit about the similarities between McKay and Kennedy a bit later. But rooting the candidate in the context of 1972. So this film was released a few months before Nixon would thrash McGovern in the presidential election.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yeah. Where do you place the candidate and where do you place the Democratic Party at this time? Well, the film, I think, was deliberately made to time with with the 1972 campaign. thank you I'm not sure what kind of a political intervention they hoped to make, but they hoped to make some kind of a statement.
00:04:49
Speaker
And, yeah, you're absolutely right. it it did It was released during the summer of 1972, which was seeing you know Richard Nixon um getting a landslide, which made the whole Watergate stuff completely redundant. You didn't need to
1972 Election and Democratic Party Shift
00:05:03
Speaker
do that.
00:05:03
Speaker
um But American politics at that time, and ah maybe there are some echoes with today, um was increasingly fractious. Nixon based his victory in 1972 on being able to get white, blue-collar, you know, working-class Democrats, to some of them, to vote for him, partly along race racial lines. i mean, race was was ah was an issue in 1972. Vietnam was going on, and the Democrats...
00:05:31
Speaker
in response to what all of those tensions were actually going quite, for them, left to the left, which is why they ended up with George McGovern. And so Bill McCabe, it Bill McCabe is kind of one of those younger, radical, leftish Democrats um who were taking their party in a certain direction, and as it turned out,
00:05:51
Speaker
to catastrophic electoral defeat. I mean, let's let's talk about the comparisons between McKay and other political figures. I mean, you say McKay is this almost a young buck with new ideas, bringing something fresh to the Democratic Party. Yes. you Just Kennedy.
00:06:12
Speaker
Well, maybe Robert Kennedy, who of course was assassinated in 1968. but But apparently, um well, first of all, Jeremy Larner, who wrote the script and won the Oscar for the script, had worked as a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy, who was ah the radical Democrat senator who stood up against Lyndon Johnson and effectively forced him to stand up to stand down from seeking the re to the presidency, being re-elected in 1968.
00:06:37
Speaker
So he's he's got some kind of real-world experience in American, in ah in left, democratic um American politics. The director, whose name escapes me, um he worked... And this is a more the more relevant, I think, comparison. um Also the director's Michael Ritchie. Michael Ritchie, yes. He and and others who made the film worked on the campaign of ah John V. Tunney, don't know.
00:07:04
Speaker
American politician who had not come across before, who won um the exact same campaign that McCabe is trying to win. In 1970, he became the Democratic Senator for California, one of the two. And he was 36, which is very, it was about the same age as McCabe.
00:07:24
Speaker
He was, he made a lot about his youth and his idealism, which McCabe does you know early on. He's also a politician that makes a lot about the environment, <unk> which again in the film, McKay mentions that quite a bit.
00:07:38
Speaker
So there is a cut, I think there's <unk> just not a direct comparison, and not but they I think they drew on, the people that produced this drew on various models, but i think Tunney was the one. But people say Jerry Brown, who himself was the son of a governor who became a governor.
00:07:55
Speaker
because And also at this point, we should probably bear in mind that Ronald Reagan is the governor of California. um So there's the the politics of California at this point in time are not as directly and simplistically democratic as we now assume it to be. It's yeah a quite a contested state.
00:08:13
Speaker
And thinking about Senator Jarman, who is in the race with Bill McKay, in the same way that McKay might resemble this young buck Democrat, what about, you just made the link to Reagan there. Is Senator Jarman a play on those kind of ideas or in the same way?
00:08:28
Speaker
Well, he's he is... yeah He's been senator for 18 years, they point out. So he's he's started off quite quite a while while before all of that. But he clearly is. He talks about you know the state in kind of like the sort of terms that Ronald Reagan might have talked about the state at this point in time.
00:08:44
Speaker
He's clearly on the right of the Republican Party. um He's seen in one of the early, early, early source scenes as addressing a meeting in Orange County in California, which is the heartland of really right-wing Republican politics in California.
00:09:03
Speaker
But he's also is also quite sly and clever because when... um i mean the environment becomes a bit of an issue because of all these fires that that are and they depicted and these people putting fires out um and obviously that's that's a very big thing today even more so and that's blamed mckay actually takes it has the issue and he blames it on the things the watershed you know things are drying out because we're using them too much water and initially Crocker Jarman is like, he's poo-pooing all of that.
00:09:33
Speaker
And then as soon as there's a fire, he says, I'm going to introduce an act which is going to do something about the watershed. And actually, Richard Nixon, were you know, very right-wing Republican of his day, was also concerned about the environment in similar sort of pragmatic terms. so
Character Analysis of Jarman
00:09:50
Speaker
So, yeah, he's he's a very right-wing Republican. Republican, but he's he can use his he's clever enough to use what power his existing office has to kind of stymie McKay. So he's not he's not stupid.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah. I think what's really interesting about this movie is where do you stand on itself as a reflection of nineteen seventy s politics or a predictor of where we're going? And you talked about the environmental issues that are really addressed in The Candidate. Yeah. And um i mean, you think of California, absolutely huge and within so many policies such as housing, economics, water supply.
00:10:26
Speaker
Where do you stand on the movie being a reflection itself or as a predictor for the developments of US politics? I don't i don't think they they were predicting. i think they were reflecting. I mean, many of the themes that they that they that the film addresses have become much more obvious um to us. But i don't think I think they were just addressing things as they as they saw them. um I mean, the big the big theme of the film is really how McKay...
00:10:54
Speaker
is is it's handled, is is iss created into a rather different figure to the one that started off the campaign by his campaign managers. So like, superficially, they have his hair cut. He wears suits. They change his tie. high, they they man they kind of edit all of his interactions with with with ordinary voters to present certain ideas about who he is.
00:11:19
Speaker
And there's a lot about media manipulation in that, which today we would just take for granted. But in the nineteen sixty s late 1960s, people were were coming to terms with that. i mean Politicians and parties have always advertised themselves. Political posters in the 19th century used the techniques of advertising.
00:11:36
Speaker
So it's not really new, but I think people became more concerned with the packaging of candidates, particularly in the United States. And i
Media's Influence on Politics
00:11:44
Speaker
have I have here, this is the book, um the selling of the president. you know that There was an acute sense that, um but by Joe McGuinness, an acute sense it ra that that that Nixon had adopted all of these techniques.
00:11:57
Speaker
So it's kind of playing out that those those concerns. And yeah as things go on, McKay is just being more and more handled by by his campaign managers. And you begin to wonder, and I think he begins to wonder, who am i you know, in all of this?
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I guess that's to the credit of the candidate is actually a really good reflection of what it is to be in that campaign campaign. campaign race, where candidates in a way, I guess what the common is and in the way that I saw it is that as you go through the campaign and it becomes more chaotic and you go to these television debates, you almost lose what you began at the start. And I think, I'm wondering what you think about that development of McKay at the very start as a lawyer who's trying to help normal people into this television debate where in a way he's told what to say.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's that's his journey. He starts off knowing who he is and who he doesn't want to be. And and and how he how he's sold on becoming the candidate is, like i said early on, his campaign manager says, well, look, you're not going to win, right? So you can say what you like.
00:13:04
Speaker
right So he does start saying what he likes. When when he's asked about busing, which is the big one of the big issues that was a concern to to white suburbanites about having their children, their white, nice children being bused to black areas, to be in black schools and vice versa, um to to promote some kind of racial integration.
00:13:25
Speaker
And that was that was a very big issue, very controversial. And most politicians thought shy of it. When he's asked, when McKay's asked right at the start, he's announcing his candidacy, what you think about busing? I'm in favour of it. Yeah.
00:13:37
Speaker
and And you can hear a journey say, well, that's the first, you know, Democrat policy. But towards the end, he's going, well, we need to look into it. yeah So he's he's kind of like on that journey. um And, i mean, it is it is an insight um into into how the individual person, whoever, whether you're, you know, this kind of principled young person or just a candidate, I think it gives you an insight into how alienating it actually is.
00:14:06
Speaker
mean, there's a scene in a shopping mall where he's trying to talk to to all these shoppers and and there's distortion, um you know, his his microphone goes wrong, there's feedback. He gives up, does if I remember correctly. And also there's lights, so he can't really see anybody and he's being heckled and he doesn't even know if they can hear him, can he even hear himself? That that is actually quite a a very good scene about the alienation of if you're a ah candidate in that kind of situation,
00:14:35
Speaker
you kind of do lose a sense of yourself and what you're trying to do. least there's a danger of it anyway. and And even
Relevance of Film Themes Today
00:14:41
Speaker
drawing to 2025, where, i mean, talk about the alienation in that scene where McKay's speaking to an audience. He can still see the faces of people. yeah Today, you'll be in front of a screen and you'll be on TikTok or Instagram.
00:14:56
Speaker
Do you think this movie is even more important and relevant now than maybe it was in the nineteen seventy s Well, it's, I think, I mean, it's, well, it's historic. I mean, now, I mean, some of the things you see in it, you just, you know, there's even a ticker tape parade that is part of his campaign. When was the last person had the ticker tape parade? And he's also very close to the people. So when he's in a urinal, some wise guy starts to have a go at him while he's urinating.
00:15:27
Speaker
And he also gets punched in the face. by somebody. And but apparently these things actually happened to Eugene McCarthy during his 1968 campaign. So this is all the thing. But the thing is, they're they're much closer to real people in nineteen the 1970s.
00:15:42
Speaker
And now it's they're even more abstracted away and and become... you know, completely divorced from from actual real people. I mean, they do have some of those, um when he goes around talking to people, like the outside factory goats goes to the beach.
00:15:56
Speaker
And these are like stilted conversations, you know, handshake and all of that. And then they're edited into really dynamic things that are really, really good. Yeah. um Which shows, you know, these these are just media events. I mean, even in the 70s, they're showing these are media events. These are not real things.
00:16:13
Speaker
and when it And when it isn't good for him, when he goes to, I think it's a community hospital where these very angry black women who are really, really, you know, that they're on in poverty and they're really alienating, really angry about the situation. they're not They're not playing along, so they don't even use that.
00:16:30
Speaker
They edit all that out. And I guess that is something which is just so normal to us, that would would that have felt very... Strange and new, watching that in the cinema in 1972, seeing the importance of advertisement and this kind of, I don't want to say spin doctor, but well almost a director. yeah yeah Before they were called spin doctors, they were campaign managers. Yeah, they they were doing that job.
00:16:54
Speaker
i think I think maybe maybe it would. um I mean... I think most people, even you know then still, just thought what they were seeing is what that thought that's what they were.
00:17:05
Speaker
Right. I think and even today you get people like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, naming no names, no bias there, um who present a certain persona of themselves, which is at variance with who they really are. And yet people are still taken in by some of that.
00:17:20
Speaker
um But I think there was a kind of an innocence and um films like this and Yes Minister as well kind of punctured about and it's kind of interesting. These are kind of comedies that are giving people ah and are actually real insight into how politics is.
00:17:35
Speaker
And for some, it was it was quite shocking. Yeah. Thinking about coming towards the end of the podcast now and where the movie ends up.
00:17:46
Speaker
yeah I mean, it's this famous scene. i'm I'm thinking back to our podcast on the amazing Mrs. Pritchard and a lot of these, these kind of films and series end with a, what do we do now?
00:17:57
Speaker
We're in this situation. So McKay is in his in the room with his political consultant, Marvin Lucas, and he's just found out he's won the governorship. Unexpectedly, yes. Unexpectedly.
00:18:10
Speaker
He says, what do we do now? i mean, my question to you, Stephen, is what what does he do? will Will he be a successful politician? Will he go on and become a president? Well, the the person who he was mostly based on, or at least a campaign that that this evokes, the the John V. Tunney um campaign, he he was elected in 1970 and he was out by 1976. So I suspect he might have been a one-term senator who probably anguished you know all kind of about all kinds of things. But one of the things about McKay is he starts off being very principled and he's It's kind of like he's pushed in a certain direction, but he doesn't really there's not very much pushback on his part. He kind of seems to be quite malleable.
00:18:53
Speaker
um I mean, there's a scene towards the end when um when his campaign manager looks at his tie and he says, that's the wrong tie. You can't wear that tie going into that debate. Change the tie, change the tie.
00:19:05
Speaker
And it's a minor thing, but... And then he just goes... yeah it's he's been Yeah. He's been kind of conditioned to be told what to do by that point. that
Exploration of Political Campaign Principles
00:19:16
Speaker
yeah You're absolutely right. He turns around and says, yeah know what do we do now? I'm not i'm not the person that I thought I was.
00:19:22
Speaker
what am i what am i going to What am I going to do? And so I think he'd be a very malleable um senator who will probably just get kicked out when when the right wing sort of wave in in California comes and washes him away.
00:19:36
Speaker
But do you think he would find it frustrating be being in the Senate or... Oh, no, yeah, he'd hate it. Oh, he would absolutely hate it. mean, first of all, because he he wasn't meant to win. And secondly, he's won by by watering down virtually all the things that he had hitherto believed in.
00:19:53
Speaker
he would have just sat there and just, I mean, what am I for? I mean, he literally would say, what am I here for? So he might not have even stood for re-election in 1976. He might have just walked away and become an activist again.
00:20:08
Speaker
Which is a very depressing thing to say because, cause you know, it kind of what this film kind of does suggest, whether they're meant to do it or not, was that the futility of having principles and having positions because eventually you're going to water it down so you can win over the white suburban vote, which is essentially what happens. And so whatever you started at the but the start of the process, whatever you were, you're not going to be like that at the end.
00:20:33
Speaker
and and it's also And the final point, it's it's interesting that they're not really blaming anybody. There's no hand, hand but you know, a finger wagging. You go, oh, this is terrible. this is up So this is just the process, which is almost more depressing, actually.
00:20:48
Speaker
i know. But on that cheery note, that's all we have time for. Thank you very much, Stephen, for coming on. It was fantastic. So wherever and however you are tuning in for this episode of the After Dark series, thank you for listening.
00:21:02
Speaker
If you found yourself interested in our discussion and want to hit hear more, stay tuned for more episodes or check out mine and Stephen's episode on The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard. We're available on YouTube and all your streaming apps at Observations Podcast.
00:21:17
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.
00:21:29
Speaker
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