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THE MAN
Rating:  ½
USA. 1972.
Director – Joseph Sargent, Screenplay – Rod Serling, Based on the Novel by Irving Wallace, Producer – Lee Rich, Photography – Edward C. Rosson, Music – Jerry Goldsmith, Art Direction – James C. Hulsey. Production Company – ABC.
Cast:
James Earl Jones (Douglas Dillman), Martin Balsam (Jim Talley), William Windom (Arthur Eaton), Burgess Meredith (Senator Watson), George Stanford Brown (Robert Wheeler), Janet MacLachlan (Wanda Dillman), Barbara Rush (Kay Eaton)
Plot: When the US President and most of the Cabinet are killed in a plane crash over Frankfurt, the nearest successor in line to the presidency is Senator Douglas Dillman. But Dillman is a Black man and the notion of a Black president causes an uproar. Dillman steps up to the job, but once there realizes that those around him are only thinking him of as an interim caretaker until the next election. He determines to prove his worth. His opponents decide to give him enough rope to hang himself. And when Dillman impetuously rushes to defend an African-American student from the charge of assassinating the South African Minister of Defence, this becomes a highly contentious issue that his opponents seek to turn into his undoing.
The Man originally started out life as a made-for-tv movie but was deemed to have sufficient quality that it was instead released cinematically. In that The Man contains a speculative scenario – an African-American man becomes the President of the USA – that has not come to pass more than three decades later, it certainly must count as borderline science-fiction.
The Man features a script from Rod Serling, the creator/host of tv’s classic The Twilight Zone (1959-63). In the decade since The Twilight Zone ended, Serling began to turn to bold, politically charged screenplays like Seven Days in May (1964) – another speculative quasi-science-fictional scenario set around the US Presidency – Planet of the Apes (1968) and the racial drama tv movie A Storm in Summer (1970). The downside of Rod Serling’s writing was that it could often descend to the shrilly moralistic, dealing in caricatures and flowery melodramatic hyperbole, as in the Night Gallery tv series (1969-72), which really represented Serling at his worst. But when he did work at full strength, as here, it was good to see Serling return to the level of literacy that won him a Peabody Award and three Emmy’s back in the 1950s for the writing of tv plays like Patterns (1956) and Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957).
The Man is really quite a good film. Rod Serling adapts a book by Irving (The Prize, The Book of Lists) Wallace and delivers a strong and literate screenplay. The politics and humanism come to a surprising level of eloquence. The scene as James Earl Jones stands up to decry assassination at the end – “You cannot kill a dream by killing the dreamer, all you commit is murder” – is moving. The production is topped by James Earl Jones who gives an impressively noble and commanding performance of both compassion and weakness, but above all of moral fibre. He is given able support, especially from the great Burgess Meredith.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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