Of Cabbageheads and Kingfish Power

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Bop-bop, boppity bop-bop-bop-bop. Snugged up in his private plane, plugged into his Walkman, Pete St. John, media consultant to politicians, drums his cares away on the practice pad that accompanies him everywhere. Pete's life moves to this same rhythm: jazzy, snazzy, yet lacking in soul. If he had one it would be packed in a two-suiter with his scruples, in the lost-luggage office of some airport on a half-forgotten campaign trail.

For the moment, Pete (played with a sinuously boyish charm by Richard Gere) has more pressing problems. He has candidates in trouble all over the map: a Governor's divorce and remarriage in the far West; a rich candidate's cabbageheaded stupidity in the Southwest; the hold on a Midwestern senatorial candidate by agents of an Arab oil state. The true purpose of these cliches and intrigues is to supply Power with some paranoiac melodrama of the kind that is nowadays never absent from movies about American politics. Pete may be involved, either as unwitting coconspirator or victim, in something more menacing to the commonwealth than a few dirty political tricks. These dawning hints of complicity give him an excuse to renounce political expedience and square himself with his former wife (Julie Christie) and his sometime mentor (Gene Hackman), who function here as the voices of liberal conscience.

Too bad. It is always disappointing when an engaging heel abandons his unprinciples to embrace moral uplift. Especially since Power has already made its points about the manipulation of political imagery in the sharply satirical sequences that show Pete creating TV spots for his candidates --sequences full of conviction, energy and a knowing cynicism that are missing from the film's more exhortatory passages. Around these later commercials for responsibility the air of the obligatory ever hovers.

Something similar occurs in Huey Long, Ken Burns' rather too conventional documentary about the rise and demise of our most successful demagogue. The antique footage of Long on the campaign trail, directing his mating cries at the bedazzled Louisiana electorate, retains its hypnotic power more than a half-century later; he had the great seducer's capacity to enlist his victims' complicity in his lies. The testimony Burns has elicited from the plain people who elected Long Governor and Senator, and were preparing to back his presidential campaign when he was assassinated, makes it clear they have never known a political lover so memorably transporting. Burns dutifully brings on spokesmen for the good-government opposition, and naturally one feels obliged to agree with their strictures.

One does so uncomfortably. For the issue raised but not really addressed by both these films is altogether too complicated to be resolved by civics lessons. There are people like the historical Huey and the fictional Pete who wear their amorality glamorously, who have the ability to move the practice of politics out of smoke-filled rooms and into the chambers of the yearning human heart. Conventional political morality, to which both these films retreat in good-hearted confusion, is inadequate to deal with such creatures. Art conceivably is. But today, media far more devious than a radio mike await the next Huey Long. To take the measure of his threat, art will have to be shrewder and more sensitive than either of these movies.