For decades I’ve harbored fond memories of The President’s Analyst (’67), a half-annoying, half-hippieish, half-psychedelic social satire that starred the smooth James Coburn and a comfortably laid-back Godfrey Cambridge.

So when I gave Analyst a re-watch the other night, I was surprised to discover that much of it (roughly 60%) isn’t especially good…unfunny, broadly played, overly brittle, vaguely irritating, shallow in a Man From U.N.C.L.E.-ish or Our Man Flint-y way. I was soon looking at my watch and figuring “okay, not as good as I remembered.”

But then it does a switch-up and becomes a whole different film…it goes all hippie-dippie-ish and rock-and-rolly and free love-celebrating, and is generally invested in a kind of “spread the joy and transcendence of LSD” attitude. And then it dives into a surreal but amusing plotline about the malevolence of TPC (The Phone Company) and the robots behind this malignant entity. It ends with Coburn and Cambridge shooting it out with TPC droids….hilarious!

Rarely has a mezzo-mezzo mainstream film (green-lighted by Paramount’s Robert Evans) completely uncorked itself and gone all loopy-doopey like The President’s Analyst did. I ended up up chuckling and mostly loving it. The last 40%, I mean.

The big switch happens right around the one-hour mark. It starts when Coburn’s Dr. Sidney Schaefer, running from would-be assassins of an international cast, ducks into the legendary Cafe Wha? on McDougal Street and hooks up with a rock band led by “Eve of Destruction“‘s Barry McGuire (89 and still with us!). Schaefer quickly becomes a splendor-in-the-grass lover of the attractive, hippie-chicky Snow White (Jill Banner).

From the moment that McGuire and Banner slip into the narrative and invite Coburn to join them on their magic travels, The President’s Analyst becomes a mid ’60s “turn on, tune in and drop out” mood piece…a capturing of what a lot of people were feeling and delving into and experimenting with in ’66 and ’67.

In this sense Analyst is almost as much of a mid ’60s cultural capturing as John Boorman‘s Catch Us If You Can (’65) and Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66).

And yet that first hour…whoa. And the one-sheet slogans were hideous.

Poor, pixie-sized Banner was Marlon Brando‘s off-and-on girlfriend from roughly ’68 until her car-crash death in 1982, when she was only 35. She got slammed by a truck on the Ventura Freeway.

The career of Ted Flicker, director-writer of The President’s Analyst, went flat after someone slipped the Analyst script to J. Edgar Hoover‘s FBI, thereby tipping them off to the fact that Analyst would sharply satirize the bureau as well as the CIA. This led to Flicker and Evans being surveilled and harassed. The industry quickly got scared and dropped Flicker like a bad habit for a while. He later co-created Barney Miller. David Ewing‘s Ted Flicker: A Life in Three Acts screened in 2007 at the Santa Fe Film Festival. Flicker passed in 2014 at age 84.