The American presidency in filmic context:
Certain past presidents have cast distinctive shadows over the movies made during their tenure. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is imprinted in every careworn Okie face in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and Harry Truman's push for atomic glory casts fallout over dozens of science-fiction movies (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, The Thing from Another World). There's much of John Kennedy's testicular adventurism in the early 007 boom, and Richard Nixon's backroom machinations generated a bumper crop of left- and right-leaning paranoid thrillers (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, Dirty Harry). The fantasy boom (Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Field of Dreams) of the '80s is also unthinkable without the don't-worry-be-happy paternalism of Ronald Reagan.