I woke up on Sunday morning to the news about the military/political situation in Syria resulting in the ouster of one dictator, with replacement by what won't shock me if it turns out to be another group of dictatorial wannabes. Unfortunately, I did a post on the Cary Grant movie Crisis quite a few years ago, so instead I watched another movie that had been on my DVR, about politics and the Middle East: Protocol.
As the movie opens, some sort of motorcade for a state visit is making its way to Washington DC from the airport. But it gets blocked because of poor Sunny Davis (Goldie Hawn), whose car breaks down at just the right point to cause a major traffic snarl. Not that Sunny has anything to do with politics. She's just a waitress at Lou's (Kenneth Mars) Safari Club, where the waitresses dress in costumes reminiscent of animals and have the opportunity to pick up a few extra bucks by satisfying the male patrons in just the right way.
That night, after her shift at Lou's, Sunny is heading for home when she comes upon a crowd of people lined up behind a barricade the way they would in Hollywood for the premiere of a new movie, hoping to see the stars up close and personal. As they say, politics is Hollywood for ugly people, and this is actually for the diplomats exiting a state dinner for the same Middle Eastern potentate who was involved in that traffic jam over the opening credits, the Emir of Othar (Richard Romanus). As the people in the crowd are jostling, Sunny can feel that one of the swarthy men jostling with her has a gun, which he naturally pulls out as part of an assassination attempt. Sunny foils it by trying to bite the man. Not that she cares about the Emir; as far as she knows they could be trying to kill the President (has that happened recently?). Sunny, for her troubles, gets shot in the butt.
However, stopping the attempt and getting shot in it makes her a national hero, even if an unlikely one. The people at the State Department know there's the possibility of a major international incident, and to be fair, that would be the case with any schlub getting involved in an attempt like this. Nobody seems to think about what's going to happen to Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day after the end of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Sunny is going to be thrust before the press at some point, so the State Department sends one of their flaks, Michael Ransome (Chris Sarandon), to help Sunny. Sure enough, her answers at the press conference are so anodyne that everyone can interpret them as being positive toward them, and a couple of political handlers think Sunny can be useful to the current administration.
With that in mind, Sunny is offered a job in the Protocol Office of the State Department. She's so naïve that she doesn't even know what protocol means in this regard, but when she hears how much of a jump in salary she'll be getting, she takes the job. And, in one of those most highly original plot twists, Sunny decides like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday that she's going to start doing her homework and learn what protocol actually is. Sunny also doesn't yet realize that the US and Othar have been in negotiations to build a US military base there due to its strategic location -- and that she herself is about to become part of the negotations.
The Emir returns to the US for a private visit, and wants to see Sunny, which could easily enough be seen as a way to thank her away from the cameras for saving his life. The US would like Sunny to show him a good time, which she does by taking him and his entourage to Lou's, ensuring Lou's financial survival. However, this visit was really about getting the Emir to accept Sunny as his next wife and grease the skids for that military base. When Sunny gets to Othar and discovers she's being used, sparks fly. Of course, sparks also fly because the Otharian opposition picked precisely this moment to try a coup d'état.
Protocol is one of those movies that starts off with a reasonably good idea; after all, a lot of reviewers back in the day brought up Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The screenplay (by Buck Henry), is also written with a view to allowing Goldie Hawn to display her screen persona, which she does quite well. Unfortunately, the second half of the story gets extremely lazy, playing to all sorts of stereotypes. Forty years on, people are going to complain most loudly about the portrayal of the Arabs, but the government officials also wind up being cardboard cutouts and the story line winds up fairly unoriginal.
Still, with Goldie Hawn's performance, she elevates Protocol into an 80s time capsule that's worth one watch.
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