Goodness knows, the subject of Hollywood political movies has been difficult terrain to tackle for many years. Significant films, documentary and television series have recently paved the way for new and interesting scholarship to appear, but over the longer historical period an authoritative appreciation of the whole subject from the beginning of American cinema is still much needed. Alas, M. Keith Booker's new book, From Box Office to Ballot Box, is not the work to set this anomaly straight. To be fair, one must assume that this book is not aimed primarily, or even particularly, at an academic audience; how else to explain a paucity of footnotes, only a few minor and discreet references to other works within the text, and a book with no bibliography whatsoever.

But even so, that should not be an excuse for the level of analysis and discussion on display here. In a series of fairly interesting chapter headings, to say Professor Booker galvanizes the (admirably large) array of films together with all the force of a Tony Blair speech at the Women's Institute is to do some disservice to the former prime minister. Not only but especially the chapters on campaign movies and government process see films come into view, plots being rehashed, characters provided with certain motivational functions, but all with little sense of cohesion or evidence. The chapters follow no historical arc, and certainly no thematic structure. The author observes on (27) that “perhaps the most problematic aspect of Bulworth (Warren Beatty's 1999 satire on congressional and electoral politics) is its treatment of race.” Perhaps? The treatment of race in Bulworth is the problematic subject at the film's heart. And race could have been such an interesting theme to develop, especially the reasons why political movies have shied away from the subject for so long. Unfortunately, when a film like The Distinguished Gentleman from 1992 finally enters the conversation, Eddie Murphy's portrayal of a small-time crook looking to jump on the Beltway gravy-train is given no ethnic or comparative dimension at all. Apocalypse Now is cited as the first major film about Vietnam, when The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter have already been mentioned and therefore implicitly are not major in some respect. Likewise, if Coming Home is the “first major film” about veterans returning, then is it not surely by any definition a major film about the war, two years before Coppola's epic? On the domestic front the progenitor of Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is regarded as Gabriel over the White House, when it was really Washington Merry-Go-Round, an important political film of the 1930s that is absent here.

More than this, as some of the above films demonstrate, the book's title is somewhat misleading because half of the discussion is about foreign-policy and/or intervention films, not really political campaigns, or straightforward Washington politics. Instead, Vietnam and labour relations are engaged in further chapters, with some perceptive observations but again little in the way of clues about the author's analytical or evidential claims. A huge opportunity is missed here, and while Booker's reminder to us of the power of forgotten masterpieces like Tanner 88 and even the recent Silver City, which he rightly claims is an underrated film, is useful, the style and loose manner of construction in each chapter (together with some errors in plot for some films) makes for frustrating and, ultimately, unsatisfying reading.