The name of the movie basically tells its tale. Proceeding like Citizen Kane in flashbacks, the picture begins with Hoover's death and the desperate scramble to shred his private files. The picture, then, proceeds to scoot along at high velocity disclosing to us the content of those files. At the end of the film, we are back in the present, Nixon's corrupt regime. Hoover's companion (and, possibly, boyfriend)Clyde Toland, rescues a half dozen files from the Holocaust occurring after the "Boss'" death. It's implied that these files contained the secret data that brought down the Nixon White House. Hoover's various adventures consist mainly of meeting in offices, elaborately decorated rooms, and grim corridors.
For most of its length, Cohen's Private Files proceeds chronologically. We see Hoover as a young man aggressively defending immigrants from unlawful detention. Then, he is recruited to run the FBI, an agency with no real power and badly besmirched due to complicity in Harding's Teapot Dome scandal. Hoover is portrayed as a dogmatic "straight arrow", a boss who tells people to shave twice a day due "a tendency toward five o'clock shadow" and quite willing to persecute female clerical workers for extramarital affairs or, even, wearing slacks instead of a skirt. Hoover is incorruptible -- something that the film insists upon throughout its entire length. When gangsters start slaughtering FBI agents, who don't carry guns, Hoover declares war on them, arms his men with machine guns, and wipes out most of the mobsters. He's upset that G-Man, Melvin Purvis is getting too much media attention and, so, forces him out of the Agency (Purvis then commits suicide on-screen). A nice girl tries to seduce Hoover but he goes berserk on her, accusing the woman of trying to set him up -- he thinks she's trying to compromise him. It's a display of utterly unmotivated rage and paranoia that's unsettling and suggests that there's something wrong with Hoover, at least with respect to sex. Hoover leaks information to newspapermen, including Walter Winchell and gets filmed arresting Alan "Creepy" Karpis, a gangster. But the spectacle is botched -- no one has handcuffs and the G-men get lost on the way to the local hoosegow. Events follow one another very rapidly, often sutured together by editing tricks -- Hoover is seen walking through one door only to enter a conference room or government office somewhere else a year or two after the preceding scene. Periodically, thugs arrested by the FBI claim that Hoover is a homosexual, shouting slurs at him and, as the film progresses he spends more and more time with Clyde Toland, another FBI man. But the problem of Hoover's sexuality is never solved: we don't know whether he's just a weirdly misogynistic "Momma's boy", asexual, or homosexual. He clearly is highly prudish but, also, goes into a sort of febrile spasm when listening to his bedroom tapes of high-ranking politicians and celebrities engaged in sexual misconduct. The film's consistent theme is that the presidency is corrupt, that all presidents are liars and cheats, and that the FBI has been a constant, and, even, righteous bulwark against abuse of presidential power -- this is shown most directly in scenes in which Hoover argues with FDR about his order to inter Japanese Americans in concentration camps, a decree that Hoover finds appalling. This theme is continued throughout the Kennedy and LBJ eras and climaxes with Hoover gathering files that will be used to destroy President Nixon during the Watergate debacle. Hoover's vices aren't concealed -- he publishess books under his own name written by subordinates and seems remarkably cosey with Joe McCarthy. (Both he and McCarthy are vehemently anti-Red -- and Cohen's Communists are pretty much bomb-throwers given to harangues in front of big pictures of Marx and Lenin.) Broderick Crawford is superb as Hoover. He lumbers around not fully balanced on his big flat feet -- Crawford must have been very old when this movie was made -- and he's less intimidating than simply pathetic. But he can flex his muscle when necessary, humiliating both Bobby Kennedy (who has earlier bullied him) and Martin Luther King. For the first half of the movie, Hoover is played by an actor who looks almost as old as Crawford in the second half of the film -- this guy, who is also good, is labeled "Young Hoover", but Hoover seems to have been born old and "young Hoover" seems only slightly less superannuated than the Old Man. The film has a voice-over narrator but this is a bust: the minor character narrating is so tangential to the plot that I couldn't figure out who he was (I think he's a G-man who gets in trouble for having an extra-marital affair) and his words don't add anything to the movie.
The film is mildly interesting but it's really too nonchalant to be very dramatic. There is an incredible opening shot of FBI men blazing away at targets mounted in a two-story facade at night -- this is black and white and a fantastic image;it's pure Sam Fuller. The rest of the movie is basically confrontations in offices and official buildings intercut with flashy montages of machine guns firing and cars crashing, the sort of gangland imagery that was old when Howard Hawks' perfected this sort of thing in Scarface.. The film could be a template for Oliver North's conspiratorial pictures like Nixon and JFK. But North makes everything portentous and seems appalled by the corruption shown by his conspirators. The tone is completely different in Cohen's film -- the whole thing is casual and its simply assumed that politicians and their lackeys are wholly and irredeemably corrupt. Cohen's picture is breezy and amused --nothing matters too much: it's a cheerful tour of corruption whereas Stone besieges us with a moral Jeremiad. I like Cohen's approach much better but the movie is pretty minor.
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