Top Movie Presidents

The hottest movie this week — and one of the hottest this year — is Oliver Stone’s W., which examines our current Chief Executive’s youthful years. Josh Brolin plays the Prez, and advance buzz indicates the treatment is not as scorching as first expected.

By year’s end, we’ll see Frank Langella as another controversial president in Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard. And in 2010, Steven Spielberg will deliver his long-promised biopic of Abraham Lincoln, with Liam Neeson as the doomed leader.

Political movies never have been box-office giants, but the lure of playing presidents, either fictional or authentic, draws interesting candidates. Among them: Josh Brolin, as mentioned, plays George W. Bush in W. In late December, he’ll be seen in Milk as Dan White, bigoted assassin of San Francisco’s first openly gay city official Harvey Milk, played by Sean Penn. Interesting dual roles for this election year.

James Cromwell plays the senior George Bush in W. , and the film focuses on their father-son conflicts. Cromwell, once known mainly as Babe’s farmer, played another stately figure as Prince Philip opposite Helen Mirren in The Queen. What’s intriguing, though, is that Cromwell is an outspoken liberal, as was his father, director John Cromwell. In fact, the elder Cromwell was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. Among his credits: the super-patriotic 1944 homefront valentine Since You Went Away, frequently shown on Turner Classics and starring such non-radicals as Claudette Colbert and Shirley Temple.

Frank Langella repeats his stage success as Richard Nixon in the upcoming Frost/Nixon. His most famous previous role? The blood-sucking Dracula, which he also played onstage.

Morgan Freeman played a worried American president dealing with a fast-approaching comet in Deep Impact. This was in 1998, before Barack Obama rose to national prominence. But it was good practice for Freeman, who would play an even more powerful role as God in both Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty. These almighty figures definitely elevated him from driving Miss Daisy.

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