Senator Douglass Dilman (James Earl Jones) becomes the first black U.S. president in the 1972 film The Man. (Paramount Pictures)

This story previously ran on Oct. 31, 2008.

More than 30 years before the rise of Barack Obama, James Earl Jones became the first black U.S. president. In the little-known 1972 film The Man, Jones plays Douglass Dilman, a New Hampshire senator who’s sworn in as commander-in-chief after a confluence of highly improbable events.

Hollywood’s first-ever dramatic exploration of a black presidency was hardly Oscar-worthy; New York Times critic Vincent Canby dismissed the movie as “silly and innocent.” Still, it’s a fascinating Nixon-era cultural artifact, and the characterization of Dilman as a hyper-articulate intellectual seems somewhat prescient given Senator Obama’s educational background and trademark eloquence.

Sci-fi legend Rod Serling wrote the screenplay to the film (based on Irving Wallace’s 1964 novel) and it shows — the credibility-straining plotline of The Man gives it the feel of a racially progressive episode of The Twilight Zone. The film opens in Washington, with comic warhorse Jack Benny (as himself) doing his lame shtick at the annual White House correspondents' dinner. Secretary of State Arthur Eaton (William Windom) and high-ranking Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith) leave the event in a hurry after hearing news that’s both grave and bizarre: a 500-year-old palace ceiling has collapsed at a summit meeting in Frankfurt. Unfortunately, both the sitting U.S. president and the Speaker of the House were under it, and have succumbed to their injuries.

At a hastily convened cabinet meeting, crotchety Vice-President Noah Calvin (Lew Ayres) defies all logic by refusing to assume the number 1 job. Surprisingly, he admits that he’s also about to expire: “I’ve been ill, you know. I’ve been quite ill.… I don’t think we can handle that many presidential funerals.” OK, three down — so who’s next in line? Well, according to the constitution, it’s the president pro tempore of the Senate, a.k.a. the highest-ranking senator. And in The Man, that’s Douglass Dilman. Yes, back in ’72, a movie plot had to be this pretzel-like for Hollywood even to imagine a black man as president.

Via an expository radio news report, we learn that the new president is a widower, former professor and a “warm, often witty man.” Dilman’s party affiliation is never explicitly stated. Initially, he’s completely freaked out by his new responsibilities. Dilman’s hands shake as he pours a stiff drink, sobs while looking into a mirror and tells his militant daughter, “I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.” He claims that black Americans will want him to be a “black Messiah,” while white politicos will crave a placid “Uncle Tom.” (Indeed, this quandary echoed the persistent debate during the presidential race about whether Barack Obama is “black enough.”)

James Earl Jones posing near a photo of George Washington for the film The Man. (Paramount Pictures)

The new supremo’s fears are borne out; his cabinet is a nest of vipers. Many people on his staff regard him as a mere caretaker, filling in for just a few months until the next election season. Senator Watson, Burgess Meredith’s character, is a southern segregationist determined to manipulate and embarrass the black leader. On the day Dilman is inaugurated, Watson delivers perhaps the cheesiest line in the entire movie: “The White House doesn’t seem near white enough for me tonight.”

Secretary of State Eaton is manoeuvring for his own run at the president’s job. Eaton’s wife (played by Barbara Rush) spews racial epithets and makes Lady Macbeth look like a chilled-out, loving spouse in comparison.

Eventually, Dilman finds his presidential mojo and starts to assert himself. He makes a serious misstep in the handling of an American student accused of murdering South Africa’s defence minister, but the freshly minted head of state grows into the role, projecting gravitas and putting his oratorical skills to good use. (Jones’s basso profundo certainly helps.) Although Dilman’s cabinet colleagues don’t want him to criticize South Africa’s apartheid regime, the president essentially finds his voice by doing just that. At the end of the movie, Dilman walks into his party’s convention and announces that he’ll “fight like hell” for the nomination. We see several supporters carrying “Change with Dilman” signs, an eerie foreshadowing of Obama’s omnipresent slogan, “Change we can believe in.”

Despite Serling’s overheated script, Jones is convincing as the history-making chief. He exudes integrity, even as the story’s hairpin turns multiply. In five years, the classically trained actor would go on to voice the villainous Darth Vader. At this stage in his career, however, Jones was being positioned as the next Sidney Poitier. Jones had only starred in one other film, The Great White Hope (1970), in which he played a fictionalized version of Jack Johnson, the heavyweight boxing champ who became a flashpoint for racial prejudice in the early 20^th century. Jones received an Oscar nomination for that performance.

The Man received no critical accolades, and has been largely forgotten. It’s commercially unavailable on DVD, though Obama’s remarkable ascent would seem to guarantee at least a cult audience for the film.

Since 1972, only a few other films have featured black presidents. It isn’t a plot element that’s captivated Hollywood scriptwriters. In Deep Impact (1998) — a sci-fi film about a comet that’s due to knock the dickens out of our planet — Morgan Freeman played President Tom Beck as calm, kind and beneficent; in other words, like virtually every other Morgan Freeman character. Meanwhile, Chris Rock mined the idea for laughs in Head of State (2003).

Imperfect as it is, The Man remains the only full-length Hollywood drama devoted to the premise of what would happen under a black president. We’ll see if a comparable real-life drama unfolds.

Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.