Election Day 2026, which may prove to be the most
consequential midterm contest in our nation’s history, is a good time to check
back on an Alan Alda film from 1979. It was made during the period when Alda
was starring on television’s M*A*S*H, and it showcases the multitalented
Alda’s work as a writer as well as an actor. The Seduction of Joe Tynan is
a clear-eyed look at the challenges faced by an idealistic young politician
whose aspirations just might include a run for the White House.
Alda’s hugely popular M*A*S*H role as Hawkeye Pierce,
an idealistic young surgeon operating near enemy lines during the Korean War,
led audiences to view him as an idealistic young actor who just might make an
appealing liberal politician, in a movie or perhaps in real life. In the film,
directed by Jerry Schatzberg, Joe Tynan is a U.S. Senator from New York. He’s
smart, witty, and squeaky-clean, with a brainy therapist-wife played by Barbara Harris. Early on the two
are seen cuddling in bed, engaging in sexy banter. It’s clear they truly dig
one another, but the fact that Joe keeps gloating over on his latest triumph in
the halls of Congress hints that he has more on his mind than marital bliss.
There are also two kids at home, including a teenaged daughter bent on
rebellion against her parents, come what may, so clearly Joe has a lot to think
about.
Then a crusty old colleague from the other side of the aisle
(a late-in-life performance by Melvyn Douglas) asks for Joe’s help regarding a
rival’s nomination to the Supreme Court. In the course of deciding whether this
new nominee can meet his own high-minded standards, Joe is introduced to a
feisty Southern labor lawyer played by a very young Meryl Streep. Thougb she
too is married, she and Joe quickly fall into a torrid affair, helped along by
their mutual yen for politics as well as for one another. For a guy on the
national political scene, it’s all too easy to be discreet: wife and kids are
safely at home in New York, while he tools around DC, scheduling “meetings”
with his pretty new “advisor.”
Frankly, I had expected to see Senator Tynan’s political
dreams come tumbling down as a result of his sexual misstep. But Alda the
writer has other ideas. Joe quickly sees the error of his ways when his wayward
teenaged daughter gets into a small medical crisis. (She develops hepatitis
after getting her butt tattooed—and tattooing in 1979 was a REALLY big deal.)
Yes, what’s been going on suddenly becomes clear to his wife, but she’s enough
of a good political spouse to look past his indiscretions and keep her anger to
herself.
We end with the confetti and the hoopla of the Democratic
Party’s national convention, at which Joe shakes off his jitters in order to wow
the delegates with a rousing speech, while his wife does what a political
spouse is supposed to do: look on proudly from the sidelines. Apparently,
they’ve both been seduced by the promise of future glory. Fade out.
The Seduction of Joe Tynan is not a great film. I
believe Alda, as a writer, did better with another story about sex and
marriage, The Four Seasons. (Yes, it was the source of the current
Netflix miniseries, which in its opening
episode graciously gave the now elderly Alda a nice cameo role.) But I like the
way Joe Tynan takes an Alda-like liberal politician and shows what makes
him vulnerable . . . and it’s not just
sex.
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