1929
The Great Depression leads to financial and political meltdown.
1932
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected President.
1939
Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington sees James Stewart as the honest provincial senator who single-handedly reasserts decent American values and sorts out corruption on Capitol Hill.
1941
Citizen Kane offers an acute view of American politics as a media magnate (Orson Welles) runs for office but is caught in a sexual scandal just before the election.
1947
McCarthyism begins, a witch hunt for communist film-makers. A total of 320 actors, writers and others were ostracised including Leonard Bernstein, Larry Adler, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Miller and Orson Welles.
1960
John F Kennedy is elected President.
1962
The Manchurian Candidate (starring Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh) criticises both McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunters and the naive liberals who failed to recognise the communist threat. Sophisticated view of Washington. Commercial flop.
1963
John F Kennedy is assassinated.
1968
Richard Nixon is elected President.
1972
Opening days after the Watergate break-in, The Candidate catches a moment of change in the US political system when an idealistic civil-rights lawyer (Robert Redford) is elected Democratic senator but no longer knows what he stands for.
1974
Nixon resigns over the Watergate crisis. The Parallax View mixes elements of the Kennedy assassination with Watergate in a paranoid tale of a crusading journalist (Warren Beatty). The director went straight on to make All the President’s Men.
1976
All the President’s Men reconstructs Watergate from the point of view of the investigative reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) who journey through the dark labyrinth of Nixon’s Washington.
1988
George HW Bush is elected President.
1991
Oliver Stone’s three-hour political epic JFK boldly reinterprets American history since 1962.
1992
Bill Clinton is elected President.
1998
Release of Primary Colors, a film à clef about the Clintons, based on the novel by Anonymous (revealed to be Joe Klein of Newsweek). A box-office disaster, probably because America had had enough scandal via Kenneth Starr – remember him?
1999
The United States gets a new president who’s upright, moralistic and can speak Latin. You’re right – it’s not George W Bush, but Martin Sheen, star of the new politico drama The West Wing, which debuted in 1999 and ran for seven years.
2000
George W Bush is elected President.
2004
The Manchurian Candidate reworks the seminal classic in a post-9/11 world. The programmed assassin, abducted in the original by communist brain-washers, is seized during the first Gulf War.
2008
W, the film of the Bush presidency, is released.
Justin Webb is the BBC’s North America correspondent and author of Have a Nice Day – Behind the Clichés: Giving America Another Chance (£14.99, Short Books). Frost/Nixon is out on 9 January.
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