Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover 1977

Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover is as intense and funky as Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011) is bland.  Like Cohen's other films (God Told Me To, 1976; It's Alive, 1974) The Private Files is both a horror film and a political one,  It follows Hoover's career from his early days to his death in 1972 and nobody comes across well, from FDR's insistence on internment for American citizens of Japanese descent to Martin Luther King's yielding to Hoover's blackmail, the main source of Hoover's power, with files on everyone in his orbit -- often from illegal phone taps -- and his willingness to use them.

Whether Hoover was actually gay can probably never be proven, but Cohen chronicles Hoover's devotion to his mother and his fear of women from early on, that any women who showed him affection were simply "honey traps."  Hoover (effectively played by Broderick Crawford as a dissipated racetrack devotee whose books were written by agents during working hours) and his second-in-command Clyde Tolson (played appropriately by song-and-dance man Dan Dailey) were obviously devoted to each other, though I suspect Hoover was essentially married to his job and the power that went with it. When Hoover died Colson is seen to be rescuing documents from Nixon's shredders and Cohen hints at the role those documents may have played in the Watergate scandal.

In the large cast of Cohen's film Michael Parks as Robert Kennedy and Rip Torn as a disaffected agent particularly stand out, along with Jose Ferrer, Lloyd Nolan and Celeste Holm.  Cohen's regular cinematographer, Paul Glickman, gives the film a desaturated and shaky newsreel feel and veteran composer Miklos Rozsa (The Killers, 1946 and many other films) provides an appropriate moody and dramatic score.