TV Reviews : A Crackling Good ‘Teamster Boss’

A TV movie shoots a withering arrow across the bow of a live President in the heat of a campaign tonight.

In charting the turbulence of the Teamsters Union in the Ronald Reagan era, “Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story” (at 8 p.m. on HBO) dramatizes the mutual trade-off between Teamster power broker Presser and the Reagan-Bush camp during the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns.

At one point in the production, then-Vice President George Bush, in videotape newsreel footage edited into the movie, is seen at a Teamster convention exhorting the glory of a union that is starkly portrayed as a handmaiden of the Mafia.

The cozy connection between the Reagan Administration and Presser (the perfectly cast Brian Dennehy) is only a small aspect of an otherwise sweeping portrayal of Teamster corruption in the ‘80s, from a script by Abby Mann, based on the book “Mobbed Up” by James Neff.

But two newsreel moments featuring Reagan and Bush, which have been so adroitly enhanced as to blend indistinguishably into the dramatic texture of the movie, are sure to embarrass the Bush camp.

To hear the crooked Presser give millions of Teamster dollars and votes to Reagan and Bush in return for Reagan’s promise to kill a major deregulation bill--and then to see him become such a favorite of the incoming Administration that he’s seen talking to Reagan on a two-way video hookup on election night--charts an unexploited dimension in the TV movie genre: contemporary history as election-year weapon.

Dennehy, padded up and sporting a bulbous nose and receding hairline, is riveting as the chain-smoking, rotund, raucous, womanizing Presser. Using his Teamster executive father (Eli Wallach) to gain a foothold, Presser is initially derided as a buffoonish “Humpty Dumpty” until he forges a path to power with murder and graft and takes over a union seething with mob members on the Teamster executive board.

Directed with crackling energy by Alastair Reid, here’s a tumultuous labor story that’s gotten a tremendous jump on the forthcoming Jack Nicholson movie about Jimmy Hoffa, whom Presser despises and whom we see, in more archival footage, being lacerated by Robert and John Kennedy in introductory scenes at a congressional hearing.

The lesser known but apparently more complex Presser and the rock-hard Hoffa will make a terrific double bill someday. Meanwhile, in an election season, you couldn’t ask for a better political movie--even if you’re a Republican.