February has been a good month for American movies in which vulnerable males stare out their bedroom windows at willowy, troubled blondes and grow obsessed. No, Rear Window has not been re-released; in James Gray’s melodrama Two Lovers a Brooklyn Heeb falls for the Shiksa next door, and in William Olsson’s stylistically assured, super-cynical without even realizing it directorial debut An American Affair, a slick, low-budget period movie with the cozy art direction of a Danish furniture commercial without even blinking an eye suggests that Jack Kennedy was a man of many mistresses and woefully foreseeable enemies.

Such is our post-Watergate American existence that we no longer see politicians as enlightened, civic minded individuals in an ennobling vocation. Such is our post-Lewinsky American existence that we are no longer shocked or even especially aroused by our political leaders’ sexual misdeeds. Sure Eliot Spitzer’s political star fell just under a year ago after his nocturnal visits from call girl Ashley Dupre were exposed, but Louisiana Senator David Vitter continues to sit in his Senate seat nearly a year and a half after he admitted to seeing prostitutes. As An American Affair deftly dramatizes, in the previous era the press corps would have just kept what they knew about the sex lives of powerful men under wraps. But lets get to those tantalizing one sheets.

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