Best American Secret Service Movies

By Raymond Lockley

Something about the dedication and drama of the U.S. Secret Service has always captured the American imagination. Although the Secret Service was established as part of the Treasury Department to deal with currency counterfeiting, and continue to have a broad charter for a range of modern law enforcement duties like cyber-crime, they are popularly most closely associated with their work protecting the President of the United States and other key federal officials.

The U.S. Secret Service was created by Abraham Lincoln on the day before he was assassinated in 1865, and began protecting American presidents right after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. Although only two assassination attempts (Truman and Reagan) have thus far required it, their well-known willingness to "take a bullet" for the President inspires us in real life as well as in our fiction.

While Secret Service agents are featured, prominently or in the background, in a wide variety of movies, very few movies of quality focus on those characters, or would be considered to be "about" them. Here's my list of the best American movies to do so:

  1. In the Line of Fire (1993)
  2. Vantage Point (2008)
  3. The Sentinel (2006)
  4. Guarding Tess (1994)
  5. The Interpreter (2005)
  6. Murder at 1600 (1997)
  7. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
These movies meet my criteria for being a good, worth-watching movie, and for having a focus that fits the theme of this list. They also, you may note, feature an all-star list of actors portraying some of those agents, including Clint Eastwood, Michael Douglas, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn, Diane Lane, Dennis Quaid, and Kiefer Sutherland.

Special mention

Ronald Reagan A list of movies about the Secret Service and presidential protection really should not fail to mention a series of movies which, while generally considered "B" movies, do feature the work of the Secret Service AND feature an actor in the top-billed position who would go on to become a U.S. president whose life would be saved by the Secret Service: Ronald Reagan, taking his first turn at the top of the marquee. So, lest we forget...

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