Advise & Consent

When I was about 10 or 12 I started reading Allen Drury’s Cold War tales of political intrigue in Washington, D.C. He had such an imaginative way of retelling what the real life pundits and politicos tried to warn us were the true dangers of those villainous Soviets and Red Chinese.

Advise & Consent was the first and most famous of those novels, originally published in 1959 and made into a stage play before turning out this 1962 film version. Henry Fonda plays Robert Leffingwell, nominated to be Secretary of State by a (never named in the script) president, a very controversial choice, mainly because he ran afoul of a very senior southern senator several years before. Senator Seabright Cooley (played by Charles Laughton) does not like to be shown up, not hardly, and knows how to hold on to a grudge.

Leffingwell’s politics are, perhaps, a bit too liberal in what was a country barely passed the McCarthyite Era and sure enough Cooley uses a trick right out of that nasty playbook. The nomination also runs into the ambitious young senator named Van Ackerman (a very young George Grizzard) and the morality of the committee chairman, Lafe Smith (Don Murray, Smith is the junior senator from Utah so of course he’s called Brigham Anderson). Playing a Kennedyesque bachelor senator is Peter Lawford (who was the real ones’ brother-in-law) and also stuck in the middle is Walter Pidgeon as the loyal workhorse majority leader.

Directed by Otto Preminger and with a screenplay from Wendell Mayes, Advise & Consent wisely avoids explicitly stating to which party any of the politicians belong. Though if one were to suggest the majority (and all the main characters) were Democrats, I’d probably agree. Preminger made this movie at the height of his career, coming after the Sidney Poitier version of Porgy and Bess, the Jimmy Stewart thriller Anatomy of a Murder (with script also by Wendell Mayes) and Exodus, improbably starring Paul Newman in the dramatic journey of Holocaust survivors trying to get past nasty British soldiers into pre-Israel Palestine.

This film version is just okay, the novels were much better; Preminger and Mayes take the melodramatic portions of Drury’s novel and as much as possible avoid the political story. Fonda is barely seen in the first half and refuses to involve himself in the back room maneuvers surrounding his nomination. Laughton and Murray have the meatiest parts, though the few women present–mainly Gene Tierney and Inga Swenson–have juicy cameos.

moderately recommended