Advise and Consent
Otto Preminger (1962)
Otto Preminger’s drama, adapted by Wendell Hayes from Allan Drury’s 1959 novel of the same name, takes its title from a phrase in the American constitution, referring to a president’s appointments made ‘by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate’. Following the incumbent’s death in office, the President (Franchot Tone) has nominated a replacement Secretary of State, the name to be considered by a Senate sub-committee. During its first hour or so, Advise and Consent is a contemporary politics procedural. Preminger sketches in the main players, the alliances and feuds between them; builds the controversy around the President’s nomination of Robert A Leffingwell (Henry Fonda); and stages Leffingwell’s pivotal misdemeanour – to save his skin, he lies under oath at the Senate confirmation hearings. His perjury comes to the attention of the Senate sub-committee chairman, young Utah senator Brigham Anderson (Don Murray). Up to this point, the story feels shallow and is only mildly entertaining: I wondered how the film could go on for another hour-plus. Then ambitious, broadly impartial, squeaky-clean Anderson, seemingly a supporting character, is unforeseeably propelled centre-stage; Leffingwell, as a presence on screen, exits the picture never to reappear. Advise and Consent turns increasingly and bizarrely melodramatic, and eventually (inadvertently) comical. Thanks to this barmy transformation, though, it certainly doesn’t end up dull.
In one respect, the film’s version of Washington DC is odd from the start: the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ pass no one’s lips. One assumes this is a Democrat administration because Leffingwell is notoriously liberal. His noisiest supporter is Senator Fred Van Ackerman (George Grizzard), a kind of peacenik demagogue from Wyoming (of all places). His most outspoken opponent is white-suited Senator Seabright Cooley (Charles Laughton) from South Carolina – an apparently Republican type though he could equally be a relic of the Dixiecrat tradition. There’s a ludicrous little sequence early on, involving three female spectators at Capitol Hill – one American, one English, one French. Being women, Preminger seems to say, they can’t – bless ‘em – get their pretty little heads around the Senate’s modus operandi (especially the prettiest of the three, who’s the French woman (Michèle Montau), of course). You sympathise with this trio because the set-up is hard to grasp, at least in terms of political affiliation. Preminger and Wendell Hayes may have avoided labels in order to focus more clearly on themes of political power, ambition, chicanery and rivalry, but the effect is weird. Advise and Consent rather gives the impression that the US is a one-party state.
Though he doesn’t even give his inner circle advance notice of Leffingwell’s nomination, the President (sans surname throughout) nevertheless expects Senator Bob Munson (Walter Pidgeon) to see the nomination safely through the Senate, and Munson goes about his task loyally and conscientiously. The confirmation hearings warm up once Cooley procures a witness – a Treasury Department clerk, Herbert Gelman (Burgess Meredith) – to testify that he was once part of a communist cell in Chicago along with three other men, including Leffingwell. Gelman is discredited as a witness when Leffingwell exposes the clerk’s mental health history but the nominee lies in denying that he knew Gelman and that he was indeed one of the Chicago four. Undaunted, Cooley finds another member of the cell, Hardiman Fletcher (Paul McGrath), now a senior Treasury official, and pressures him into confessing his past, and associations with Leffingwell, to Brigham Anderson. Admitting his perjury to the President, Leffingwell feels his nomination should be withdrawn but the President won’t stand down. He even dispatches Fletcher abroad to get a problem out of the way.
It’s when Brig Anderson returns home one night to his beautiful wife (Inga Swenson) and their cute little daughter (Janet Jane Carty) that Advise and Consent suddenly shifts up a melodramatic gear or three. Anderson is cock-a-hoop: in a meeting with the President, he has insisted that Leffingwell’s nomination be withdrawn; the President, although still refusing to concede, knows he’s lost the argument even before Bob Munson tells him as much. Anderson’s mood darkens the moment his wife reports a puzzling anonymous phone call earlier in the evening – the caller ‘said that before you go on with the Leffingwell matter you ought to remember what happened in Hawaii. Then he hung up. … He made it sound like he knew some kind of nasty secret’. Similar threats soon follow: Anderson is warned that, unless he lets Leffingwell’s nomination proceed, a compromising letter that Anderson once wrote to Ray Scharf, an army buddy in Hawaii, and a photograph of the two young men together – wearing leis, smiling happily – will be made public. From the moment the blackmail thread is introduced, Advise and Consent, along with Anderson, spins out of control.
Turns out Ray Scharf recently called at Anderson’s office and left with his PA a New York address where Ray could be contacted. Anderson jumps on a plane to New York. At the address Ray supplied, Anderson has a frantic conversation with Manuel (Larry Tucker), who is oily, creepy and hugely overweight. (He could be the twin brother of the Victor Buono character in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, which landed in American cinemas for Halloween 1962, just three months after Advise and Consent opened.) According to Ruby McGuigan, the BFI programmer who introduced this screening, Preminger was proud to have made a film that, despite a homosexual subplot, reached the screen without the censor’s insisting on cuts. You suspect this can only have happened because Preminger’s treatment of the theme, far from being liberal, comes over as flagrantly homophobic. Manuel directs Anderson to a city bar – supposedly the first-ever gay bar seen in a mainstream Hollywood movie – whose leering clientele suggests the lowest circle of Hell. Anderson is so appalled that he turns on his heel and leaves but not before Ray (John Granger) – white T-shirt, jeans, muscles – catches sight of Anderson and rushes after him. In the street outside, Brig angrily knocks his old flame to the ground, leaving Ray face down in a muddy puddle, and jumps in a yellow cab to the airport. One of his fellow passengers on the flight back to Washington happens to be the Vice-President, Harley Hudson (Lew Ayres). He can see Brig’s anguish and, apparently without knowing its cause, says he may be able to help. Anderson briefly cheers up until a member of the air crew asks passengers to fasten their seat belts, warning of turbulence ahead (!) … Back in Washington, Anderson hotfoots it to an apartment building, where he commits suicide.
Although this breathtaking turn of events upstages the Senate proceedings, things are still bewildering once the action returns to the main political arena. The President, in declining health, is approaching the end of his second term. He tells Munson he’s determined to press ahead with the Leffingwell nomination because he doesn’t reckon dull Vice-President Hudson capable of maintaining the administration’s imaginative foreign policy. But how will appointing Leffingwell as Secretary of State ensure the foreign policy legacy is preserved once someone else is President? Meanwhile, Van Ackerman is revealed as the prime mover in the blackmail of Brigham Anderson. The conclusive Senate vote on Leffingwell’s nomination is on a knife-edge: in the Oval Office, the ailing President listens anxiously to a live radio broadcast of the vote count. It’s so stressful that he drops dead (off-camera). The vote is tied. The Vice-President, ex officio President (in effect, Chair) of the Senate, is expected, according to convention, to use his casting vote in favour of his boss’s nomination. Then someone hands Harley Hudson a piece of paper, informing him of the sad events at the White House. In the circumstances, President-once-he’s-taken-the-oath-of-office Hudson declines to vote. Leffingwell’s nomination therefore fails. Everyone troops out of the Senate chamber, understandably exhausted.
If it’s anything like the film, it seems astonishing that Allan Drury’s source novel won a Pulitzer Prize. There were differences enough for Drury to cross swords with Preminger and Hayes about their adaptation. Drury was politically to the right of the moviemakers: according to his Wikipedia profile, he ‘believed most Americans were naive about the dangers of the Soviet-led communist threat to undermine the government of the United States’ – and the film’s storyline does depart significantly from the book’s. The first in Drury’s series of political novels, Advise and Consent ends with Leffingwell’s nomination failing without the melodrama of the President’s death (which would wait for the beginning of the second novel in the series). Even so, Leffingwell’s communist past and the blackmailing of Anderson are key to the novel’s plot; the presumed inspirations for both serve to underline their implausibility in the story that Drury devised.
Robert Leffingwell may well have been modelled on Alger Hiss. During his political career in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Hiss was the object of rumours about his past communist connections but he had left politics, of his own accord, well before his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 and subsequent imprisonment. Brig Anderson’s suicide may have been suggested by that of Democrat senator Lester Hunt in 1954 but the latter, a staunch opponent of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaigns, took his own life when Republican senators threatened to make public that Hunt’s son had been arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer. It’s more than believable that a left-wing past and a whiff of homosexuality could do for a US politician in the early post-war period. It’s less easy to credit that opponents would keep sufficiently quiet about such matters to allow a political career to progress unimpeded – until just the moment when the politician under suspicion was nearly at the top of the greasy pole.
Plenty of the cast of Advise and Consent keep things interesting. Before his unexpected departure from the scene, Henry Fonda cuts a credible figure as Leffingwell. Ditto Walter Pidgeon as Munson although, as usual, he’s a bit dull. Don Murray is a good choice for clean-cut Anderson, the eager rising star and proud family man; it’s hardly Murray’s fault that he struggles once the character’s secret past takes over. Burgess Meredith is excellent in his few minutes on screen. George Grizzard, in a crudely OTT role, gives a performance to match. As suggested above, the female parts are feeble. The sole woman senator is Betty (Golden Girls) White. It’s presumably for old times’ sake that Preminger has Gene (Laura) Tierney in the film, as a Washington society hostess having some kind of fling with Munson. Charles Laughton looks ill (he died before the end of 1962) and seems tired: Seabright Cooley’s oratory in the US Senate sounds like Laughton going through the motions – it compares poorly with his oratory in the Roman Senate, when he played Gracchus in Spartacus just two years previously. It doesn’t help either that, when he’s not making a speech, Cooley has a tiresome penchant for natural world metaphor to underline how wily-folksy he is (‘Us ole buzzards can see a mouse dyin’ from 10,000 feet up … us ole buzzards have the sharpest eyes in creation’, ‘It’s my day for sunnin’ myself … like an ole bullfrog on a lily pad’). Yet Laughton’s silent reaction to the news of Anderson’s suicide – a moment with more emotional depth than any other in the film – is enough on its own to remind you of his greatness.
Leffingwell’s teenage son is played by Eddie Hedges, whom I’d seen a couple of months ago in a bigger role as Frank Sinatra’s son in A Hole in the Head (1959): as soon as Hedges appeared in Advise and Consent, it reminded me that the opening credits had promised ‘the voice of Frank Sinatra’ and I wondered when we’d hear it. The answer is in the most unlikely place: on the soundtrack for all of ten seconds, The Voice is the voice of an unseen singer in the infernal gay bar – not the kind of underworld you naturally associate with Sinatra. (By the way, his Rat Pack colleague Peter Lawford has a minor role here as a womanising senator.) Otherwise, the film is musically unmemorable: it’s hardly surprising that Jerry Fielding’s score doesn’t seem sure what it’s meant to be doing. The film didn’t seem to me visually distinguished either although it was showing as part of BFI’s annual ‘Film on Film’ mini-festival – as one of three black-and-white Cinemascope offerings of the 1960s. On the NFT3 screen, some of cinematographer Sam Leavitt’s images looked a bit blurred. There’s also a repeated mismatch between the volume of oohs and aahs and applause in the Senate committee chamber and the much lesser degree of reaction of spectators suggested in the image that the sound accompanies. That opening credits sequence, conceived by Saul Bass, is a smart piece of title design: the dome of the Capitol Building flips up roguishly to admit Otto Preminger’s name, as if to suggest his film will really take the lid off Washington goings-on and get inside the place. In the event, though, Saul Bass’s animation may be the smartest thing in the whole of Advise and Consent.
14 June 2025