Old Yorker

  • Advise and Consent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

  • Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lone Scherfig (2002)

    We recently watched the new Netflix crime thriller series Dept Q.  It’s brimming with violence, physical and verbal, and, as might be expected from the Edinburgh setting, well-known Scottish actors – even though the lead detective is English (Matthew Goode) and his surprising sidekick a Syrian refugee, played by a Russian-born Swede (Alexej Manvelov).  The Scots include Mark Bonnar, Kate Dickie, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald, Steven Miller, Chloe Pirrie and Jamie Sives.  All have shown their talents in other TV shows and/or cinema films; all do notable work in Dept Q (though Chloe Pirrie is miscast, I think); but Jamie Sives is outstanding – as usual.  He’s impressed me ever since he brought Tom Harper’s only fair-to-middling Wild Rose (2018) to exciting life during his few minutes on screen.  That was the only time I’d seen Sives in a cinema role.  Dept Q sent me looking through his IMDb credits for earlier – I hoped larger – parts in films.  This is how I came upon Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself.  I’m delighted that I did.

    The film’s name rang a bell (as it would) but I knew nothing about Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, in which Jamie Sives plays the title character, a serial suicide manqué in turn-of-the-millennium Glasgow.  This was the second feature directed by Lone Scherfig, who also co-wrote the screenplay, with her fellow Dane, Anders Thomas Jensen.  (He has gone on to share the writing credit on two films by other high-profile Danish directors, Susanne Bier’s In a Better World (2010) and Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land (2023).)  Wilbur is a true Danish-Scottish collaboration:  much of the cast is Scottish; most of those involved behind the camera are Danish.  There are a couple of coincidences between the film and Dept Q.  The latter is adapted from the first of a series of books by a Dane (Jussi Adler-Olsen), which was set in Copenhagen[1].  From this distance in time, the most striking non-Scottish actor in Wilbur – in that he’s now much the biggest international name in the cast – would seem to be Mads Mikkelsen.  Not for this viewer, though.  As in Dept Q, a pivotal role is taken by an Englishman (though this one plays a Scot).  Adrian Rawlins, like Jamie Sives, is one of my favourite TV actors.  On the evidence of this film, Rawlins may also be, like Sives, one of Britain’s most underrated, underused film actors.

    Rawlins’ Harbour is Wilbur’s elder brother.  Their late parents ran a second-hand bookshop, which they left to their two sons.  Harbour runs the business single-handed; Wilbur, who wasn’t interested, works, between suicide attempts, as an assistant in an infant school.  (This seems surprising, given his mental state:  you forgive the improbability, thanks to Jamie Sives’ interactions with the children.)  Harbour takes his responsibility to look after Wilbur very seriously but he can only do so much.  They don’t live together, at least at the start of the story:  Harbour lives over the shop, Wilbur in a flat not too far away.  Although neither brother has a partner, we get the impression from conversation that blunt chauvinist Wilbur has had more of a sex life than sensitive, courteous Harbour.  Things change with Alice (Shirley Henderson again), a regular client of the bookshop:  a single mother living with her young daughter Mary (Lisa McKinlay), Alice works night shifts as a cleaner at a local hospital – she sells Harbour books that she picks up there.  Wilbur tells his brother that it makes sense ‘grabbing’ women; suddenly, Harbour and Alice are getting married – celebrating with Mary, Wilbur and Alice’s friend Sophie (Susan Vidler) in a Chinese restaurant.  Afterwards, Wilbur stays over at the bookshop and slits his wrists in the bath.  Harbour and Alice find him just in time to save his life.  When Wilbur gets out of hospital this time, Harbour insists that he move into the flat above the bookshop – along with him, Alice and Mary.  Wilbur and Alice are strongly attracted to each other.  To try and subdue his feelings, Wilbur turns his attentions to Moira (Julia Davis), a nurse at the hospital where he’s regularly treated.  It emerges that Harbour is also visiting the hospital.  He tries to keep his pancreatic cancer diagnosis a secret from his wife and brother but Moira, when the four of them – plus Mary – go to the Chinese restaurant together, crassly gives the game away.  Wilbur and Alice inevitably spend more time together once Harbour is receiving longer-term hospital care.

    You wouldn’t guess from all that how funny the film is.  Lone Scherfig brings off a difficult balancing act – between black comedy and end-of-life drama, between genuine human feeling and graveyard humour (several sequences take place in a cemetery, where the brothers’ parents are buried, and where Harbour will eventually join them).  And Scherfig succeeds through integrating rather than alternating the material’s different aspects.  Her lead actors were evidently aware that and how she managed to do this – that her linguistic outsiderness helped.  The extras on my DVD of Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself include snippets of interviews with Jamie Sives and Adrian Rawlins (as well as with Scherfig herself and Shirley Henderson).  Both seem to have found their dialogue beguiling but somehow alien, although they express this differently.  Rawlins, with a baffled smile, describes the writing as ‘tilted’.  Sives says delivering a Danish line in a Glasgow bookshop isn’t the same as delivering a Glasgow line there.

    One contributor who didn’t get the memo is Joachim Holbek, who composed the music.  Holbek’s score always seems to be straining to reduce the story to poignant sentimental drama, and Scherfig makes too much use of it.  There’s a natural risk that Shirley Henderson, beautifully fragile in looks and voice, will also have the effect of over-sweetening the film but this doesn’t happen.  Scherfig smartly gives Henderson a big, angry outburst – Alice’s reaction to Harbour’s secrecy about his terminal illness – that is powerfully counteractive.  Alice’s adultery with Wilbur gives the narrative a larger astringency.  At the same time, you don’t lose sympathy with them – not least because they feel bad about betraying Harbour.  Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is very good at conveying offshoots of a tragic situation that are almost more painful than that situation.  Harbour is allowed out of hospital to spend Christmas Day with his family.  ‘Are you going to sleep in Wilbur’s old room?’, Mary asks innocently.  The answer’s no anyway because Harbour is returning to the hospital, where that night he will take an overdose of tablets to end his life.  In the meantime, he recalls visiting his dying father in hospital, who mistook him for Wilbur.  Harbour has always had to look out for his vulnerable younger brother, ever since the death of their mentally fragile mother, who adored her younger son.  Wilbur does unforgivable things – especially the suicide attempt that interrupts Harbour’s wedding night – but he was always the charmer.  Even now, Harbour accepts that, not only without bitterness but lovingly; even so, Mary’s question effectively tells him it’s time to take his leave.

    There are things in the set-up and storyline that don’t really work – not in Glasgow anyway.   Mads Mikkelsen’s character, Dr Horst, a psychologist at the hospital, is implausibly ubiquitous.  One moment he’s supervising the talking-and-sharing group of failed suicides ‘in recovery’; next, Dr Horst is sitting alongside Harbour’s oncologist and giving diagnostic as well as psychological advice to the patient.  Harbour appears always to have a private room at the hospital.  Although on his last legs, he comes back to the bookshop for Christmas Day entirely unsupervised – getting a taxi there and back.  Wilbur eventually gets banned from the suicidal circle, a move led by his aggressive bête noire on the group (Elaine Mackenzie Ellis).  Later on, once he feels that Alice makes life worth living, Wilbur saves this woman’s life when she tries to drown herself:  staged straight, this is almost tastelessly pat but the following scene between Wilbur and Alice, when he returns soaking wet to the bookshop, makes a virtue of it.

    Lone Scherfig has had an oddly shaped, up-and-down cinema career.  There was a cross-cultural theme of sorts even in her first feature, Italian for Beginners (2000), about a group of suburban Danish lonelyhearts trying to find love through an Italian class.  In the next few years, Scherfig seemed to be developing an incisive interest in Scottish, or at least Glaswegian, life.  After Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, she (and Anders Thomas Jensen) had a hand in the screenplay of Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006), according to IMDb.  An all-Danish film, Just Like Home (2007), followed before Scherfig returned to Britain to make An Education (2009).  That film gave her a deserved international success; in the next decade, though, she seemed to choose much less interesting and more generic British projects – One Day (2011), The Riot Club (2014), Their Finest (2016).  After her first American-based film, The Kindness of Strangers (2019), bombed, Scherfig went back to Denmark to develop the TV hospital drama series, The Shift.  Her latest feature film, The Movie Teller (2023), set in rural Chile and featuring an international cast, was much better received than The Kindness of Strangers. 

    In Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Scherfig orchestrates her variously talented cast with great success.  Although Dr Horst never quite fits, Mads Mikkelsen’s dry humour comes through increasingly well.  Julia Davis has more of a comic-sketch approach to character than the film’s other main players – an approach that works splendidly in a support role like Dawn in Gavin and Stacey; here, it meshes with Moira’s dressing-up tendencies (changing her hairdo, wearing an Oriental outfit for the Chinese restaurant, and so on).  And the two main men are wonderful.

    I’ve never seen Adrian Rawlins in his best-known cinema role, as Harry Potter’s father.  Rawlins is well into his sixties but it’s only in recent TV appearances – in The Sixth Commandment, Moonflower Murders and Patience – that I’ve really started to notice and admire him.  Whatever Rawlins does, he’s remarkably truthful:  that came across especially in Moonflower Murders.  Although Lesley Manville carries it (and its predecessor, Magpie Murders), the casting gives nice opportunities to several of the cast to play two contrasting parts – one more serious than the other – within the same story.  Rawlins was equally convincing in both.  In Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, the role of Harbour, although it includes just about as much screen time as that of Wilbur, is, of course, markedly less showy.  But it gives Adrian Rawlins the chance to explore and express a range of emotions, and each of them is deeply felt.  He’s got great humour, too.

    As for Jamie Sives … Dept Q features lashings of bitterly witty, profane dialogue (several writers were involved).  Although the cast delivers this expertly, it often seems like a grandstanding house style – supposedly different characters speaking with the same voice.  Sives is always the exception.  He plays a police detective, James Hardy, erstwhile sidekick of the protagonist, Matthew Goode’s Carl Morck.  From an early flashback sequence, with the Englishman and the Scotsman arguing about the 1966 World Cup Final, Sives’ wisecracking anger is thoroughly real and very funny.  (Hardy spends most of the eight episodes lying in a hospital bed, paralysed by gunshot in the attack that kicks the story off; Sives is just as marvellous when he can hardly move at all.)  Those qualities make him the ideal choice for Wilbur.  You’re confident of a secure tone to the film from the sequence over the opening credits, during which Wilbur swallows tablets; tries – belt and braces – to gas himself, too; and furiously hits the oven for not doing what he wants it to.  Scherfig gives the character plenty of backstory – perhaps a bit too much but that serves to ensure that his suicidal tendencies aren’t a plot device which, unexplained, might well seem questionable.  After the gas oven prologue, we next see Wilbur at the hospital, in the suicides’ group, where he’s heard enough, decides it’s lunchtime and lets out a noisily impatient sigh.  He goes on to show, though often by suppressing, natural appetite of a different kind whenever Shirley Henderson’s Alice is around.  Jamie Sives’ combination of relaxed physicality and avidity is simply amazing.

    13 June 2025

    [1] The book in question, Mercy, was first adapted for the screen in the 2013 Danish film The Keeper of Lost Causes.

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