ADVISE AND CONSENT
Friday June, 10 2011 at 10:00 PM
The passage of time turns every film into two films. Apart from what its narrative may yield, it becomes an inadvertent documentary as well. So it is, in spades, in Advise & Consent (1962), Otto Preminger's Kennedy-era look at the post-McCarthy Senate. As rejiggered in Alan Drury's best-selling 1959 novel about political wheeling and dealing, the film takes on new life by preserving the details and minutiae, as if in amber, of D.C. life in the '50s. While not the only fascination in this lumpy but rich pudding of a film, it's a pungent ingredient.
As much as we're caught up in the machinations of the high-rolling Senate wheelers and dealers, we're charmed by the simplicity and Harry Truman-like plainness of the lifestyles of those same makers and shakers. Perhaps intentionally, the only senator seen with an entourage is George Grizzard's Joseph McCarthy-like heavy, who needs henchmen because he spends so much time doing bad deeds in the name of good – digging up dirt to strong-arm a Senate committee chairman (Don Murray) into confirming Henry Fonda's statesmanlike, global-thinking, Adlai Stevensonesque appointee, Robert Leffingwell, as secretary of state.
But the other senators in Advise & Consent's plummy gallery of character actors take what today seems an amazingly direct do-it-yourself approach. Paul Ford, as the Senate whip, stuffs a newspaper into his pocket, walks to a curb, and hails his own taxi. When Charles Laughton's foxy Dixiecrat, who steals the film, decides to do a little detective work, he plunks his wide-brimmed hat on his head and determinedly plods to the office that has the info he's looking for. When Murray's senator flies the shuttle from NYC to DC, his seatmate is Lew Ayres' vice president. Each is traveling not only alone, but anonymously.
The titillating promise of insider hardball in the corridors of power, dished up to a public not yet inured to hearing negative things about government, made the novel a hit. The drama is heightened by steering the confirmation process from a sub-committee to an open hearing, where the opposing sides can grandstand, and do, with many a flourish. With a Congress that's anything but a rubber stamp for the executive branch, the nomination seems shaky because Leffingwell's internationalism and belief in building consensus with allies is assailed as softness on communism. One of the witnesses against him, distortedly testifying to and exaggerating Leffingwell's youthfully idealistic flirtation with communism, is Burgess Meredith, delivering a masterly turn as a Whitaker Chambers-like echo of the House Committee on un-American Activities' pursuit of Alger Hiss.
Although there was no doubt about the liberal tilt of Preminger's politics (he and various company members, including Gene Tierney, who had known JFK in his pre-Jackie days, lunched with JFK on the presidential yacht), Advise & Consent is an equal-opportunity piece of cynicism, augmented by bits of visual authenticity – the Senate canteen, the trolley that brings the senators through underground passages. The closest it comes to dignifying the Senate is in the grace, patience and stature of Walter Pidgeon as the Senate Majority Leader. Franchot Tone's president is a dying man. But he still seems paler, dramatically, than he ought to be. Although perhaps superficially modeled on FDR, he lacks size and presence. Surprisingly, the usually quietly powerful Fonda also comes up short on presence, too, as the nominee. He seems wooden, a bit recessive, embalmed by what we're told is the man's stature, but is never communicated to us as felt knowledge.
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http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/386904|159645/Advise-and-Consent.html
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