Advise and Consent (1962)
Directed by Otto Preminger

Film Review

After showing up the failings of the American judicial system in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), director Otto Preminger devotes himself to a similarly vigorous dissection of the country's political system, and leaves us in no doubt that politics can be a very dirty game indeed, especially when personal reputations are at stake.  Advise and Consent is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Allen Drury, although it subverts the strident anti-Communist intent of the novel and serves more as a critique of the anti-Communist hysteria that swept through America in the 1950s (in a similar vein to Chaplin's A King in New York).  As in many of his films of this period, Preminger goes out of his way to attract censure and the film broke new ground in its portrayal of homosexual persecution (based on a real life incident).

The film is admirably served by a remarkable ensemble of big name actors, including Henry Fonda, Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray and Charles Laughton.  In his last screen role (he died from cancer not long after the film was released), Laughton turns in a delightfully chilling performance (no actor plays sly villainy so effortlessly) and even if he does tend to ham things up his presence livens things up no end.  Gene Tierney (Heaven Can Wait, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) makes a welcome comeback after an absence of seven years from cinema (during which she battled depression) and Preminger defied the blacklist by casting Burgess Meredith in a key supporting role.  As you would expect from such a distinguished cast, the performances are impeccable and add considerable lustre to a film that, by virtue of its subject, could have been as dull as ditch water.

A variant on the courtroom drama theme, most of the action takes place in the United States Senate, principally in a subcommittee to vet the president's nomination for the post of Secretary of State.   As in Anatomy of a Murder, Preminger stages these sequences in such a way that they are utterly compelling, stretching the abilities of his cinematographer, camera crew and actors in an attempt to make them as exciting as possible.  (The use of real locations gives the film a greater sense of immediacy and impact.)  The film's other notable sequence is the one in which an incorruptible young senator (sympathetically portrayed by Don Murray) is driven to suicide when his homosexual past comes back to haunt him.  Here, Preminger recreates the mood of his earlier film noir masterpieces and provides a suitably bleak interlude that serves as a trigger for the film's dramatic conclusion.  Advise and Consent may let itself down with a plot that is too contrived to be entirely credible, but for all that it remains one of Otto Preminger's most compelling and daring films.

Film Synopsis

Aware that his health and power are ebbing away, the President of the United States is determined that Robert A. Leffingwell, a liberally inclined academic, should be appointed Secretary of State.  Not everyone approves of the choice and Leffingwell must appear before a Senate subcommittee before he can be elected to the role.  Leffingwell's staunchest supporter is Bob Munson, the Majority Leader of the President's party, but he has a formidable opponent in Seabright Cooley, the senator from South Carolina who regards the nominee as a misguided appeaser.   Cooley attempts to discredit Leffingwell by revealing that he once belonged to a Communist cell, but the President retaliates by sending a key witness out of the country.  When the subcommittee chairman Brigham Anderson moves to put pressure on the President to withdraw his nomination he begins to receive anonymous phone calls from someone who threatens to expose his past indiscretions...