Advise & Consent (1962)
The political picture can be difficult, primarily because it appears to be one of the genres (films dealing with mental breakdown being another) that’s most encouraging of a certain suffocating self-righteousness. Life, humor, even sex mostly, are choked out of these pictures in a desire to be taken seriously as (I assume) works of criticism or essays of change (Oscar traps). Charlie Wilson’s War, the recent Mike Nichols release, is such a film. War began promisingly as a boozy, one thing after another chronicle of a guy in Congress that kinda-sorta grows a conscience by accident, only to squander its strengths and originality (a we scratch each other’s backs to keep the machine rolling by way of compromise by way of humor born of despair that fleetingly recalls a contemporary screwball comedy by way of Altman on a lesser day) in favor of the usual eat your vegetables civics beats. Charlie Wilson’s War had a more honest than usual ending, I’ll give it that, but I had checked out long before, finding the self-congratulation too stifling.
Happily, the problems many usually note of Otto Preminger’s movies (cold impersonality being a primary), run straight into the problems of the political picture in Advise & Consent, and cancel one other out in the process. The film concerns the approval of the President’s (Franchot Tone) nomination for Secretary of State, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), by the Senate. Advise & Consent, unmistakably a Preminger film, opens with the most essential, definitively first, cog in the plot-the announcement of the nomination in the paper (an example of the picture’s admitted naiveté, primarily springing from a just adequate screenplay), which the President has made to the Senate’s excitement, dismay and shock. The conventional candidates were ignored (of course) in favor of Leffingwell, whom the President feels is essential to maintaining his legacy. The Senate Majority Leader (Walter Pidgeon) immediately kicks into spin drive on the President’s behalf, contacting a variety of (again, of course) eccentric characters in the Capitol in an effort to put the President’s nomination through with as little question and conflict as possible (the underrated Aaron Sorkin-Rob Reiner film, The American President, is a comedic gloss on an intentionally similar premise).
The President and Senate Majority Leader’s primary hurdle is South Carolina Senator Seabright Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in one of his grand, willfully bizarre scenery chewing roles. Laughton’s walk, intimidating in its purposefully, ironically visible vulnerability (an old fat man’s come on), has more personality and wit than many actors’ full bodied orations. Laughton’s full bodied orations then, which have no bearing on any kind of speech existing on planet Earth, are feats of hyperbolic poetry (also catch Witness for the Prosecution, if you haven’t yet) that puncture that ridiculous seriousness that pervades in many political pictures (The Contender, being another, recent, laughable example). Laughton accomplishes something notable here: he takes, as he’s normally apt to, his character so far into the theatrical stratosphere that he comes to resemble something more true (at least in our movie fed imaginations) than most movie politicians. Laughton signifies the idea of inner government as ultimate performance art, a perpetual game of evening the stakes, of give and take, tit for tat. (It stuns me that Preminger didn’t give Laughton a scene of eating rare steak.)
Preminger uses most of the other performers just as adroitly, with Gene Tierney, returning to Preminger after all those years, registering in a bit as a socialite Pidgeon is seeing in secret; blessing the film, briefly, with the pathos of her real story-a still beautiful woman, struggling to hold herself together amidst a society of jackals. Burgess Meredith brings the picture to a temporary standstill as a man of mental doubt who comes to accuse Leffingwell of Communist leanings; his frailty and torment seemingly borrowed from another picture, which brings the picture at hand to frightening, vivid life (he gives us a sense of the cost of all this nonsense without resorting to the pedantic). Tone, as the President, feels miscast at the beginning (we wonder how he could be elected) but blossoms, as Advise & Consent continues, into a memorable, convincing, portrait of casual, insidious, slight of hand entitlement.
Advise & Consent’s tone, and manipulation of plot, particularly pertaining to the Henry Fonda character, are what strike me as most interesting and subversive though. The opening third primes us for the usual, morally rigid story that subjects our spiritually untouchable character to a series of insults and doubt before allowing him to conquer all and rise to the occasion in order to bless us all with his sense of right and indignation. The picture introduces Fonda to us in a scene with his little son, drinking milk of all American things, never a good sign. Fonda’s scenes primarily consist of him defending himself to the increasingly self-amused Laughton character, again no surprise. Then the film drops Fonda almost entirely, after revealing him to be a bit more fallible than we expect. Contracting Fonda’s guilt, jarringly (like a disease), is an up to this point secondary character, Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), who discovers Fonda’s indiscretion via a manipulation on the part of Laughton. At this point, Advise & Consent, written off by Pauline Kael as mindless melodrama, comes to unexpected, feverish, lurid life.
The film, once again characteristic of Preminger, consciously concerns ahead of its time subject matter; namely, homosexuality, and the never-ending compromise that is service in the big government. To write off Preminger’s treatment of homosexuality, and its subsequent influence on the Leffingwell case, as merely melodramatic and puritanical (both true) is to miss part of the point: the Puritanism, whether a limitation of Preminger’s or an intentional manipulation of the filmmaker, informs Advise & Consent in a way that undeniably increases its fascination and tension. The shift in focus of characters is interesting enough for a mainstream American film of the early 1960s, but the shift in tone strikes me as amazing.
Brigham Anderson, facing professional and personal collapse, loses his wits, which in turn transforms much of the last third of Advise & Consent into a near horror picture. Yes, a gay club is portrayed as a nest of forbidden evil, but this is also the culmination of Anderson’s panic and is complimented by an earlier scene with Anderson and his wife at their home, and their child’s almost alien voice and she asks to play with dad. Is Preminger overplaying his hand? Or exhibiting considerably more empathetic filmmaking than is traditionally acknowledged in his work? I think it’s both, and that’s an unsettling accomplishment, with the picture’s brilliant, open-ended anti-climax serving as the cherry on top: revealing the entire story to be just one of many daily controversies, with the next already ready at the wings.
Preminger’s curious, remote approach dries the subtext free dialogue of the script. The superb, full compositions lend the picture a subtly and implication of inner life that is absent on the page. Preminger’s aloof outlook (a criticism that’s overstated but undeniably present), when wedded to the right story, perfectly compliments the barely repressed hysteria and perversion of the subject matter. Angel Face is a wonderful example, and so is Advise & Consent, rightfully regarded as one of Preminger’s strongest films.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Yes, this is a rather startling film. It takes you by surprise; by the third act, it really does become something of a horror picture. In the abstract, Laughton’s performance shouldn’t work but onscreen it does. You’re right, he makes the otherworldly Senator somehow more real than he would be if underplayed. Capitol Hill has quite the history of real flamboyant, larger-than-life characters and honestly I think Laughton nails all of the pomposity of that individual.
Walter Pidgeon is terrific as well. But then, the whole cast is top-to-bottom solid.
Preminger certainly allows his remoteness to make the film work as well as it can, with a kind of dispassionate faux “God’s eye” on all of the troubled characters. It really makes this political drama/thriller-cum-horror movie come alive in a way that a more subjective and emotional take, like John Ford with The Last Hurrah, which worked for a that personal, vastly more intimate film, for instance, but would probably not fly with Advise and Consent.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Excellent analysis, Chuck. This is one of my favorite Preminger films. I really like it when he shot in the modern-day 50’s and 60’s. The film is laborious in that Preminger way, but unfolds indeed like a horror show. The gay bar scene is fascinating in its reveal, and I love the classic Preminger tastelessness in the scene with the gay cat-owner.
Despite his rep, Preminger did get unique performances out of good and bad actors.
May 27th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
It was Charles Laughton’s last performance: and truly, what a way to go, man!
May 27th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Agreed, Gloria.
And, Christian, you’re right. Preminger doesn’t get enough credit for his handling of actors, which was always very deft.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Alexander-Weird you mention The Last Hurrah, I’m checking that one soon. And you’re right about Pidgeon, terrific.
Christian-yeah, many of Preminger’s pictures are laborious, but many of them transcend that, and the performances are a key reason. I recently caught Bonjour Tristesse for the first time, and it begs to not work, but somehow does. The French were right about Seberg for one thing, and that scene where she all but says she’s jealous of Kerr for having her father is astounding and disturbing.
Gloria-very much agreed. Thanks for stopping in and hope to hear more from you!