ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

Political movies (that is, movies explicitly about some aspect of the American political scene) had a heyday of sorts in the early 60's--think of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE BEST MAN, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, and FAIL SAFE. This one is often touted as the most realistic one of the bunch, and as much of it was filmed at actual Washington settings, it certainly looks real. The atmosphere put me in mind of a Senate version of "The West Wing." Apparently many of the situations and characters are based on real events and people (despite a big disclaimer at the end of the opening credits), although except for certain similarities to the McCarthy debacle, I couldn't make any one-on-one connections. Despite this (or perhaps because of this), I found the movie to be mostly compelling, if a little tough to parse on occasion. Ailing president Franchot Tone has picked Henry Fonda to be his new Secretary of State. During confirmation hearings in the Senate, it comes out that Fonda may have dabbled in Communism in his youth and powerful Southern senator Charles Laughton leads an effort to block Fonda's appointment. Young hotshot George Grizzard, pissed that he was passed over as chairman of the hearings committee (for young coolheaded Don Murray) makes an aggressive attempt to push Fonda's nomination ahead, and he gets so desperate that he tries to blackmail Murray over a homosexual affair he had in the Navy during the war. That, in a nutshell, is the plot, largely presented as two separate stories which intertwine briefly.

The movie is filled with solid performances: in addition to Laughton (who, in his last movie, chews the scenery in a mostly fun way) and Murray (whose quiet but powerful performance is the polar opposite of Laughton's), there's Burgess Meredith as a neurotic ex-commie called to testify against Fonda, Lew Ayres as the ambitious but realistic vice-president, and Inga Swenson as Murray's in-the-dark wife. Walter Pidgeon, as the Majority Leader, anchors the movie with the best performance I've seen from him, and it's also fun to see people like Paul Ford and Edward Andrews get to stretch a bit. What I liked best about it is that there aren't really good guys and bad guys; even the men who come off the worst are more assholes than evil. Fonda (who, despite being top-billed, practically vanishes for the last hour of the film) is used to great advantage: the audience knows that his persona is that of an good and admirable man, so it's a wonderful shock to realize halfway through that he's not so very admirable after all, though he may still actually be the best man for the job. The gay angle is handled in a way that was quite sensationalistic in its time, but seems tame and quaint now--the glimpse we get of a New York gay bar makes it look quite preppy and not at all decadent and shameful as one might have expected. Otto Preminger's widescreen style is not splashy but it is quietly effective. The movie is a bit long, but it's worth sitting through, especially since the unpretty picture it presents of political wheeling and dealing still seems quite relevant today. [DVD]