SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

A Disappointing Continuation

The first must-see film of the year.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I will not refute that my radical response towards Preminger's ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959, 5/10) vaguely seven years ago, is due to a commonplace disparity of personal taste, which may explain my procrastinated second foray into Preminger's cannon, the less prominent and awards-snubbed ADVISE & CONSENT. Personally speaking, political drama is not my genre of passion especially I have grown up from a country where no such type of cinema conspicuously exists, plus basically I have few clues of the structure and framework as regards the complex USA political hierarchy (although thanks to HOUSE OF CARDS, I have assimilated some elementary guidances now), thereby, my ingrained insouciance is the chief impediment. Efficiently introduced in the very first scene, the central issue is zooming in on the designation of the newly-nominated Secretary of State Robert Leffingwell (Fonda) by the ailing President (Tone), who resorts to Senate Majority Leader (Pidgeon) to facilitate the procedure in the Congress while the main drag force is a senior Senator Cooley (Laughton) who holds a personal ill will against Robert. Then roughly the film can be split into halves, the first one principally concerns a cross- examination of Robert's communist background in a subcommittee presided by the budding Senator Anderson (Murray), it's a conflict blurs the lines between truth and lie, which can be implied tacitly as an imperative criterion in politicking and also segues into the second half pertains to Anderson being extorted into an earlier jurisdiction by an envious Senator Van Ackerman (Grizzard), with an extra push from Cooley. Anderson is plagued by the deepest secret about his sexual orientation, as a result, a certain tragic follows. The two glaring talking points (communism and closeted homosexual) come as convenient and topical at the Cold War years, half a century later, propitiously we are lumbering on. At the final act, the Vice President (Ayres) steals the show as a fluke of an arbitrary fabrication on the votes. For audiences, the most palatable merit is a stellar ensemble body of work, first-billed though, Fonda vanishes completely after two thirds of the story, he is as righteous as in 12 ANGRY MEN (1957, 9/10); seeing as his swan song, Laughton withstands his splendor wonderfully and his eloquence in oratory is second to none. Two surprisingly enacted performances are from a suave Pidgeon, whose disparaging tongue-lashing to Van Acherman is perfectly on the nose, and a square-shouldered Murray carries a more tortuous story development and emanates an absorbing shock wave. I put all four in leading category, since in supporting circle, Tone, Ayres, Meredith (riveting as a key witness mouthing slanders) and even Tucker (the paunchy pimp totally incongruous with the bureaucratic atmosphere) are equally contending along with a sophisticated Tierney past her prime but her finesse never recedes. In a nutshell, ADVISE & CONSENT is an exemplar of political drama, and more unexpectedly it beckons a revisit and revaluation of ANATOMY OF A MURDER for me, where I may not give enough credit for Preminger's calculated camera scheduling and detached phlegm out of his source material.

Taking on the world of Washington with the same ponderous and sober eye that he focused on jurisprudence in "Anatomy of a Murder", Preminger has styled a political drama that never seems false and never bores but also never really surprises or inspires.Half the fun is in trying to identify the real historical figures who provide the basis for the fiction. Offhand, I felt that Franchot Tone's President was similar to FDR, especially in how the situation develops with his nervous and self-doubting VP, played by Lew Ayres. Following that thread of thought, there seems to be a bit of Henry Wallace in Henry Fonda's Leffingwell, the nominee for Secretary of State. The film's main plot concerns the battle for Leffingwell's nomination, which eventually involves sordid blackmail regarding past homosexual affairs on the part of the junior Congressman from Utah (Don Murray). The anchor performances in the film come from Walter Pidgeon and Charles Laughton, who play a couple of grizzled Senate veterans locked in a sometimes subtle battle over the confirmation.All the performances are solid, even Gene Tierney's (sorry for the backhand compliment, Gene, but you deserve it..... what did Preminger have for her anyway?). She stands in for Mrs./Ms. Merriwether Post, even inhabiting her old house uptown. Peter Lawford is also surprisingly good as (this time not surprisingly) a thinly veiled John Kennedy stand-in (in his introductory scene, we observe a fashionably dressed blonde exiting his hotel room). There's a brief scene where Betty White plays a Senator from Kansas, which is a real treat for today's audiences.The film has a minimum of patriotic mumbo-jumbo, and for that we can be thankful.... Preminger does not fall into the classic Capra trap of condemning what he loves the most, and giving us a worshipful paean to a corrupt system after having shown us all the warts. But he does portray the gay blackmail angle in a way that's unfortunately homophobic, even if we try to give the film some slack for the change in the times. Why was Ray's (John Granger) friend depicted as such a slovenly pimp? Why was the gay bar depicted in such a seedy and shadowy manner (the boys at the bar lasciviously staring at Murray as he enters)? Why, oh why, did Murray have to push Granger into a gutter at the end of his scene? I understand that Murray was portraying some kind of self-loathing Mormon who had lapsed into homosexuality, but that was all the film gave us of Granger and it left plenty of space for the homophobes in the audience to walk out cheerful about seeing a queer having his face pushed in the mud.All in all, though, I liked the film. It's a bit dated... if you disagree with me, think about how different this film would be if it had been produced after Watergate and Vietnam. The film practically glows with its respect for the crusty old Senators played by Pidgeon and Laughton, reserving all its dire condemnation for the young upstart Senator played by George Grizzard with his "brain trust" -- the whiff of misplaced nostalgia is hard to avoid. Still, it is a diverting film full of excellent performances (including Grizzard's), so it is well worth watching at least once considering how few intelligent films have been produced dealing with our sordid national politics.

Now aged, script misses and acting is not strong.That's what I wrote in my own one-liner as record against this movie.Perhaps it was considered avant-garde when first shown. Now, every aspect of it is like the yellowed pages of a discarded book.I was particularly hoping for clever dialogue; something close to All About Eve, with the senate replacing the theatre.But although the film attempts to stage such scenes, the script is mostly functional. Another disappointment was the underuse of Henry Fonda. The younger senators were not played well; not by actors who could make me care.The reveal of the dark secret of the committee chair was (by today's standards) quite cheesy.Also, seen through 2012 eyes, the film holds no surprises in its execution.

Soon to be celebrating its 50th Anniversary, this political drama of senatorial disputes over the President's choice of a replacement for the recently deceased Secretary of State is right on the money in the sense of its closeness to the current political climate, both statewide and nationwide. In an era when people are losing faith in the people they've elected to government office, this film is almost serio-comic in its look at the political squabbling still going on today. (Just watch C-Span after viewing this to compare!) The movie is overstuffed with stars, both old and new, and it is hard sometimes to keep track of who is on what side and pay close attention to each performance. Henry Fonda plays the chosen Secretary of State replacement, but he isn't the focus. That responsibility goes to another legend, Walter Pidgeon, as the Senate Majority Leader, and young Don Murray as the head of the committee questioning Fonda. In his last film role, Charles Laughton gives an almost haunting performance as the senior senator opposing Pidgeon's support of Fonda as SOS. It is difficult to tell whether it is his performance or his obvious health issues that makes his quiet performance so mesmerizing. Burgess Meredith, a veteran of several Otto Preminger films, underacts unlike his overly hammy performance in the camp classic "Hurry Sundown" and others.The lovely Gene Tierney, who was Preminger's heroine in the classic film noir "Laura", is wasted here as a Washington hostess. She is still lovely, but the role lacks any real meat. Betty White adds a humorous touch in her brief role as the only female Senator shown on screen, one of the few film roles she would do before her iconic TV roles on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Golden Girls". A few other actors later popular on TV include Will Geer ("The Waltons") as the Senate Minority Leader and Broadway musical veteran Inga Swenson ("Benson"), who is totally unrecognizable.There's only a limited amount of domestic drama to offset all of the political intrigue, mostly surrounding Don Murray's character who faces a shocking blackmail attempt involving a homosexual encounter he had years ago. Preminger takes the cameras into a Washington DC gay bar where Murray goes to confront his old lover and is disgusted by what he sees. Preminger doesn't take a stance for or against the gay lifestyle, but simply presents it "as is" long before Stonewall where the "fringe of society" could not be out in the open. His direction is never boring, and the camera shots of the underground tram system (previously seen in MGM's "Washington Story") is quite interesting as well.It is also interesting to see Senators walking around Washington DC as if they could never be recognized, something which could never happen today. As both a historical and unchanged view of what man's disagreements politically can do to their effectiveness on the job, "Advise and Consent" is both ironic and frightening over the power we give the people we elect.