The Milieu Is the Meaning

Advise and Consent, as novel, play and film, has applied to Washington politics the popular American notion that every public event contains an inside story wildly signaling to be let out. An event treated in this way tends to become polarized either as an expose, which is a form of ethical idealism, or as gossip and innuendo, which are the scuttlebutt of sensationalism. Neither has much to do with the basic reality of U.S. politics, which is a blended genius for compromise and bargaining.

Part of the appeal of Allen Drury's best-selling Pulitzer prizewinning novel was that it was a tantalizing Who's Who of Washington, a hint-and-run foray among the political movers and shapers of the '40s and early '50s. In Otto Preminger's film, the identity tags are so blurred as to be almost unintelligible, and the milieu is forced to become the meaning. The outsize, old-fashioned school desks of the Senate chamber, the slender twilit plinth of the Washington Monument, the narrow-gauge shuttle that speeds Senators to quorums: these are real. Compared with these props, the people and situations are strangely unreal, all but bogus. In Preminger's handling, the idealism (the future good of the country) and the sensationalism (the homosexual past of a Senator) split the picture in two, and both stories are melodramatically told not in trenchant filmed images but in thousands and thousands of words.

Some characters have been pared away, but the story line pretty much follows the book. A headstrong, dying President (Franchot Tone) picks Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) as his nominee for Secretary of State. Southern Senator Seabright Cooley (Charles Laughton), who prides himself on being a "flannelmouth curmudgeon," holds a longstanding personal grudge against Leffingwell. The wily Cooley unearths a mentally unstable clerk (Burgess Meredith) who swears that he knew the would-be Secretary of State years before as a co-member of a Communist cell. Leffingwell confesses as much to the President, chalking it up to youthful indiscretion. He lies under oath before the Senate subcommittee on confirmation. Revolted by this lie, when he learns of it, Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), chairman of the subcommittee, begs the President to withdraw his nominee, but the President refuses. Meanwhile a McCarthyesque peace-at-any-price demagogue, Senator Van Ackerman (George Grizzard), threatens Anderson with a photograph and letter exposing a wartime homosexual liaison in Hawaii. Unable to confess the episode to his wife, the hounded and agonized Anderson commits suicide. At the moment when he is about to break a tie Senate vote on Leffingwell, the Vice President (Lew Ayres) learns that the President has died, announces, "I'd prefer to name my own Secretary of State."

This blandly inconclusive ending is typical of the film. Since none of the characters are properly developed, the actors wrench the roles about to suit their own personalities. Charles Laughton retains his rating as a prime ham's ham. A jowly, jiggling panorama of obesity, Laughton's Seab Cooley drips rhetoric like a honeyed asp. No proof is offered that Leffingwell is fit or unfit to be Secretary of State, but the grieving spaniel eyes of Henry Fonda transmit their customary message: simpleness is next to godliness. Franchot Tone, gasping for life from the first reel, has no more authority than a beached flounder. But George Grizzard's bristly non-clubbish troublemaker is splendid--and a welcome distraction from all the pious filiblustering pother about "this great body."

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