The president nominates Robert A. Leffingwell as Secretary of State. The second-term president, who is ill, has chosen him in part because he does not believe that Vice President Harley Hudson, whom both he and others usually ignore, will successfully continue the administration's foreign policy should the president die.
Leffingwell's nomination is controversial within the Senate, which must use its advice and consent powers to approve or reject the appointment. The parties of both the president and the minority are divided. Senate Majority Leader Bob Munson, the senior senator from Michigan, loyally supports the nominee despite his doubts, as do the hard-working majority whip Stanley Danta of Connecticut and womanizer Lafe Smith of Rhode Island. Demagogic peace advocate Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming is especially supportive, but Munson repeatedly advises him not to aggravate the situation. Although also of the majority party, the curmudgeonly president pro tempore Seabright "Seab" Cooley of South Carolina dislikes Leffingwell for both personal and professional reasons and leads the opposition.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee appoints a subcommittee, chaired by majority member Brigham Anderson of Utah, to evaluate the nominee. The young and devoted family man is undecided on Leffingwell. Cooley dramatically introduces a surprise witness, Herbert Gelman, during the subcommittee's hearing. The minor Treasury Department clerk testifies that he was briefly affiliated with a communistcell with Leffingwell and two others at the University of Chicago. Leffingwell denies the charge and questions Gelman's credibility but later tells the president that he had committed perjury and that Gelman was correct. He asks the president to withdraw his nomination, but the president refuses.
Cooley identifies another member of the cell, senior treasury official Hardiman Fletcher. He forces Fletcher to confess to Anderson, who tells Munson. Despite personal lobbying by the president, the subcommittee chairman insists that the White House withdraw the nomination because of Leffingwell's perjury or he will subpoena Fletcher to testify. The president angrily refuses, but the majority leader admits that the White House will soon have to nominate another candidate. Anderson delays his committee's report on Leffingwell, but the president sends Fletcher out of the country, angering the senator.
Anderson's wife receives anonymous phone calls from a man warning that unless the subcommittee reports favorably on Leffingwell, information about what happened with "Ray" in Hawaii will be disclosed. A worried Anderson visits fellow army veteran Ray Schaff in New York. Schaff admits that he sold evidence of a past homosexual relationship between the two. Hudson and Anderson's friend, Smith, joins others in attempting to counsel the troubled chairman, but unable to reconcile his duty and his secret, Anderson takes his own life.
The president denies knowing about the blackmail to Munson and Hudson. He tells the majority leader that he is dying and that Leffingwell's confirmation is vital. Munson criticizes Cooley for opposing the nominee but not exposing Fletcher and thus forcing Anderson to bear the pressure alone. Anderson's death nonetheless permits the subcommittee and the Foreign Relations Committee to proceed with the nomination. Both report favorably to the full Senate.
Sen. Seabright Cooley (Charles Laughton) speaking against the Leffingwell nomination on the Senate floor
In the Senate Chamber, Cooley apologizes for his "vindictiveness." While he will vote against Leffingwell and his "alien voice," the senator will not ask others to follow. Munson, moved by Cooley's action, cites the "tragic circumstances" surrounding the confirmation. The majority leader will vote for Leffingwell but will permit a conscience vote from others. Hudson's quorum call and the majority leader's refusal to yield the floor prevent Van Ackerman from speaking until Munson asks for the "yeas and nays," ending debate. The majority leader tells Van Ackerman that but for the Andersons' privacy, the Senate would have censured and expelled him, as he was responsible for the blackmail. Van Ackerman leaves the chamber before the vote.
Munson's side is slightly ahead until Smith unexpectedly votes against Leffingwell, and the majority leader prepares for the vice president to break the tie in the nominee's favor. Secret Service agents enter the chamber, and Hudson receives a message from the Senate chaplain. He announces that he will not break the tie, thus causing the nomination to fail, and that the president has died during the vote. As he leaves with the Secret Service, Hudson tells Munson that he wants to choose his own secretary of state. The film ends as Munson makes a motion to adjourn because of the former president's death.
Appearing in two scenes as Senator John J. McCafferty—who, whenever awakened from a deep sleep, automatically responds "Opposed, sir! Opposed!"—was the 87-year-old Henry F. Ashurst, one of the first senators elected by Arizona, serving five terms. Ashurst died on May 31, 1962, a week before the film's premiere.
This marked Charles Laughton's final film appearance. He died of cancer in December 1962, five months after the film's release.
David McCullough, who would later become a renowned author on American history, appeared as an extra in the film.[3]
Production
Preminger offered Martin Luther King Jr. a cameo role as a senator from Georgia,[4] although there were no serving African-American senators at the time. King rejected the offer and put out a press release rejecting any claims that he accepted a role.[5] Former vice president Richard Nixon was offered the role of the vice president, but he refused and pointed out some "glaring and obvious" errors in the script, presumably including the critical fact that under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the vice president automatically assumes the office of the president upon the president's death, and would not have been able to cast a tie-breaking vote as vice president.[6]
Advise & Consent was one of a sequence of Preminger films that challenged both the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and the Hollywood blacklist. It pushed censorship boundaries with its depiction of a married senator who is being blackmailed over a wartime homosexual affair, and was the first mainstream American film after World War II to show a gay bar.[4][7] Preminger confronted the blacklist by casting known left-wing actors Geer and Meredith.[citation needed] Fonda's character Leffingwell was seen as drawing particularly on real-life State Department official (and accused Soviet spy) Alger Hiss.[7][8][9]
The film's poster and advertising campaign by Saul Bass featured a logo: the nation's capital dome opening up like a teapot. Bass likewise designed the film's abstract titles which riffed on the stripes in the American flag.[10]
The film marked a screen comeback for Gene Tierney, whose breakthrough to major stardom came in Preminger's 1944 film Laura. Tierney had withdrawn from acting for several years because of her ongoing struggle with bipolar disorder. Advise & Consent was the last of four films she made for Preminger, and one of her last major film roles overall. Advise & Consent was Laughton's last film; he had cancer during filming and died six months after the film's release. Lawford, John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law, plays Lafe Smith, a senator from Rhode Island modeled after Kennedy, although in Drury's book the character represents Iowa. Betty White made her film debut in Advise & Consent, appearing in one scene as a young senator from Kansas.[11][12]
Many scenes were filmed at real locations in Washington D.C., including the Capitol, the canteen of the Treasury Building, the Washington Monument and the Crystal Room of the Sheraton Carlton Hotel.[13][14]
Critical response
The staff of Variety praised the acting but considered the screenplay problematic, writing: "As interpreted by producer-director Otto Preminger and scripter Wendell Mayes, Advise and Consent is intermittently well dialogued and too talky, and, strangely, arrested in its development and illogical... Preminger has endowed his production with wholly capable performers... The characterizations come through with fine clarity."[15]
The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther did not like the storyline, writing: "Without even giving the appearance of trying to be accurate and fair about the existence of a reasonable balance of good men and rogues in government, Mr. Preminger and Wendell Mayes, his writer, taking their cue from Mr. Drury's book, have loaded their drama with rascals to show the types in Washington." Crowther also was bothered by the use of the homosexual affair. He wrote, "It is in this latter complication that the nature of the drama is finally exposed for the deliberately scandalous, sensational and caustic thing it is. Mr. Preminger has his character go through a lurid and seamy encounter with his old friend before cutting his throat, an act that seems unrealistic, except as a splashy high point for the film."[16]
Critic John Simon described Advise & Consent as "pure hokum."[17]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 75% based on reviews from 12 critics.[18]
On May 10, 2005, Warner Bros. released the film on DVD as part of its Controversial Classics box set.[19] The following year, it was included in the Henry Fonda Signature Collection.
Charles Laughton was a British-American actor. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.
Gene Eliza Tierney was an American film and stage actress. Acclaimed for her great beauty, she became established as a leading lady. She was best known for her portrayal of the title character in the film Laura (1944), and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Ellen Berent Harland in Leave Her to Heaven (1945).
Carey Estes Kefauver was an American politician from Tennessee. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1939 to 1949 and in the U.S. Senate from 1949 until his death in 1963.
The United States Senate Committee on Appropriations is a standing committee of the United States Senate. It has jurisdiction over all discretionary spending legislation in the Senate.
Allen Stuart Drury was an American novelist. During World War II, he was a reporter in the Senate, closely observing Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, among others. He would convert these experiences into his first novel Advise and Consent, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960. Long afterwards, it was still being praised as ‘the definitive Washington tale’. His diaries from this period were published as A Senate Journal 1943–45.
Donald Patrick Murray was an American actor best known for his breakout performance in the film Bus Stop, which earned him a nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His other films include A Hatful of Rain (1957), Shake Hands with the Devil, One Foot in Hell, The Hoodlum Priest (1961), Advise & Consent, Baby the Rain Must Fall, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Deadly Hero (1975), and Peggy Sue Got Married.
Kenneth Douglas McKellar was an American politician from Tennessee who served as a United States Representative from 1911 until 1917 and as a United States Senator from 1917 until 1953. A Democrat, he served longer in both houses of Congress than anyone else in Tennessee history.
Advise and Consent is a 1959 political fiction novel by Allen Drury that explores the United States Senate confirmation of controversial Secretary of State nominee Robert Leffingwell, whose promotion is endangered due to growing evidence that the nominee had been a member of the Communist Party. The chief characters' responses to the evidence, and their efforts to spread or suppress it, form the basis of the novel.
Advice and consent is an English phrase frequently used in enacting formulae of bills and in other legal or constitutional contexts. It describes either of two situations: where a weak executive branch of a government enacts something previously approved of by the legislative branch or where the legislative branch concurs and approves something previously enacted by a strong executive branch.
The Senate is the upper chamber of Nigeria's bicameral legislature, the National Assembly. The National Assembly is the nation's legislature and has the power to make laws, as summarized in chapter one, section four of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria. The lower chamber is the House of Representatives.
Capable of Honor is a 1966 political novel written by Allen Drury. It is the second sequel to Advise and Consent, for which Drury was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960.
Preserve and Protect is a 1968 political novel written by Allen Drury. It is the third sequel to Advise and Consent, for which Drury was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960, and is followed by two alternate sequels of its own, Come Nineveh, Come Tyre (1973) and The Promise of Joy (1975).
The Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution empowers the President of the United States to nominate and, with the advice and consent (confirmation) of the United States Senate, appoint public officials. Although the Senate must confirm certain principal officers, Congress may by law invest the appointment of "inferior" officers to the President alone, or to courts of law or heads of departments.
The 1880 Republican National Convention convened from June 2 to June 8, 1880, at the Interstate Exposition Building in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Delegates nominated James A. Garfield of Ohio and Chester A. Arthur of New York as the official Republican Party candidates for president and vice president in the 1880 presidential election.
Robert John Morris was an American anti-communist activist who served as chief counsel to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security from 1951 to 1953 and from 1956 to 1958, was President of the University of Dallas and founded the now-defunct University of Plano.
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress. The United States Senate and the lower chamber of Congress, the United States House of Representatives, comprise the federal bicameral legislature of the United States. Together, the Senate and the House maintain authority under Article One of the U.S. Constitution to pass or defeat federal legislation. The Senate has exclusive power to confirm U.S. presidential appointments, ratify treaties, exercise advice and consent powers, and try cases of impeachment brought by the House. The Senate and the House provide a check and balance on the powers of the executive and judicial branches of government.
Dennis K. Burke is a former United States Attorney for the District of Arizona.
Louis Brandeis was nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson on January 28, 1916, after the death in office of Joseph Rucker Lamar created a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Per the Constitution of the United States, Brandeis' nomination was subject to the advice and consent of the United States Senate, which holds the determinant power to confirm or reject nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Wiley Rutledge was nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 11, 1943, after the resignation of James F. Byrnes created a vacancy on the court. Per the Constitution of the United States, Rutledge's nomination was subject to the advice and consent of the United States Senate, which holds the determinant power to confirm or reject nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. After being favorably reported on by both a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the full Judiciary Committee, the nomination was confirmed by the full Senate through a voice vote on February 8, 1943.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
