Harley Hudson is a political fantasy, but a sufficiently compelling one that I rewatched all two and a quarter hours of Otto Preminger's Advise & Consent (1962) just for his handful of scenes.
I suppose the film is a fantasy, too, however temptingly it presents itself as a quasi-documentary exposé of realpolitik under the White House. As in the Pulitzer-winning novel by Alan Drury, the intrigues of the plot revolve around the contentious confirmation of a controversial nominee for Secretary of State, the Stevenson-like Robert A. Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) whose international, intellectual approach to foreign policy has tarred him in this technically post-McCarthy era as an egghead, an appeaser, even a Soviet plant. One of the nicer things said behind his back is "He's going to stage a giveaway to the Communists that'll make Munich look like a clambake." Nevertheless, the ailing President (Franchot Tone) wants his hand-picked dark horse appointed by the advice and consent of the Senate even if it means open war on the floor of the Capitol and he damn near gets it by the roll call of the final vote. American politics according to Drury and screenwriter Wendell Mayes is both Machiavellian and Byzantine, a bag of dirty tricks ranging from the leverage of old grudges and the advantage of new deals to smear campaigns, suborned witnesses, and even—pushing the fraying envelope of the Production Code, albeit nowhere near as deftly as its transatlantic forerunner Victim (1961)—the lavender scare of blackmail over a same-sex affair. Scrupulous in its bipartisan cynicism, the script takes pains never to identify its characters as either Democrats or Republicans, although its substitute device of referring to "the majority" or "the minority" feels somewhat disingenuous when an old-school Dixiecrat can be detected on the President's side of the aisle; it's more important that the audience understand how thoroughly the chaos of Leffingwell's nomination cuts across party lines, disrupting previously reliable alliances and enmities to the point where the President's party may have the edge in numbers, but they have anything but a lock on the vote. Whatever his reservations about elevating a man who's "never played ball with us," Senate Majority Leader Bob Munson of Michigan (Walter Pidgeon) will do his sincere best to deliver a confirmation for his President and Majority Whip Stan Danta of Connecticut (Paul Ford) will more skeptically assist him, but their most formidable obstacle is not the opposition of the minority led by Warren Strickland of Idaho (Will Geer) but the drawling call from inside the house known as Seabright Cooley of South Carolina (Charles Laughton), a roguish, ruthless elder statesman concern-trolling his country out of personal slight. Clean-cut Brigham Anderson of Utah (Don Murray) seems a shoo-in to rein in the courtroom circus of the hearing, but it's soon even odds whether his uncompromising principles or his compromised past will pose more of a danger to his neutrality. Ambitious Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming (George Grizzard) is throwing the weight of his "organization" so aggressively and self-aggrandizingly behind Leffingwell that his boosting may do the nominee more harm than the rumpled testimony of Herbert Gelman (Burgess Meredith), the fragile clerk who claims to have been a fellow traveler of Leffingwell's in their college Commie days. Even undecided players like good-time Lafe Smith of Rhode Island (Peter Lawford) or independent Bessie Adams of Kansas (Betty White) can send the action off at an angle simply by colliding with the interests of the principals. Dismissively, the President snaps, "Wondering doesn't run a government." The viewer may begin to wonder nonetheless if under these conditions the government runs at all.
Into this perpetually fevered atmosphere of wheeling and dealing comes Vice President Harley Hudson (Lew Ayres), a small innocuous man with the pleasant face and silver-brushed hair of a TV host and a dryish, reedy voice that slightly ruins the effect. He presides over the Senate professionally enough, but as soon as he's off the dais he's Mr. Cellophane, so insignificant that the fast-failing President has closed him out of his councils—effectively forestalling any kind of transition—and the senators in the aisles talk right past his offers and concerns. It doesn't appear to have embittered him; he seems almost whimsically resigned to his invisibility, correctly guessing that no one's listening when he announces with an offhand straight face, "Did I tell you I murdered my wife last night? Buried her under a kumquat bush?" Surrounded by men who take their self-images seriously, he's well aware of his decorative reputation as "charming Harley, the housewives' delight," the "compromise candidate" who has to ask questions of unthinkable ignorance just to catch up to the scuttlebutt and gets sent out of town for a PTA convention while Washington tears itself in two. "Being vice president isn't exactly a crime," he quotes an unidentified wit in a kind of G-rated echo of John Nance Garner, "but it is a sort of a disgrace." For all his light comedy, however, Harley's no fool; it is beginning to frighten him that he might be catapulted into the presidency without so much as a cry of incoming! and as we discover late in the film, he has good reason. The President isn't just trying to secure his legacy with a decisive last act in office. In a very real sense, he's trying to appoint his heir. Standing in his bathrobe on the deck of a battleship, looking tired and ill and disheveled while the seagulls cry behind him and the grey waves slap the hull, indifferent as the elements always are to human gestures like bravado or the need for reassurance, the President finally confides to Munson, "I'm going fast. Nothing left inside here is working anymore. Leffingwell can take a firm grip on everything I've built up in foreign policy, not let it all fall to pieces. Harley can't. You know he can't." The viewer who has been paying attention should bridle. Disregarded and disrespected as the vice president may be, his carefully interspersed scenes have let us in on the secrets of his intelligence, his self-doubt, and most importantly his compassion—while the eyes of America are on the judgment of Leffingwell, Harley has noticed the pain of Brig Anderson. The near-miss of their rapport on a night flight to D.C. is the movie's hardest moment, and its consequences remain visibly with the vice president even as the dying commander-in-chief treats a violent tragedy as a regrettable convenience and his VP's objections as proof that the successor he's officially stuck with hasn't got the balls to make it on the world stage. To be fair, Harley worries about that himself. But the more anxious this keenly self-deprecating man becomes about the prospect of ascending to the highest office in the land, the more appealing it becomes to the audience. Who wouldn't want a kind, modest, morally sensitive President of the United States, especially one who's spent enough time pointedly shut out of the corridors of power to have a real feeling for the vulnerable and the marginalized? Isn't it attractive to imagine a world leader more daunted by the demands of their responsibilities than buoyed by the anticipation of their privileges? It's the cliché of not wanting the job being the best qualification for it, but Ayres makes it seem not just credible but hopeful; my first time around with this movie, it endeared him to me almost as instantly as I loved L. Frank Baum's Kaliko and Katherine Addison's Maia Drazhar and carried a little red-spined edition of Robert Graves' I, Claudius (1934) everywhere with me for a year in high school. Evidently it has a similar effect on Munson, because the majority leader for once disagrees with his old friend, even if the President's mind is set. Perhaps if more people listened to Harley instead of just being charmed by him, they might come around to the perspective of Brig, looking at his quietly, unconditionally steadfast seatmate as if he's never seen him before in his life: "Harley, I've suddenly gotten the feeling that you're the most underestimated man in Washington."
( The country could go to hell before I'd grow big enough to see over the desk. )
Fantasy or not, Advise & Consent certainly looks authentic in the black-and-white Panavision of Sam Leavitt, its deep-focus stretch equally suited to theatrically staged long shots and proto-Sorkin walk-and-talks; its location shooting benefits not just from recognizable landmarks and exteriors like the Ellipse, the National Mall, or the Old Senate Office Building, but from access to the interiors of the Capitol itself, captured during a recess in the fall of 1961. Tourists are visiting the rotunda, but we get inside the caucus room, the canteen, the weird little subway system of open-topped trolleys filled with senators, representatives, and staff. The Senate Chamber and the Oval Office are studio recreations, but the halls of the Treasury Building and the ballroom of the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel play themselves. The subcommittee on Leffingwell meets beneath the same Corinthian pilasters and carved eagles as the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic and the Army–McCarthy hearings. It's a nice kind of national psychogeography, simultaneously demystifying and hallowed; when one character receives the cold condemnation that he's "dishonored us," the chamber itself seems to turn against him, a nauseating effect of isolation cutting him out from the body of the Senate until he all but flees as in a nightmare where the rock cries out. When Dolly Harrison (Gene Tierney) throws one of her famous parties, it's stocked with real-life Washington socialites having an actual party around the charmed circles of shooting. I should note that while the film accurately reproduces the near-zero number of women in the 87th United States Congress, it features almost no women outside the Capitol, either. Ellen Anderson (Inga Swenson) serves first to fill out Brig's bona fides as a family man, then to question them; she contributes most to the film with her anguished understanding on reading her husband's last love letter to another man. I could actually have done with more of the "front elevator" romance between Dolly and Munson, since it's sketched just enough to intrigue—they are unmarried by her choice—and then seems to have been left on either the writers' or the cutting room floor; her mansion provides a sort of neutral territory for political opponents to drink and play cards and she functions otherwise as a Greek chorus with a pair of diplomats' wives (Hilary Eaves and Michèle Montau), their commentary from the gallery keeping the audience in touch with the operations of the legislative branch. Otherwise it's mostly office girls and Lafe Smith's latest arm candy. I do like that Betty White in her second credited film was already taking no guff from anyone, least of all grandstanding Van Ackerman. The queer content in this film totals at most five minutes and has furnished articles all on its own. Without risking one, I think I would call it sympathetically intended and partly successful and let down by its sensationalism, not to mention compression. There are more cuts and extra-diegetic music in those two scenes than anywhere else in the film and I just wish the production hadn't been so wound up about it.
I admit that at this moment in history, when I hear a statement like "Fortunately, our country always manages to survive patriots like you," I want to shake the speaker like he'd shouted Macbeth in a crowded theater, but I understand it's part of the bargain this country has made about the kinds of stories that can be told in and about it. So much of the film maintains the careful vagueness of majority and minority parties, the political comes to feel automatically slanted into the personal, ideological conflicts reduce to matters of individual conscience, and the actual politics of the script, acting, and direction—because there's no such thing as art that's apolitical, merely art that doesn't stand out from the status quo—sneak in, occasionally unfiltered, around the metatext. All the same, something in its flagrantly cynical, poignantly idealistic nuts and bolts of legislative procedure registered as real enough to me that I found myself exclaiming to Rob, "Our government really is made out of baling wire and tape and arguing! Many things I love are also made out of baling wire and tape and arguing! But this one needs to be a little more ironclad!" Perhaps I believe as much of Advise & Consent as I do because of its loopholes, where everything from the next best thing to murder to a compassionate chief executive can slip through. I'm still not sure I should get used to it, but it feels a little less painful to fantasize these days. This vote brought to you by my wondering backers at Patreon.
I suppose the film is a fantasy, too, however temptingly it presents itself as a quasi-documentary exposé of realpolitik under the White House. As in the Pulitzer-winning novel by Alan Drury, the intrigues of the plot revolve around the contentious confirmation of a controversial nominee for Secretary of State, the Stevenson-like Robert A. Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) whose international, intellectual approach to foreign policy has tarred him in this technically post-McCarthy era as an egghead, an appeaser, even a Soviet plant. One of the nicer things said behind his back is "He's going to stage a giveaway to the Communists that'll make Munich look like a clambake." Nevertheless, the ailing President (Franchot Tone) wants his hand-picked dark horse appointed by the advice and consent of the Senate even if it means open war on the floor of the Capitol and he damn near gets it by the roll call of the final vote. American politics according to Drury and screenwriter Wendell Mayes is both Machiavellian and Byzantine, a bag of dirty tricks ranging from the leverage of old grudges and the advantage of new deals to smear campaigns, suborned witnesses, and even—pushing the fraying envelope of the Production Code, albeit nowhere near as deftly as its transatlantic forerunner Victim (1961)—the lavender scare of blackmail over a same-sex affair. Scrupulous in its bipartisan cynicism, the script takes pains never to identify its characters as either Democrats or Republicans, although its substitute device of referring to "the majority" or "the minority" feels somewhat disingenuous when an old-school Dixiecrat can be detected on the President's side of the aisle; it's more important that the audience understand how thoroughly the chaos of Leffingwell's nomination cuts across party lines, disrupting previously reliable alliances and enmities to the point where the President's party may have the edge in numbers, but they have anything but a lock on the vote. Whatever his reservations about elevating a man who's "never played ball with us," Senate Majority Leader Bob Munson of Michigan (Walter Pidgeon) will do his sincere best to deliver a confirmation for his President and Majority Whip Stan Danta of Connecticut (Paul Ford) will more skeptically assist him, but their most formidable obstacle is not the opposition of the minority led by Warren Strickland of Idaho (Will Geer) but the drawling call from inside the house known as Seabright Cooley of South Carolina (Charles Laughton), a roguish, ruthless elder statesman concern-trolling his country out of personal slight. Clean-cut Brigham Anderson of Utah (Don Murray) seems a shoo-in to rein in the courtroom circus of the hearing, but it's soon even odds whether his uncompromising principles or his compromised past will pose more of a danger to his neutrality. Ambitious Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming (George Grizzard) is throwing the weight of his "organization" so aggressively and self-aggrandizingly behind Leffingwell that his boosting may do the nominee more harm than the rumpled testimony of Herbert Gelman (Burgess Meredith), the fragile clerk who claims to have been a fellow traveler of Leffingwell's in their college Commie days. Even undecided players like good-time Lafe Smith of Rhode Island (Peter Lawford) or independent Bessie Adams of Kansas (Betty White) can send the action off at an angle simply by colliding with the interests of the principals. Dismissively, the President snaps, "Wondering doesn't run a government." The viewer may begin to wonder nonetheless if under these conditions the government runs at all.
Into this perpetually fevered atmosphere of wheeling and dealing comes Vice President Harley Hudson (Lew Ayres), a small innocuous man with the pleasant face and silver-brushed hair of a TV host and a dryish, reedy voice that slightly ruins the effect. He presides over the Senate professionally enough, but as soon as he's off the dais he's Mr. Cellophane, so insignificant that the fast-failing President has closed him out of his councils—effectively forestalling any kind of transition—and the senators in the aisles talk right past his offers and concerns. It doesn't appear to have embittered him; he seems almost whimsically resigned to his invisibility, correctly guessing that no one's listening when he announces with an offhand straight face, "Did I tell you I murdered my wife last night? Buried her under a kumquat bush?" Surrounded by men who take their self-images seriously, he's well aware of his decorative reputation as "charming Harley, the housewives' delight," the "compromise candidate" who has to ask questions of unthinkable ignorance just to catch up to the scuttlebutt and gets sent out of town for a PTA convention while Washington tears itself in two. "Being vice president isn't exactly a crime," he quotes an unidentified wit in a kind of G-rated echo of John Nance Garner, "but it is a sort of a disgrace." For all his light comedy, however, Harley's no fool; it is beginning to frighten him that he might be catapulted into the presidency without so much as a cry of incoming! and as we discover late in the film, he has good reason. The President isn't just trying to secure his legacy with a decisive last act in office. In a very real sense, he's trying to appoint his heir. Standing in his bathrobe on the deck of a battleship, looking tired and ill and disheveled while the seagulls cry behind him and the grey waves slap the hull, indifferent as the elements always are to human gestures like bravado or the need for reassurance, the President finally confides to Munson, "I'm going fast. Nothing left inside here is working anymore. Leffingwell can take a firm grip on everything I've built up in foreign policy, not let it all fall to pieces. Harley can't. You know he can't." The viewer who has been paying attention should bridle. Disregarded and disrespected as the vice president may be, his carefully interspersed scenes have let us in on the secrets of his intelligence, his self-doubt, and most importantly his compassion—while the eyes of America are on the judgment of Leffingwell, Harley has noticed the pain of Brig Anderson. The near-miss of their rapport on a night flight to D.C. is the movie's hardest moment, and its consequences remain visibly with the vice president even as the dying commander-in-chief treats a violent tragedy as a regrettable convenience and his VP's objections as proof that the successor he's officially stuck with hasn't got the balls to make it on the world stage. To be fair, Harley worries about that himself. But the more anxious this keenly self-deprecating man becomes about the prospect of ascending to the highest office in the land, the more appealing it becomes to the audience. Who wouldn't want a kind, modest, morally sensitive President of the United States, especially one who's spent enough time pointedly shut out of the corridors of power to have a real feeling for the vulnerable and the marginalized? Isn't it attractive to imagine a world leader more daunted by the demands of their responsibilities than buoyed by the anticipation of their privileges? It's the cliché of not wanting the job being the best qualification for it, but Ayres makes it seem not just credible but hopeful; my first time around with this movie, it endeared him to me almost as instantly as I loved L. Frank Baum's Kaliko and Katherine Addison's Maia Drazhar and carried a little red-spined edition of Robert Graves' I, Claudius (1934) everywhere with me for a year in high school. Evidently it has a similar effect on Munson, because the majority leader for once disagrees with his old friend, even if the President's mind is set. Perhaps if more people listened to Harley instead of just being charmed by him, they might come around to the perspective of Brig, looking at his quietly, unconditionally steadfast seatmate as if he's never seen him before in his life: "Harley, I've suddenly gotten the feeling that you're the most underestimated man in Washington."
( The country could go to hell before I'd grow big enough to see over the desk. )
Fantasy or not, Advise & Consent certainly looks authentic in the black-and-white Panavision of Sam Leavitt, its deep-focus stretch equally suited to theatrically staged long shots and proto-Sorkin walk-and-talks; its location shooting benefits not just from recognizable landmarks and exteriors like the Ellipse, the National Mall, or the Old Senate Office Building, but from access to the interiors of the Capitol itself, captured during a recess in the fall of 1961. Tourists are visiting the rotunda, but we get inside the caucus room, the canteen, the weird little subway system of open-topped trolleys filled with senators, representatives, and staff. The Senate Chamber and the Oval Office are studio recreations, but the halls of the Treasury Building and the ballroom of the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel play themselves. The subcommittee on Leffingwell meets beneath the same Corinthian pilasters and carved eagles as the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic and the Army–McCarthy hearings. It's a nice kind of national psychogeography, simultaneously demystifying and hallowed; when one character receives the cold condemnation that he's "dishonored us," the chamber itself seems to turn against him, a nauseating effect of isolation cutting him out from the body of the Senate until he all but flees as in a nightmare where the rock cries out. When Dolly Harrison (Gene Tierney) throws one of her famous parties, it's stocked with real-life Washington socialites having an actual party around the charmed circles of shooting. I should note that while the film accurately reproduces the near-zero number of women in the 87th United States Congress, it features almost no women outside the Capitol, either. Ellen Anderson (Inga Swenson) serves first to fill out Brig's bona fides as a family man, then to question them; she contributes most to the film with her anguished understanding on reading her husband's last love letter to another man. I could actually have done with more of the "front elevator" romance between Dolly and Munson, since it's sketched just enough to intrigue—they are unmarried by her choice—and then seems to have been left on either the writers' or the cutting room floor; her mansion provides a sort of neutral territory for political opponents to drink and play cards and she functions otherwise as a Greek chorus with a pair of diplomats' wives (Hilary Eaves and Michèle Montau), their commentary from the gallery keeping the audience in touch with the operations of the legislative branch. Otherwise it's mostly office girls and Lafe Smith's latest arm candy. I do like that Betty White in her second credited film was already taking no guff from anyone, least of all grandstanding Van Ackerman. The queer content in this film totals at most five minutes and has furnished articles all on its own. Without risking one, I think I would call it sympathetically intended and partly successful and let down by its sensationalism, not to mention compression. There are more cuts and extra-diegetic music in those two scenes than anywhere else in the film and I just wish the production hadn't been so wound up about it.
I admit that at this moment in history, when I hear a statement like "Fortunately, our country always manages to survive patriots like you," I want to shake the speaker like he'd shouted Macbeth in a crowded theater, but I understand it's part of the bargain this country has made about the kinds of stories that can be told in and about it. So much of the film maintains the careful vagueness of majority and minority parties, the political comes to feel automatically slanted into the personal, ideological conflicts reduce to matters of individual conscience, and the actual politics of the script, acting, and direction—because there's no such thing as art that's apolitical, merely art that doesn't stand out from the status quo—sneak in, occasionally unfiltered, around the metatext. All the same, something in its flagrantly cynical, poignantly idealistic nuts and bolts of legislative procedure registered as real enough to me that I found myself exclaiming to Rob, "Our government really is made out of baling wire and tape and arguing! Many things I love are also made out of baling wire and tape and arguing! But this one needs to be a little more ironclad!" Perhaps I believe as much of Advise & Consent as I do because of its loopholes, where everything from the next best thing to murder to a compassionate chief executive can slip through. I'm still not sure I should get used to it, but it feels a little less painful to fantasize these days. This vote brought to you by my wondering backers at Patreon.
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