The dispute was good if unwanted publicity, and in terms of promotion the delay actually worked to Otto’s advantage. In advance of its postponed American premiere, Preminger was invited to screen the film, out of competition, as the opening event at the Cannes Film Festival on May 8. To Preminger’s utter delight an irate Senator Stephen Young from Ohio introduced a bill to prevent the film’s release outside the United States on the grounds that “it would do irreparable harm to the prestige of America abroad.” Preminger was determined to show the film abroad even in the unlikely event that Senator Young could get his crackpot bill passed, and so he brought a negative with him to France. When he returned, he announced that “in Europe they like it. The film showed how free our democracy could be. They were surprised I didn’t have to get government approval.”42
After returning from France, the filmmaker corralled fifty-eight senators into sponsoring benefit premieres of Advise and Consent in their home states. Before the premieres, however, a group of dissenting senators attacked the film as “un-American.” Their action, of course, gave the film a jolt of notoriety Preminger always felt was good for business while also handing him another opportunity to advocate freedom of speech. “There were complaints that making a film about misbehaving politicians constituted a sinister attempt to overthrow the government,” Preminger stated. “I was convinced that just the opposite was true. The fact that we could make the picture in Washington with the cooperation of the government… proved that our system was sound and strong. This country’s tolerance of free expression is its greatest asset. I believed that the picture would show the world that liberty isn’t an empty word in America.”43
“Preminger had all Washington at his feet when filming; now he has a good part of Washington at his throat,” proclaimed a feature article in Life on July 6, 1962, about the divided reactions of senators. “Is the film a ringing tribute to democracy? Or is it an unpatriotic exposé bound to backfire abroad?” the article queried. “Overseas, this could be used as a strong propaganda weapon against us,” railed Senator Henry Dworshak, a Republican from Idaho. “I fear the film will do harm abroad by painting an evil picture of America,” joined in Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Democrat from Texas. “A splendid picture. We are grateful to Mr. Preminger for having made it,” opined Everett Dirksen, Republican from Illinois. Senator Kenneth Keating, a Republican from New York, was quoted as having told the filmmaker: “Henceforth practicing Senators shall look to you for extra tips on how a Senator should walk, dress, and posture with his hands. Terrific.” Senator Karl Mundt, a Republican from South Dakota, had the cleverest comment:
“The movie is fictionalized entertainment with a touch of reality, while the United States Senate is a lot of reality with a touch of entertainment.” The final tally in Life’s straw poll: twelve senators against, thirteen in favor. Preminger was granted the last word: “This movie is pro-U.S. Its fallible human beings share a common goal—making democracy work.”
Hedda Hopper, gossip columnist and a political reactionary, launched a campaign to prevent the film’s export. “How many members of Congress made asses of themselves by endorsing the film before they saw it?” she asked. “This film could present a highly damaging picture of the so-called American image,” she warned her readers.44 The Catholic Legion of Decency urged “extreme caution in viewing of this film.”
Tagged as another “controversial” Otto Preminger project, Advise and Consent received mixed notices. “A striking job of turning a delicate and complicated story into a single dramatic strand, and considering the sensitive subject matter, Preminger has built his film with the skill of a born diplomat,” observed Paul Beckley in the New York Herald Tribune on June 6, 1962. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times groused, “This country is … able to survive cinema fictions as slickly meretricious as this one.” Surprisingly, the most vituperative review appeared in the left-leaning Village Voice. Preminger has “held our government up for a basically shameless and dirty caricature,” Richard Nason wrote in his June 9 review, calling the film “a degrading cartoon. The implication is that the appointment of a Secretary of State could hang crucially and directly upon an early aberration [a homosexual affair] of a United States Senator. The film substitutes a perverse fancy for the hard mechanics of political machinery.” Nason cataloged “the subtle means by which Preminger selected the novel’s events out of context and arranged them according to a pornographic bias” and concluded that “we must be mad to tolerate this picture of ourselves for distribution all over the world.” An incendiary article in Human Events attacked Preminger personally for “publicly welcom[ing] back those who had Red connections” and accused him of “toss[ing] away the central message of the novel… [that] there is an aura of appeasement and lack of patriotism within the American Republic which could lead to its downfall… . Preminger turns everything upside down and appeasement comes out smelling like a rose.”
Preminger defended himself against charges of having committed treason by claiming that it had not been his intention “to make a political drama or to take a political stance. We have tried to eliminate any stand the book might have taken to the Right or Left.”45 Reviewers who flayed the film for not being political enough and for removing the novel’s partisan sting failed to appreciate Preminger’s purpose, examining the American political process of checks and balances. If in Anatomy of a Murder the law itself is the ultimate protagonist, so in Advise and Consent the Senate, its hierarchies of power, the means it uses to function and to maintain itself, is the film’s principal character. Politicians are on temporary passport, coming and going, whereas the Senate chamber, like the political system it represents, is ultimately beyond the reach of individuals or of time itself. And in the moving last shot, the Senate, emptied of its fractious inhabitants and commanding the attention of the camera in a high-angle shot, endures, inviolate.
Preminger’s fundamental belief in the Senate as an institution able to correct itself is reflected in the changes he and Wendell Mayes made to Allen Drury’s original ending. In the novel the Senate rejects the president’s leftist candidate; in the film, the ailing president dies during the vote—a narrative contrivance needed in order for Preminger to conclude the film on his own terms rather than Drury’s. The new president refuses to break the tie, announcing that he will name his own nominee. And therefore the bargaining and deal making, the rituals of the Washington merry-go-round that ensure the survival of the American government, will begin all over again. As Anatomy of a Murder depicts Preminger’s endorsement of due process and trial by jury, Advise and Consent dramatizes the filmmaker’s faith in the validity of another process. Preminger’s unfinished ending underlines the point that more important than the outcome of the voting is the method by which the voting was conducted. Downplaying Drury’s anti-Communist paranoia and minimizing Cold War references, Preminger and Mayes lift the story out of its own era, and as a result five decades later their portrait of how the Senate operates remains substantially undated.
The filmmaker’s admiration for the institution and its procedures is revealed in the film’s ceremonial aura—Preminger presents the Senate’s rituals in the high, dignified tone of a state occasion—and in his casting. Except for Charles Laughton’s disheveled Southerner, the politicians are fastidiously groomed, and one and all are well spoken. The film’s depiction of the Senate as a body of articulate patricians may well be its single dated component. Walter Pidgeon, Lew Ayres, Henry Fonda, Don Murray, Peter Law-ford, and Franchot Tone project grace and wisdom, regardless of their characters’ political affiliations.
In not choosing political sides Preminger protects the characters from rigid designations of “good” or “bad,” “Republican” or “Democrat.” Instead, typically refusing to rush to judgment about any of the characters, even the disruptive figures played by Charles Laughton and George Grizzard, he presents his Washingtonians as complicated men of affairs. Neither morally spotless heroes on the one hand n
or melodramatic villains on the other, they act out of sometimes contradictory and ambivalent motives. Thus, the film’s president, unlike Drury’s, is not soft on Moscow, nor is he complicit in Van Ackerman’s blackmail scheme, but he is also a stubborn, savvy politico not above trying to put the squeeze on Brigham Anderson to approve his nominee. The president’s candidate for secretary of state may lie under oath about his Communist past but he is an American patriot who has no plan, unlike his counterpart in the novel, to hand over his country to Communist adversaries. Van Ackerman is not the Machiavellian henchman Drury depicts but an overambitious junior senator who gets carried away. “He truly believes the nominee is the right man for the job,” as George Grizzard pointed out, “and to ensure the nomination he concocts the blackmail scheme. Otto wanted me to play the character not as if he were the villain of the piece, but as the character would have seen himself, that he was right to do what he did and that what he did was for the good of the country”46
Preminger also refuses to make glib moral assessments about the senators’ private lives. In 1962 politicians were presumed to lead immaculate lives beyond the reach of desire, or if they did not, they were fully expected to be able to conduct their extracurricular indulgences in secret. In fusing sex to politics Preminger (despite the fact that he was both realistic and prescient) violated the era’s codes of decorum, and some Washingtonians cried foul at the way the film entwines the two subjects. That Bob Munson (the regal Walter Pidgeon), Senate majority leader, is having an affair with a Washington hostess (Gene Tierney) in no way undermines the filmmaker’s evident respect for the character. And Preminger makes a point of presenting Senator Lafe Smith (Peter Lawford), a compulsive womanizer, as being capable of compassion and independent judgment—in the end he votes according to his conscience rather than party allegiance. Placed at a distance from the political machinations, wives and children are often seen in deep focus, glimpsed through doorways and windows. But Preminger does not jump to facile conclusions about how politicians neglect their families; rather, his dispassionate observation allows viewers to arrive at their own judgments.
In introducing homosexuality, an all but unspeakable topic at the time, Preminger aroused further animosity. “Typical of the film’s keyhole approach is a scene in a homosexual dive, found nowhere in the novel,” a disapproving journalist, Peter Bunzel, noted.47 “Some people think my handling of the homosexual subplot was sensationalism,” Preminger said. “But I wanted to show something, not talk about it. The film never mentions ‘homosexuality.’ But I went beyond the book and followed the character to New York and to a gay bar to show not only that he was horrified by this life, but also attracted to it, that he hadn’t really put his past completely behind him.”48 When Senator Brigham Anderson hunts down his former lover in a dark subterranean bar populated with Quentin Crisp types ogling a few muscular studs, he is indeed horrified, and no wonder: saturated with an illicit aura, the place seems to be an incubation chamber for guilt and despair. Anderson flees in panic and on a plane trip back to Washington decides to commit suicide.
For Preminger to have presented a humane, life-affirming view of gay life would most likely have been a cultural impossibility in 1962; it would also have been false to the character of Brigham Anderson, a conservative from Salt Lake City tormented by his sexual ambivalence. While the film makes no attempt to provide other than a fleeting, outsider’s view of a contemporary homosexual underground, in taking his camera for the first time in a mainstream American film into a gay bar, Preminger yet again smashed a Hollywood taboo. (Can we really afford to be smug about the film’s presumably dated depiction of homosexuality? For someone with a background as conservative as Anderson’s, might not homosexual feelings still
Opening the closet: Don Murray as a senator tormented by sexual ambivalence enters the first gay bar ever depicted in a mainstream American film.
The New York opening of Advise and Consent. The Saul Bass logo of a raised Capitol dome promised to lift the lid off Washington.
cause discomfort, or fear of exposure? And isn’t it still possible that the revelation of homosexuality could destroy a political career, or for that matter a Hollywood one, too, especially for a closeted man or woman?) For a television screening in 1965, CBS wanted to cut the scene that, as Bob Lardine reported in the New York Sunday News on July 25, 1965, “takes place in a noisy bar that caters to perverts.” Preminger refused and forfeited the $250,000 CBS was offering. “It’s utter nonsense that the scene would shock. It played all over the world. No one was shocked,” Preminger stated.
Nowhere else in his work has Preminger’s preference for long takes, camera choreography, and carefully composed group shots been used with greater refinement or thematic purpose. The film’s visual fluency, which confers on governmental procedures a sense of order and integration, rests primarily on two motifs: most of the time, characters who have something to say to each other appear in the same frame; and the camera moves whenever the characters do. When the camera glides across the Senate floor, encompassing senators on both sides of the aisle in one unbroken take, an ideological point, the interconnections that the system depends on, is being underscored. Preminger reserves one-shots and close-ups for isolated moments—when the blackmail threats begin to drive a wedge between Senator Anderson and his increasingly suspicious wife, for instance, or when Anderson, his repressed sexual past having returned to haunt him, scrutinizes himself in a mirror. Like Washington’s sturdy system of checks and balances, the film itself is a smoothly working mechanism that interweaves multiple characters and plot lines.
Beautifully filmed and acted, and thematically both far-reaching and timelessly contemporary, Advise and Consent, made by a maestro at the height of his command of the language of film, may well be the most intelligent American film about American politics. As Geoffrey O’Brien wrote, it is “Hollywood’s most underrated movie classic” and “the only American film to address seriously the mechanics of democratic government. The movie stands at the end of an era, in terms both of politics and filmmaking. Against all odds, Preminger, here at the peak of his directorial abilities, succeeded in making a film of novelistic density, in which the real star is the political structure within which the individual characters go to their separate ends.”49
FOURTEEN
The Prodigal
“When Otto hired me as a reader in December 1961 he had just cut Advise and Consent and was readying the publicity campaign,” recalled Mike Macdonald, the son of the critic Dwight Macdonald.
Saul Bass did many variations on the Capitol dome going up, which was the film’s logo, and was to be used on everything, including envelopes and stationery: no detail was too small for Otto. For the previous three years Otto had had a Midas touch for potboilers when he had grabbed the film rights to Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, and Advise and Consent before they became the leading fiction best sellers for 1958, 1959, and 1960, respectively. That was quite a record. But when I was there no production clock was ticking, and beyond a rusty option on The Cardinal, a 1950 best seller, his property pipeline was empty.1
When Macdonald signed on, Preminger’s office was located in the penthouse at 39 West Fifty-fifth Street, next door to La Caravelle, a traditional French restaurant that along with “21” was the director’s favorite New York meeting place. Macdonald remembered “a creaky old elevator” that opened onto
a surprisingly dingy and mildewed hallway. But then you entered Preminger’s throne room, quite attractive and modern, lit by recessed ceiling lights and hung with colorful oils by Miró and Picasso. Otto’s famous ovoid head was nicely set off by his diplomat’s uniform: conservative suits custom-tailored by Alexander Shields, whose cologne he also wore. As Otto held court sitting behind a long Brancusian slab of beige-veined marble in a black leather boardroom chair, he might have been a late Roman emperor, a tough old mercenary elevated to the purple by admiring comrades in arms.
Macdonald noticed that the centerpi
ece of Otto’s desk, and of his working life, was a “then exotic white speakerphone” on which Preminger conducted a massive volume of calls to and from agents, producers, and actors.
Macdonald was “third down the line” after Nat Rudich, Preminger’s general factotum, and Bill Barnes, who headed the story department.
Otto Preminger Page 43