'Advice and Consent'(1962) is a great movie

Turner Classic Movies ^ | 8/28/2018

[iowamark]

Watched the 1962 movie 'Advice and Consent' on TCM last night. It really is a great political movie. Director Otto Preminger did a great job. I am not sure how they could afford such a great cast.

Many stars of Classic Hollywood:

Franchot Tone as the (shady) President

Lew Ayres as The (simple minded but honest) Vice President

Charles Laughton as South Carolina Senator Seabright Cooley

Don Murray as young Utah Senator Brigham Anderson

Walter Pidgeon as Senate Majority Leader Bob Munson

Henry Fonda as a Lefty Academic turned government bureaucrat, nominated for Secretary of State

Peter Lawford(then married to President Kennedy's sister Jean) as Senator Lafe Smith

Gene Tierney as DC hostess Dolly Harrison

Burgess Meredith as troubled government bureaucrat Herbert Gelman

Paul Ford as Senate Majority Whip Stanley Danta

George Grizzard as Lefty Sen. Fred Van Ackerman

The President wants a lefty Secretary of State Fonda to make a deal with the Soviets. Henry Fonda is hiding his Communist past. The young Senator from Utah hesitates to support Fonda so the President organizes a smear based on the Senator's homosexual past.

The Senators (including a young Betty White) are portrayed as decent people trying to do their best within the system.

[iowamark]

video clips:
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/66836/Advise-Consent/videos.html

trailer:
https://youtu.be/eVmIJvNSQdg

[Lisbon1940]

So Brigham was a poofter. No surprise there. As for Fonda, the tree doesn’t rise far from the acorn.

[Nifster]

An even better book.....Drury was such a great writer

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Englishman Charles Laughton worked on a southern drawl but still couldn't kick his inherited UK twang. Some lines were simply unintelligible.

[notloud]

I read all the Allen Drury novels in the Advise and Consent series as a kid, but never saw the movie. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the first book; it was clearly a different time. I don’t know how it’s aged, but one of the books in that series, “Come Nineveh, Come Tyre” was a major influence on me as a young reader, and played a big role in leading me towards conservatism.

[MplsSteve]

Drury was such a great writer

He was. In the mid 80’s, he wrote two books, “The Hill of Summer” and “The Roads Of Earth”.

Both dealt with an increasingly weakened US trying to deal with the threat of a militant Soviet Union. In “The Hill of Summer”, a weak Jimmy Carter-like President dies in office and the VP (diametrically opposed to him) becomes President. He tries very hard to deal with the growing Soviet threat to the US and the rest of the free world.

Much of the book is written around ongoing debates in the UN Security Council as the President tries to round up support from other nations to stand up to the Soviets. “The Hill of Summer” ends on a somber note.

“The Roads Of Earth” is a continuation of the first book as we see things start to change in the battle against the Soviets.

I’ll say no more. But if you haven’t, you should try to get both of these books. I still have them. They’re a bit tattered but they are keepers.

[BlueLancer]

Agreed, even as a youngster, I adored the Advise and Consent Series and eagerly awaited new books in the series. I have the entire series in hardback and re-read it at least once a year.

"Promise of Joy" and "Come Nineveh, Come Tyre" were also very influential in my becoming a diehard conservative ...

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I’d count Advice & Consent one of the top ten movies ever made.

[iowamark]

Preminger offered former Vice President Richard Nixon the role of the Vice President, and offered Martin Luther King the role of a Senator from Georgia.

[Steely Tom]

I read Advice and Consent as a middle-school student because it was laying around the house. It was my first encounter with the concept of homosexuality, I believe. That whole part of the story didn't make very much sense to me, but I knew almost nothing about sex at the time, except that it was how babies were made.

[Menehune56]

Sad that now we all know things we’d really rather not know.

[T-Bird45]

Interesting that so many FReepers would link Drury’s writing with their own development as conservatives. I’ll add my name to that list as I also started reading Drury in junior high and high school (late 60s - early 70s). The books in the 80s definitely drew from the headlines and had real feel for what was going on in that decade.

[miss marmelstein]

Wonderful movie. Anybody who says Otto Preminger was a bad director needs their head examined.

[Nifster]

If you haven’t read the Advise and Consent series you have missed a great opportunity to see how The Swamp has always worked

[higgmeister]

Advise & Consent

[colorado tanker]

Englishman Charles Laughton worked on a southern drawl but still couldn't kick his inherited UK twang.

Laughton became an American citizen, a fact of which he was immensely proud.

Ruggles of Red Gap is a hidden gem of a movie in which Laughton stars as an English butler on the American frontier. Lots of observations about new world v. old, class society v. self-made men (and women), living life on one own's terms v. what society expects. The showstopper scene is when he is in a saloon and the American frontiersmen are trying to remember those words Lincoln said. Laughton, the English butler, recites the Gettysburg Address from memory, mesmerizing the Americans. I dare you to watch that scene and come away with a dry eye. At the time he was already considering taking citizenship.

[LibertyOh]

I watched it too - interesting how times have changed but political shenanigans suggested in the film are essentially the same.

[TBP]

The book is better. Hollywood did a job on it, which is probably why none of Drury’s subsequent novels in the series got to the big screen.

[TBP]

I don’t recall — who played Orrin Knox?