Advertisement

The best Washington movie

By MARTIN SIEFF, Senior News Analyst
Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter

WASHINGTON, March 22 (UPI) -- The world is full of famous anniversaries. An article in this week's edition of "The Hill," the influential and respected insider Capitol Hill newspaper, recollects a rather offbeat one. This week was the 40th anniversary of the appearance of the movie "Advise and Consent" -- still arguably the very best Washington political movie ever made.

"Advise and Consent" has worn remarkably well, especially when it is considered that the raw material it was based on was a generation old even at the time it was made. Veteran journalist Allen Drury's novel won a Pulitzer Prize and was an enormous best seller in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. But it was largely based on his own experiences as United Press's Senate correspondent in the 1940s, through and after World War II.

Advertisement

The novel is still surprisingly widely read among Washington political cognoscenti, though it has been virtually forgotten otherwise. Drury used its success as a springboard to launch a series of political novels using the same vast cast of characters as they confronted the Civil Rights movement, the mass protests of the Vietnam era and the great global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Advertisement

As the series continued, the scope and ambition became ever grander, the plots more melodramatic, and the endings and scenarios more hysterical -- in the psychiatric sense of the word. The later novels as a result have dated ludicrously.

None of the dire outcomes Drury was convinced would happen ever came to pass. Ronald Reagan, the nearest thing to his heroic, Midwestern President Orrin Knox, was not destabilized and the country brought to the brink of civil war under his feet, by vast Rent-a-mobs of crazed, screaming radicals.

The radical young protestors did not destroy American civilization. Instead as they grew up, they mellowed and embraced it. A clear majority of that generation enthusiastically supported Reagan through his two presidential terms. And the United States did not collapse to be occupied by the Soviet Union. It was the Soviet Union that collapsed. Also, the Civil Rights revolution succeeded far more quickly, far more thoroughly than Drury expected.

Finally, Drury's supposedly enlightened calls for in the early novels for African Americans to show "patience" and allow Jim Crow segregation to be only eroded in the most minor of ways over decades to come reads especially repugnantly now.

Advertisement

One of Drury's supposedly most sympathetic characters in the early novels, Southern Sen. Sebb Cooley, is a segregationist who dies, supposedly heroically, on the floor of the Senate in an overwrought filibuster seeking to block passage of a supposedly "extreme" civil rights bill.

But when he wrote "Advise and Consent", Drury had not yet expanded like an endlessly inflating balloon into a vast container of hot air hogwash. The novel was a political junkie's dream, filled with still relevant minutiae about parliamentary maneuvers on the floor of the Senate and who influences whom in the endless social and political minuets at Washington perceptions and dinner parties.

Also, Drury, as a once-great wire service reporter, understood how human lusts, loves and fallibilities drive and derail the most complicated and supposedly foolproof political strategies. And the romances, liaisons and discreet scandals with which he artfully peppered "Advise and Consent" continue literally unchanged in 21st century political Washington.

Do prominent figures in Congress and the administration of opposite sexes still occasionally enjoy discreet and sometimes even lasting romances and liaisons? Indeed they do. Are respected congressional figures still outed in bizarre and embarrassing sex scandals? Just ask Rep. Gary Condit of California or the parents of vanished Washington intern Chandra Levy.

Advertisement

A few years ago, a quite well known political activist even committed suicide amid speculation he was heartbroken because a respected political figure on Capitol Hill had assured him he would not leave his wife and children to put their homosexual relationship first. A similar tragic tale is one of the driving plot lines of "Advise and Consent."

And do ignorant, simplistic, pompous, self-important columnists still bestride the city imagining they tower above its senators, Supreme Court Justices and sitting president? You bet they do.

The movie version of "Advise and Consent' is even better than the book. That is because shrewd, tough old Hollywood director Otto Preminger, then at the height of his power, energy and talent, kept the best of Drury while cutting the worst. The entire climactic section of the novel never appears in the movie at all. Neither does its foremost hero, heroic, role-up-the-sleeves, straight from the shoulder, conservative hawk Sen. Knox.

This is, indeed, unique. I can think of no other adaptation of a literary property to the Big Screen in which the hero himself is entirely cut from the picture. And yet "Advise and Consent: the Movie" does not miss him for a second.

Advertisement

Indeed, Preminger's ruthless and radical script surgery is the making of the film. It transforms it from the simplistic "conservative good versus liberal evil" tale of guys in white hats foiling the nefarious schemes of guys in black hats that was at the heart of what Drury had written into an ensemble picture which presents the Senate as a community in action.

This sense is intensified by the outstanding cast of great actors largely drawn from old 30s and 40s stars like Franchot Tome, Lew Ayres, Burgess Meredith, Walter Pigeon and Charles Laughton. Laughton, indeed, artfully steals the show just as he was to do in Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" a few years later. In both cases, curiously, he played fat old, underrated and despised senators -- one modern American, the other ancient Roman -- who hid surprising reserves of kindness and shrewdness beneath their vast flab.

As a result of the liberties taken with Drury's novel and the strength of the ensemble cast, the movie presents an at-first bewildering kaleidoscope of Washington political life in which many characters interact and jockey for position and influence with bewildering anonymity and complexity. And that, of course, is exactly the way Washington or any other sophisticated, complex functioning political society operates. Perhaps Preminger was just bringing his own decades-long expertise at playing power games in Hollywood to Capitol Hill.

Advertisement

"Advise and Consent: the Movie" was set on location in the Russell Senate Office Building. As columnist Richard Baker noted in his "Senate Historical Minutiae" column in "The Hill" this week, sitting senators at the time were divided over the movie. New York Republican Kenneth Keating informed Preminger that freshman senators in the future should study it carefully to learn "tips on how a senator should walk, dress and posture with his hands."

By contrast, as Baker also noted, Ohio Democrat Stephan Young thought it shamefully downgraded the august dignity of the Senate and introduced legislation to prevent the movie being shown outside the United States. It was not enacted.

Baker also noted that Preminger even tried to convince Dr. Martin Luther King to play an African-American senator from Georgia. Dr. King understandably declined. But perhaps he made a mistake in doing so. Had he, or Sidney Poitier, played such a role then, perhaps Georgia might have gotten around to electing an African-American senator by now.

"Advise and Consent" was a major box office and critical success when it came out. But it has never become a loved member of the movie pantheon like, for example, Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

Advertisement

It is easy to see why. Unlike such heartwarming parables as "Mr. Smith," "Dave" starring Kevin Kline, "The American President" starring Michael Douglas or the current highly popular NBC series "The West Wing" starring Martin Sheen, "Advise and Consent" is neither liberal nor simplistic. It presents a confident, sophisticated, highly successful, complex political culture in action and does not dumb it down.

Viewing it today, one is overwhelmed by how timeless and relevant it still is. It has proven immune to the ravages of changing fashions where Drury's later novels on the right and the slew of liberal, feel-good movie parables on the left listed above have not.

Latest Headlines