Advise & Consent (1962) on Netflix
The president nominates Robert Leffingwell for Secretary of State, and the Senate must give its advice and consent. Brigham Anderson chairs the subcommittee weighing the choice.
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- Rotten Tomatoes77%
Trailer
Plot summary
A second-term president, in poor health, nominates Robert Leffingwell as Secretary of State. The Senate is divided over the choice: Majority Leader Bob Munson supports the nominee despite his own doubts, while Seabright Cooley, president pro tempore, leads the opposition. A Foreign Relations subcommittee chaired by Brigham Anderson, a young family man from Utah, is appointed to judge Leffingwell. Anderson has not made up his mind. At a hearing, Cooley brings forward a surprise witness, Herbert Gelman, a minor Treasury clerk, who says he once belonged to a communist cell alongside Leffingwell at the University of Chicago. Leffingwell denies it and questions the man's credibility, and the subcommittee must decide whether the nomination can go forward.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Advise & Consent (1962)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Otto Preminger offered Martin Luther King Jr. a cameo as a senator from Georgia, though no African-American senator served at the time; King turned the offer down and issued a press release denying he had accepted a role.
- Former vice president Richard Nixon was offered the part of the vice president but refused, pointing out "glaring and obvious" errors in the script, including that a vice president automatically becomes president on the president's death and could not cast a tie-breaking Senate vote.
- The film challenged the Hollywood blacklist by casting known left-wing actors Will Geer and Burgess Meredith, and became the first mainstream American film after World War II to show a gay bar, via a senator blackmailed over a wartime homosexual affair.
- Henry Fonda's character, Secretary of State nominee Robert Leffingwell, was seen as drawn from the real-life State Department official Alger Hiss, who had been accused of being a Soviet spy.
- Screenwriter Wendell Mayes said novelist Allen Drury "hated the picture", calling Drury an archconservative and saying that he and director Otto Preminger, as liberals, had not done justice to the author's conservative point of view.
- Advise & Consent was Charles Laughton's final film; he had cancer while filming it and died five months after its release.
