![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Majority Leader Bobby Munson ( Walter Pidgeon) leads the charge to confirm Leffingwell, while an ancient, hardline Southern Democrat named Seabright “Seab” Cooley ( Charles Laughton, in his final role) makes some headway in blocking him after exposing Leffingwell’s Communist run-ins as a university student decades prior. The nominee has huge support within the Democratic Party. (The question of whether or not he loves America is queried more than once.) Leffingwell has been nominated by a dying President ( Franchot Tone) to preserve his foreign policy in what characters regularly allude to as a time of international crisis that said, the geopolitics of the situation are kept from the film’s screenplay at a wise remove. The plot ostensibly centers on the Senate’s process for approving a nominee for Secretary of State named Robert Leffingwell ( Henry Fonda), an academic whose progressive leanings are accused of masking Soviet appeasement. Adapted from a novel by Allen Drury, it was the first Hollywood picture to address the topic of the House Un-American Activities Committee Blacklist directly in its text, Preminger having broken the blacklist by crediting Dalton Trumbo for the screenplay of Exodus two years earlier. A brilliant exercise in inverse monumentalism, nothing is to be taken at face value in Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent. ![]()
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