Advise & Consent

Charles Laughton floats up the senate steps in Advise & Consent (dir. Otto Preminger, 1962).

Otto Preminger's swooping, on-location, black-and-white elegancies play over the marbled surfaces of Washington, DC. The story is all big powerful men snarling and sniffing ever so articulately at each other, in that early sixties not quite subversive but mildly socially satirical in a purely structural way way. All the same, the fiction of national politicians speaking in full, eloquent paragraphs like ancient Romans is beguilingly attractive.