FRED VAN ACKERMAN

'Advise & Consent,' 1962

George Grizzard as a smarmy, extortionist senator. (Columbia Pictures)

Known for: Unction, moral preening, ruthlessness.

Now, from the other side of the aisle, George Grizzard as everybody's favorite peacenik-we-love-to-hate. Otto Preminger directed this 1962 classic of the old Washington, where civility reigned and compromise was the name of the game -- but he also projects its demise. The scandal that he unfolds presciently looked into a future composed of the politics of personal destruction.

Based on the novel by New York Times reporter Allen Drury, Preminger's classic film -- still probably the best "inside Washington" film ever made -- chronicles shenanigans in the Senate as a dying president tries to get a too-liberal nominee named secretary of state. To conservative Drury this was apostasy, and his version of the big chamber party game follows as saner Republicans try to prevent this terrible thing from happening. The fly in the ointment is outsider Van Ackerman, determined at all costs to get the nomination through. One of the costs is blackmailing a junior senator for a single homosexual experience in the Army in order to get him to check off on the nom, but the results are not surrender; they are suicide. Grizzard is fabulous in a fabulous cast, which includes Charles Laughton, Henry Fonda, Walter Pidgeon and Don Murray, among others. Grizzard has a kind of feral face, also boyish and smooth, and to conservative types he represents a kind of liberal demonology: fey, effeminate, unduly charismatic, pandering to the young, sleek, slick, sexual rather than authoritarian, somehow not very manly, not willing to use force, but always trying to "get along" with the blood enemy behind the Iron Curtain.