New Picture

Magnificent Doll (Skirball-Manning; Universal-International) is a soft, oversimple Hollywood history lesson that shows how Ginger Rogers shaped the destiny of the Republic. Ginger plays the lady who is loved by--or profoundly influences the history-making careers of--James Madison, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

As Dolly Madison, famed White House hostess and brunette wife of the fourth President of the U.S., blonde Ginger makes no effort to recreate the "fine, portly, buxom dame" described by Washington

Irving. But her Dolly Madison is every inch a movie queen: stunningly gowned, as icily beautiful as an East Room chandelier and twice as elegant as the Gilbert Stuart portrait.

Biographer Irving Stone, who wrote Lust for Life (Van Gogh) and Immortal Wife (Jessie Benton Fremont), turned to a new field of history in his "historical" screenplay on the life of Dolly Madison.

Ginger, or Dolly, is forced by her Quaker father into a loveless marriage. When her husband, child and father are killed off in a yellow fever epidemic. Ginger and her mother open a genteel boardinghouse. The scene is Philadelphia, where the 3rd U.S. Congress is in session. Who should turn up as the young widow's star boarders but Senator Aaron Burr (David Niven) and Congressman James Madison (Burgess Meredith)? Of course, both celebrated statesmen fall promptly and hard for their pretty landlady.

Burr (who was actually married and a father at the time),seems to have the inside track until the lady begins to feel the first faint stirrings of political consciousness. Then she recognizes egocentric Senator Burr as the symbol of anti-democratic thinking. Madison, on the other hand, suddenly personifies not only the Will-of-the-People but also True Love. As the wife of Secretary of State Madison, Dolly (Ginger), looking far too regal ever to have been Fred Astaire's hoofing partner, sweeps into the White House to act as widower President Jefferson's official hostess. There the film leaves her--happily rehearsing her future role as the nation's real First Lady.

This pretty movie is easy to look at, its politics are at least goodhearted, its basis in early U.S. history gives it some excitement. Some day the moviemakers may discover that they can make history wonderfully believable and exciting by just sticking roughly to facts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.