Movie Review: Magnificent Doll

A new series about the depiction of presidents in film. 


In the interest of consistency for these reviews, I am going to be using four distinct categories on which to grade them, using letter grades. These categories are: 


Historical Accuracy - How much of the plot was accurate? Was there any noticeable bias? How much of the plot was based on supposition?


Period Detail - Were the costumes, locations, and sets accurate? Were they at least not distractingly bad?


Casting - How well did the actors portray the historical figures? Were they distracting or helpful in their interpretations?


Quality of the Film - Was the movie actually any good? Did the inaccuracies (or accuracies!) get in the way of the plot?


So, without further ado, I give you Magnificent Doll.

I love old movies. I like my heroes heroic, my villains dastardly, and my romances chaste, but even I couldn't say Magnificent Doll (1946) was a good movie.


That is not to say I didn't enjoy the heck out of it. Any movie where James Madison is played by the Penguin is going to be worth watching, but Magnificent Doll is so much a product of its times, it suffers. 


Synopsis:
The movie covers the life of Dolley Madison from her girlhood in Virginia to her time as First Lady, but mostly focuses on the time between her first marriage and the death of Alexander Hamilton. Dolley is contracted into a loveless Quaker marriage with her first husband, who dies tragically in the Yellow Fever epidemic of Philadelphia. She and her mother take in boarders to make money, and their first boarder is none other than Aaron Burr, who takes a shine to Dolley. Through Burr she meets James Madison, whose gentle brilliance wins her over, even though she still has feelings for Burr. She gets over Burr when he attempts to take over the United States using mostly a lot of mustache twirling, and realizes James Madison is actually pretty awesome (and shockingly young looking for a man 17 years her senior).
Historical Accuracy:
Magnificent Doll is accurate in some respects, and totally off the mark in most others. It got the basic chronology and major points of Dolley Madison's life, but all the details are either fudged or completely wrong. There are too many to list here, but suffice to say, Dolley Madison was not the reason Aaron Burr conceded the presidency to Jefferson. The most glaringly awful changes had to do with her first marriage. There is no reason to suppose that Dolley Madison was forced to marry John Todd. Also, in the movie Dolley's entire family died in the Yellow Fever epidemic. While her husband and son did die, her first son survived and lived with her and James Madison. 
Grade: D


Period Detail:
Old Hollywood never let history get in the way of a good story (or an opportunity to reuse sets and costumes), so saying the movie was lacking in period detail supposes that the filmmakers had any interest in the historical period they were depicting. The dresses are not only wrong, they are hideous, and somehow manage to make Ginger Rogers look bad. 
Grade: F


Casting:
Without a doubt, the casting was the best part of Magnificent Doll, and it was still pretty patchy. I was skeptical about David Niven in the role of Aaron Burr, but he twirls his metaphorical mustache with great aplomb and manages to make Dolley's (historically inaccurate) attraction to him plausible. Burgess Meredith brings a quiet sweetness to James Madison, even though he is much too young for the role. The weakest link was definitely Ginger Rogers. Normally, I love Ginger Rogers, but it was pretty obvious she was doing this movie because of her contract with the studio, most likely with a gun pointed to her head if her line readings were any indication. Still, the casting was good overall.
Grade: B


Quality of Film:
The screenplay for Magnificent Doll was written by Irving Stone, a popular writer of historical fiction from the 40s and 50s. Random lines like, "I don't think your cousin, Patrick Henry, would approve of that!" attempt to give historical context, but instead make the dialogue clunky and unbelieveable. It seems like nobody really cared enough about this movie to try and make it good, so they just settled for mediocre. Still, the excellent cast and ridiculous melodrama are fun, if not high quality.
Grade: C


Overall: C


You can view Magnificent Doll here if you are interested.

Presidential Home Retrospective: duPont v. Madison

In which the author reminisces on previous presidential house visits. This post chronicles my third presidential house visit in 2008.

I have always felt a special kinship with James Madison. When I was in fourth grade and stuffing my brain with presidential trivia, he was one of the most memorable presidential superlatives-- the smallest president at 5’4” and 100 pounds. At the time, 5’4” seemed tall. I was just about 4’7” at the time, completely average, and hating it. I wanted to be as tall as a president. During the next year, I hit a massive growth spurt and started inching toward the magic number. Finally, in the middle of fifth grade I hit 5’4”; I was the same height as James Madison, and I was officially tall. Nine years and four inches later, I still don’t picture James Madison as a small man. He is forever linked in my mind to the moment I no longer felt average.

After visiting Monticello, my mom and I were looking at those town maps for kids to scope out other things to do in the area. I noticed Montpelier, home of James Madison, was quite close to Monticello. Even factoring in the weird scale of those maps, it couldn’t be more than ten minutes away, so we decided to pay it a quick visit.

After a half hour winding through the Virginia countryside, I took a closer look at the map and noticed there was a small note on the road leading to Montpelier that said 30 miles of road had been cut out (I later found out this same journey took Thomas Jefferson eight hours by carriage). By that time, we were almost there anyway, so we decided to just keep going. We arrived at Montpelier just in time for the last tour of the day. We watched a short instructional video detailing the history of the Madison family and the various alterations made to the house over the years.

Then it was on to the house itself, which turned out to be completely void of furniture and decorations. After Madison’s death, his wife Dolley could no longer afford the house, so she sold it to a Richmond merchant named Henry W. Moncure. The house exchanged hands several times until it was eventually bought by the duPont family in 1901. Its final owner, Marion duPont Scott, lived in the house until 1983. She re-landscaped, redecorated, and rebuilt Montpelier to suit her tastes. This included adding a racetrack to the grounds, completely changing the facade, and decorating the house in a gaudy art deco style. When she died in 1983, she willed the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the long restoration process began.

Standing in the middle of the dining room at Montpelier, I could feel my righteous anger rise in full force. I couldn’t help but feel it was a form of sacrilege. The home of someone as important to our nation’s founding as James Madison should have been carefully preserved and cared for, not changed utterly as Montpelier was. To the Marion duPont Scott’s credit, she too felt that Montpelier ought to be a “historic shrine” to James Madison, and put such a stipulation in her will. Still, I couldn’t help but feel something sacred had been violated. 

Because of the unfinished nature of Montpelier, on the tour of the house we got a crash course in historic preservation. We were shown how they peeled back layers of paint until they determined which layer was from the Madison time period. The tour guide shared with us how they used letters and diary entries to determine door and furniture placement.


Stripped down to its barest elements, the house felt spacious and light. Even though it was undecorated, Montpelier still gave a visitor the sense of the Madison hospitality. You could imagine Dolley giving lively dinner parties in the large dining room and picture James writing at his desk in his office, trying to formulate a plan for a new government. No matter how many hands Montpelier has passed through, it still maintains the spirit of the Madisons.

Outside on the grounds was a small temple where Madison would take breaks and think about various republics and democracies of the past. Standing there, James Madison was not a small man; he was an intellectual giant, quietly contemplating how to create a more perfect union.