First Lady

Wow...the reviews for this film and mine are going to be a lot different. I guess that's okay, as there are movies for all tastes and I just didn't happen to like this one very much.

Kay Francis plays the lead as a very manipulative woman who is married to the Secretary of State. She and all the women seem to think their very successful husbands are actually idiots who can be easily manipulated by them into greater and greater political success. In other words, the women are all conniving and the men, generally, are quite dim.

While all this apparently went over very well in the 1930s on stage, I wonder how many other people might dislike the film because of its rather old fashioned and sexist ideas. My concern was actually less because of sexism but more because it all seemed so incredibly contrived and fake--and almost like the relationship between the women and men from "The Flintstones"! Plus none of the characters seemed particularly nice or likable. Instead of the conniving, I would love to have seen a more gentle film where a wife DOES help her husband become a success because they are a team--less because she's the reincarnation of Macchiavelli! Overall, this film does not seem to have aged well. I think had the men and women not been such obvious stereotypes OR if they had made the characters a bit more evil and manipulative, it would have been a better film (though in the latter case, it certainly wouldn't have been a comedy).