Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

MAGNIFICENT DOLL (1946)

Much derided Founding Fathers fiction about Aaron Burr & the Madisons (James & Dolly) via Pop historical novelist Irving Stone, of LUST FOR LIFE’s Van Gogh and AGONY & ECSTACY‘s Michelangelo. As a prettified Dolly, the early White House hostess-with-the-mostest, Ginger Rogers hurried her post-war decline while director Frank Borzage did nothing to halt his. Yet the film is quite watchable, at least on its own terms as fanciful, romantic hooey. Surprisingly, the prologue, which should fit Borzage like a glove, charting the progress of Dolly’s loveless marriage to Stephen McNally’s devoted Quaker, is the worst thing in the film, with Ginger wildly overplaying her cold-to-the-touch bride. But the plot perks up once Burr & Madison enter the scene as adversaries in love & politics even as Borzage’s direction stays flat & impersonal. David Niven & Burgess Meredith are both unusually well cast; Niven showing a frightening edge as the ambitious, unstable Burr; Meredith finding good use for his typically ripe line readings. How else would the Father of the Constitution talk? Rogers finds a comfort zone once she hits her own age, though little can be done with the patriotic wallapalooza of a speech she’s got to deliver at the end. Viewed with historical blinders, it’s fairly tasty hooey, just don’t take a history test based on it.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The casting director must have been wearing those historical blinders, casting a short guy as Jefferson and a tall one as Hamilton.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Gore Vidal’s BURR, one of the great historical novels, covers much of this territory in grand, ironic style.

No comments: