Magnificent Doll

Novelist Irving Stone scripted this stately pseudo-historical melodrama. Ginger Rogers is thoroughly miscast as the Virginia belle and Quaker widow Dolley Payne, who (unwittingly) held America's future in the balance as she prevaricated over her suitors Aaron Burr (Niven) and James Madison (Meredith). Fortunately, she chooses the latter, Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State, destined to become the fourth President of the United States, while the cynical Burr tries and fails to declare himself Emperor. One of those biopics that substitute arrant nonsense for much more dramatic fact.