Lady No. 1

Lucy Chase Wayne (that's Kay Francis if you couldn't guess) is one of those women. She's married to the current Secretary of State Stephen Wayne (Preston Foster), and the solons that run the party -- this being the days before widespread primary elections, days when nominations were routinely decided in back rooms -- might possibly accept him in nomination. Indeed, Lucy has the gravitas to be First Lady, being a wonderful Washington hostess and coming from a long line of family that has been in politics.

But of course Stephen isn't going to get that nomination unopposed. Not when there are other women out there who would like to be First Lady. One of them is Irene Hibbard (Verree Teasdale). The only problem is, she's married to a Supreme Court justice (Walter Connolly) who's not right for the job of President and the party bosses know that. Instead, Irene has her eyes on a hot young Senator, Gordon Keane (Victor Jory). He might be just right for the party's nomination, although he's apparently not married, which is why all the women, including married ones like Irene, want him.

And then there are the people who are the power behind the scenes. One is Lavinia Creevey (Louise Fazenda), the head of a national women's organization that has a lot of pull in the less urban parts of the country, and remember that back in the 1930s there was a lot of the country that was a lot less urban than today. There's also newspaper publisher Banning (Grant Mitchell); it's easy to see why somebody would want to get the seal of approval from the man who publishes a nationwide chain of newspapers.

As in a lot of other vintage movies about politics, there's a lot of back-room intrigue, although in this case it's the women engaging in it. Lucy decides to use some reverse psychology in suggesting Justice Hibbard for the nomination, thinking that there's no way the party bosses can take it seriously -- until the outside kingmakers like the idea. Lucy has to think quickly on her feet, although thankfully somebody presents her with an obscure technicality that might solve all Lucy's problems.

First Lady is based on a play by George S. Kaufman, and the stage origins really show in watching the movie. It's the sort of material that probably works well on stage in a live performance where you have all the right pauses that the actors can take when the audience laughs at the right lines. But when transferred to the big screen, it feels like one of those early talkies when producers decided instead of throwing everything on film and see what sticks (a la the recently reviewed Soup to Nuts), they'd just take a play and film it as is. That might have worked in 1930, and I do mean might. But here it feels like the material wasn't opened up at all. I found myself wondering during the movie whether the producers at Warner Bros. were deliberately giving Kay Francis poor material as her star was waning.

The other issue is historical, in a couple of ways. One is that the play premiered in the middle of Franklin Roosevelt's first term, and I don't think there was any way anybody could possibly have beaten him when he was running for a second term. And then the movie was made in 1937, one year after a presidential election. I can't imagine any of this seeming realistic to an audience under the overwhelming figure of Franklin Roosevelt. And for viewers today, there's the issue that none of this stuff is relevant when everything is decided in the primaries, ostensibly by the voters.

So First Lady is a curious little historical artifact, but not a particularly great movie.