Kisses for My President

Fred MacMurray was honored in last August's Summer Under the Stars on TCM, which means that as I write this in early May I still have a couple of his movies to get through watching on my DVR before they expire, although by the time this gets posted they will have expired. First up is the 1964 comedy Kisses for My President.

The new President of the United States is being inaugurated, and that president is... a woman! Her name is Leslie McCloud (Polly Bergen), and while no real mention seems to be made of her political career before the presidency, she also has a husband Thaddeus (Fred MacMurray) and two children, teenaged Gloria and elementary school-aged Peter.

Thaddeus was a successful businessman before Leslie was elected president, and for ethics reasons since the business apparently contracts with the federal government, Thaddeus has had to sell the company. That would naturally leave anybody a bit disgruntled, I would think. But then Thaddeus gets to the White House and really gets irritated. Apparently nobody had thought of the term "First Gentleman" at the time. Not only that, but everything designed for the First Lady is, well, designed for a woman, right down to the décor in the separate bedroom that the First Lady has from the President. (At least in the context of the movie there's an explanation that since the President has to be ready for a 3AM emergency, there's an office adjoining the presidential bedroom so the President can't really use the other bedroom.)

So what's a First Gentleman with no direction in his professional life supposed to do? Madame President has him entertain a visiting foreign dignitary, President Valdez (Eli Wallach) of some Latin American tinpot dictatorship. Valdez likes any number of stereotypical masculine things like fast cars and bar-hopping that need a male companion. But the visit goes wrong, and since Valdez's country is important during the Cold War conflict with the Soviets, this is a problem.

Also going wrong is when an old friend of the McClouds, Doris Weaver (Arlene Dahl), decides to hire Thaddeus for the McCloud name. She tells him that he's going to develop a line of male cologne and hygiene products, but this is a ruse, in part because as mentioned she wants the McCloud name to help sell product and in part because she seems to want Thaddeus romantically. All of this gets Thaddeus brought before the Senate committee headed by Leslie's political enemy Sen. Walsh (Edward Andrews).

Further complicating matters for the president is that the two kids both let the influence of having a parent be president, with the concomitant Secret Service protection, go to their heads. It's not as bad as anything Hunter Biden did, since these are just kids, but using the Secret Service to get into fights with your classmates or to deal with your boyfriend's hot-rodding are definitely things that would redound negatively on the president herself.

Kisses for My President is a bit of a mess, in part because there's really only the one joke here, and because the movie doesn't know how to resolve the conflict. Interestingly, at the time the movie was made Polly Bergen was only 34 years old, which would have rendered her ineligible to be US President thanks to the requirement in the Constitution that the president be 35 years old. Of course, Leslie McCloud couldn't be 34 and have a high school-aged daughter, at least not in that generation. The movie is also slow, running its joke out for 110 minutes. Maybe the material might have worked in the days of the B movie (with a similarly short running time) before World War II. But not really in 1964.