The United States of America is the first nation based not on an assemblage of peoples, but on ideas. One of those is that “all men” are created equal.
This, of course, implied white, Christian males. No one outside of this came into it at all.
It took until the mid-1960s, a century after the start of the civil war, to make the idea extend to all Americans. Make it right.
White women did not get the vote until 1920. Women of African descent could not vote in parts of the south until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave indigenous peoples the right to vote. They were not legally considered citizens until the act was ratified. There is more. As late as 1962, an individual state could prevent an indigenous woman from voting on various grounds.
This column is not long enough to explore the voting conundrums of Asian women, Latinas, etc. But it is enough to say that the fear of the POTUS having to put the toilet seat down runs deep and long in the US subconscious.
The year 1964, close to the tail-end of Vintage, presents a Fred MacMurray film called Kisses for My President (dir. Curtis Bernhardt).
Polly Bergen plays the first female president of the United States – one Leslie Harrison McCloud. A safe name because a guy can have it, too.
Of course she, President McCloud, gets into all kinds of trouble, mainly because she’s not taking care of her kids and not cooking for her husband. Eventually, the POTUS discovers that she is pregnant and resigns her office.
Fred MacMurray’s character jokes that 40 million women put the POTUS in office. But one man took her out. Himself.
Sixty-four was also the year when those two titans of Vintage, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, settled in to the final stage of their epic careers: horror. This was the only genre that women of their age were allowed to act in.
Having starred in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? two years earlier, they were supposed to re-team in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Illness prevented Crawford from completing the film, but she did appear in another horror of the year, Strait-Jacket.
Bette was 56 that year, and who knows how old Joan was. She never gave her birthdate. They would have never been cast as POTUS. These divas would not have made a comedy.
Kisses for My President made perfect sense box office-wise because, when I was a kid, MacMurray was a comic dad on a hit TV show, My Three Sons. His work in Double Indemnity came as a shock to me when I saw it years later.
In Kisses, because no one has yet thought of the phrase First Gentleman, MacMurray is sometimes called the “first lady” or the “president’s husband”.
Kisses is a film that could not exist today, and yet did in my lifetime.
There is said to have been a silent film called The Last Man on Earth in which all the guys die, and a woman is POTUS. It was remade… as a musical.
There was also Betty Boop for President, Olive Oyl for President and something called Project Moonbase, made in the 1950s and also featuring a woman president.
And stepping outside the remit of Vintage for a moment, there is that oracle known as The Simpsons. We all know the show predicted that Trump would one day be POTUS, a reality that the writers meant to be a warning.
In one episode, set in 2030, a woman does succeed President Trump. She wears pearls, too.
Just like vice-president and candidate for POTUS: Kamala Harris.
This week’s quiz: In the 1940s, Fred MacMurray, later the husband of the first female POTUS in Kisses for My President, shared one distinction with John Wayne. What was it?
Last week’s quiz: Jeffrey Hunter took on the role of Jesus in Nicholas Ray’s 1961 King of Kings and his career never quite recovered. Neither did the career of HB Warner after he starred in the 1927 silent version.
