The President's Lady

Susan Hayward does quite well here as a married woman who has had enough of her husband. She decides that she wants to return to her mother’s (quite heavily fortified) Nashville home and luckily has Andrew Jackson (Charlton Heston) on hand to see she isn’t interfered with. Their journey isn’t without peril though, and as they strive to avoid both her pursuing husband and and some marauding Indians, they start to fall in love. He has aspirations to make life better for the settlers, so starts up a militia to fight off the natives and with him already being a qualified lawyer, the couple soon become prominent figures and he is Senate bound. When they are told that her husband sued for divorce on the grounds of her adultery, they marry - but that proves to be just one of the misfortunes that befall this couple as he heads ever closer to a job in the recently burned down White House. It’s a slightly skewed bionic, this one, as it really focuses more on “Miss Rachel” until the last five minutes whence we realise that his political career has been steadily building, even is she had been a bit of a pariah when it came to his social standing over the years. Heston does enough, I suppose - he isn’t a natural here, really but Hayward who delivers a lively and considered performance and the storyline illustrates quite well the difficulties faced by these pioneering folks in the face of the locals; the still largely subservient position of women and a fairly widespread sense of double-standardised bigotry that he wants to eradicate. One man’s scandal is another’s opportunity?