Tay Garnett - Mrs Parkington (1944)

One Christmas, scandal erupts within the Parkington family, the scandal which threatens both the Parkington expansive fortune and public good name. Widowed Susie Parkington, the matriarch of the Parkington family, handles the situation always thinking about what her husband, the rough and tumble and extremely stubborn Major Gus Parkington, would have done. Susie reminisces about her life with the Major which includes: their meeting when she was living with her family in their boarding house in Leaping Frog, Nevada, where the Major owned the town's mine; her quick need to adjust to high society life in New York as Mrs. Parkington while the Major adjusted to loving a woman for the first time that he didn't want to hurt or abuse; their private battle during a public humiliation; and their estrangement following the death of their son. With thoughts of the Major deep in her mind, Susie makes a unilateral decision, one contrary to the wishes of most of the family, but one that will restore her own sense of what is means to be a Parkington in the truest sense of the Major.