Kay Francis: The Best of 1929-1936

Disc 1

Dangerous Curves (1929)
Passion Flower (1930)
Girls About Town (1931)
One Way Passage (1932)
The House on 56th Street (1933)
Mandalay (1934)
I Found Stella Parish (1935)
Give Me Your Heart (1936)

Preface

This is Part 1 in a comprehensive career assessment of classic film actress Kay Francis. Part 1 will cover the years 1929 to 1936, where Kay starred in some of her best known and most beloved films. Part 2 will cover 1937 to 1946, a tumultuous period that saw Kay battling with her studio and working sporadically through the Second World War.

I have taken inspiration from various “Best of” musical albums to create my own version of Kay Francis’ greatest cinematic hits. These are my personal selections, plus reviews, for my favorite film from each year of her career. Think of it as a chronological, double disc collection.

Much thanks to Lynn Kear and John Rossman, the authors of Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career, who did all the hard research and painstakingly cataloged Kay’s extensive personal journals. I would also like to thank Michael Ohanlon, the host of the fanpage KayFrancisFilms.com for his collection of photographs and quotes related to Kay’s filmography.

Foreword

by Noel Kirkpatrick

It was 2021, and I was 37 when I first met Kay Francis. She was 26 and 116.

The movie was Man Wanted from 1932. In it, Francis plays Lois, a hard-charging and hard-working magazine editor who doesn’t really understand the meaning of work-life balance, and she needs a personal assistant who also doesn’t understand it, either. While Man Wanted didn’t impressed me all that much on my initial viewing, Francis did. It would’ve been all-to-easy to make Lois a soulless monster, an emasculating force opposite David Manners’ super-square Tom. Instead, Francis imbues Lois with not only smolder but with a great deal of charm and charisma. It’s an effortless, show-stealing performance chair swivels, head cocks, smirks, and purrs (to say nothing of great monogramed pajamas).

Luckily for me, TCM had a couple more of Francis’s films on VOD at the time, and I watched two of her biggest—if not the biggest—films within 10 days of Man Wanted: Trouble in Paradise and Jewel Robbery (both from 1932 as well). And I was in love, and how could I not be? Francis was luminous and dashing, and like the characters played by her leading men, I was dazzled

She encapsulated, in these trio of films, the Hollywood fantasy of being rich and successful, an escape from the pains of the Great Depression (or, in 2021, a break from navigating a global pandemic), and what isn’t ensorcelling about that? It was little wonder to me, then, that I discovered she was the biggest actress on the Warner Bros. lot. How couldn’t this woman put the butts in the seats day after day?

What was a wonder, however, was that I didn’t know her before 2021. She never came up in any of my film classes (and I took a lot of them), we didn’t watch any of her pre-Codes, and when if we discussed the Independent Theatre Owners Association’s 1938 list of box office poisons, Francis wasn’t the topic of conversation, not when you could discuss Garbo or Astaire or Crawford or Hepburn or Dietrich.

I wanted to know why. So in 2022, I watched all but one of her credited films, immersing myself in her always-evolving on-screen image, from slinky vamp to alluring socialite to hard-working and/or put-upon doctor or actress or mother (or, even more often, some combination of those of those roles as a mom). It became clear that Francis did her job and always understood the assignment, even if she didn’t like it, with a sense of grace and professionalism that came through on the screen. There’s something deeply respectable in that, and perhaps that’s why I always found her such a pleasure to watch across 66 films, and why I find myself wishing we’d talked about her in class just even a little bit.

Introduction

Katharine Edwina Gibbs, stage name Kay Francis, had a relatively brief film career, starring in 66 feature films over the span of 18 years. The bulk of her films were made from 1929 to 1938, where she mainly worked within the early Hollywood studio system, first with Paramount, then with Warner Bros. and ending her career as a freelance actress. Her final three films were made through a co-production partnership with noted “poverty row” studio, Monogram Pictures (best known for their slew of Lugosi b-pictures and Charlie Chan films).

Her career was one that burned hot and for a multitude of reasons (studio mismanagement, changing audience tastes, Kay’s own reluctance to fight for better parts) flamed out all too early. While peers like Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford enjoyed successful careers well into mid-age and beyond, Kay Francis bowed out of the Hollywood system at the young age of 41.

Her health problems began mounting due to stress, drinking and a ghastly sleeping pill and hot radiator accident in January 1948 that left her with serious burns to her legs from knee to waist. If she was considering a return to the screen before, this accident and the lingering pain put an end to that idea. She sold her Beverly Hills home several months later and purchased an apartment on Madison Avenue.

To those that knew her, it was no surprise—Kay was already considering retirement as early as 1938 while in the midst of a bitter fight with Warner Bros. to be released from her contract. She hated the political machinations of Hollywood and longed to return to her second home, New York. More than anything she was excited to be a liberated woman with her own free time, not bound to the strict rules and ever-watching eye of the Hollywood studio. The first thing she did when her Warner Bros contract ended? She got her ears pierced.

Despite a career of extreme highs and disappointing lows, Kay Francis still has a devoted cult following. To others, she is seen as a “lesser” Old Hollywood star, her work often ignored in favor of those whose names ring louder and who were in more consistently great pictures. But fans of Kay Francis can all attest—there’s just something special about her. Part of that appeal is her exotic good looks, her dark features and tall, slender frame. She wore clothes like nobody else, styled by some of the best designers of the era, but she was also a fantastic, underrated actress, who could play both light comedy and high melodrama.

While stage-trained in New York and certainly a success on Broadway in the late 1920s, she was never a major star of The Great White Way, something which likely helped her make the transition to talking pictures. And unlike many of her peers, she skipped out completely on the silent era, jumping feet first into modern moviemaking. She had both an exaggerated style (one of her most iconic poses was a certain hand-on-the-head gesture), and one that felt intensely personal. She could say everything with a subtle closeup, her big, brown eyes sucking up all the light in the room, and projecting that warmth back to the audience. She had an infectious laugh, a sultry voice and always the biggest smile in the room.

She loved dogs, sailing, hosting lavish parties and playing bridge. Friends said she was one of the most generous people they ever met; enemies found her cold and conniving. By all accounts, film crews and the day-to-day studio workers loved her. According to Stuart Jerome’s book, Those Crazy Wonderful Years, after completing Women in the Wind, the final picture of her Warner Bros contract, something special happened as she strode through the auto gate for the very last time. The cop at the station “performed an unheard-of-gesture to an actor: He saluted Kay Francis.”

I’m a firm believer that we are not the best judge of our own character. Beyond a detailed cataloging of her sexual partners, Kay’s diaries were filled with guilt and self-loathing. One of her most repeated phrases was an epithet directed at herself: “damned fool!” To get a clearer picture of the woman that was Kay Francis, I think it’s best to listen to what her friends said about her. Grace Moore, one of Kay’s closest companions from her earliest days in Hollywood until her tragic death in a Copenhagen plane disaster, said the following in her 1944 autobiography, You’re Only Human Once:

“When Kay and I get together, it means late nights of fun and gossip or a houseful of mutual friends, for Kay’s hospitality is famous. She’s shrewd, she’s wise, she’s completely adult, completely lovable. She doesn’t sing, she doesn’t dance, she hasn’t the experience and training that the legitimate stage might have given her, and she has always frankly said that Hollywood was her road to financial security. Yet with it all she’s intensely sincere. She’s done the best she can with her screen work, and by it has won a great following as well as the financial security. Never one for swank, she has put her money into safe investments, has foregone fancy real-estate plunges and the usual Hollywood splendor, and has lived with all the simplicity and grace that is the hallmark of her charm.”

1929

Dangerous Curves

A big year for Kay Francis, where she shared the screen with Walter Huston, Charles Ruggles, Fredric March, Lilyan Tashman and The Marx Brothers. But the most interesting pairing for me was Kay’s role as the vampish other woman to Clara Bow in Dangerous Curves. Kay didn’t think much of the picture, writing a single word review after the screening in her diary: “Ouch!” Bow was still trying her best to make a go with these new talking pictures, but Kay came in fresh-faced, a little wet behind the ears, but a promising new exotic starlet for Paramount studio. Bow could have easily tried to sabotage Kay’s role, but by accounts, was kind and helpful to the new star, even giving her tips on how to maximize her time in front of the camera. It’s not exactly the juiciest part (to be fair, none of Kay’s work in 1929 was), but it hints at the dramatic elegance to come, and in this writer’s opinion, is much preferred to watching Kay flirt with The Marx Brothers in The Cocoanuts.

1930

Passion Flower

Kay Francis starred in eight feature films in 1930. Her career was quickly on the rise. According to the biography on Kay, A Passionate Life and Career, “literally hundreds of articles were written about Kay in the 1930s.” She was what we call an overnight success. Studios still pegged her as an exotic vamp, but Kay’s skill was in her ability to make these “man-trap” roles sympathetic. A prime example is MGM’s Passion Flower, the last of her films released that year, directed by the other de Mille, brother William C. It would be Kay’s first top-billing and is a typically messy love triangle from the era, featuring Kay, Charles Bickford and Kay Johnson. It’s soapy, melodramatic and Bickford is slightly miscast as the uncouth heavy that these pretty girls are both fighting over, but Kay’s performance feels leaps ahead of what she was doing only a year ago. She looks and acts like a star—and no doubt her longer hair and the stylish gowns by Adrian certainly helped turn some heads to this skyrocketing star.

1931

Girls About Town

One of the greatest crimes of Kay Francis’ career is that she was not given more scripts like Girls About Town. These fun and free-wheeling roles showed off Kay’s talent for playing light comedy, and I have to imagine this is the picture that Ernst Lubitsch saw which convinced him she could play the lead in his masterpiece of comedic elegance and pre-Code sexuality, Trouble in Paradise. In Girls About Town, Kay and underrated bad girl Lilyan Tashman play two gold-diggers tricking old Iowa boys out of their fortunes, distributing the wealth around to their inner circle. Playing to Kay’s strengths, she ends up being the more guilt-ridden of the two, eventually questioning her digging ways and falling head-over-tiny-heels for Joel McCrea. In yet another cinematic crime, this was the only pairing between Kay and McCrea. How the studio didn’t see the immediate chemistry (and money to be made!) between these two tall, attractive leads, is anyone’s guess.

1932

One Way Passage

What the film critic for the October, 1932 issue of Photoplay called “a romantic ghost story.” I would be remiss if I didn’t include Kay Francis’ personal favorite film of hers in this list. One Way Passage was one of the only films that Kay was known to have screened for friends and lovers throughout the years. It also contained a particular shot of herself that she admitted to finding rare pleasure in viewing (she didn’t specify which shot it was, but my suspicion is it’s the high angle shot of Kay lying in William Powell’s arms on the beach). Tay Garnett wrote in his memoir, Light Your Torches and Pull Up Your Tights, that after the preview screening a “wildly weeping” Kay threw her arms around him and sobbed,

“It’s heahtbweaking. It’s the most moving film I’ve ever seen. It’s unfohettable.”

First off, kind of rude, Tay. But more importantly, she was not wrong. 1932 was unquestionably the greatest year of Kay’s career when it came to the quality of pictures she starred in: two bonafide classics (Trouble in Paradise, One Way Passage), one semi-classic (Jewel Robbery) a great film (Man Wanted) and several very good films (Strangers In Love, Street of Women, Cynara). She worked with some of the biggest stars of the era: David Manners, Roland Young, William Powell and Ronald Coleman. Creatively, this was the highest of highs, but unfortunately, her career would find itself on the slow decline from this point on.

1933

The House on 56th Street

A multi-decade spanning haunted-by-a-house melodrama that rushes by in a brief 68 minutes. A Ruth Chatterton reject, The House on 56th Street is an important film in the Kay Francis canon—its success for Warner Bros. ended up typecasting Kay in a multitude of similar mother/daughter sufferfests. Kay herself grew increasingly frustrated with this “suffering for her art” but was hesitant to criticize her studio and not even sure that if she was given a different role, that it would be any better. So, why put up a fight? This is about 56th Street, though, which is a legitimately great movie where Kay plays a chorus girl named Peggy with gambling in her blood. The film whips from marriage to European honeymoon to childbirth to toddler in a manner of minutes. It’s a sight to be seen. After the accidental murder of one of her former lovers puts Peggy in jail for two decades, she is eventually released to learn that her daughter has been led to believe her mother is dead. To reveal anything further would be to spoil one of the great, melodramatic Kay Francis film endings. Let’s just say pre-Code’s favorite sleazebag Ricardo Cortez shows up. I’ll give you one guess how it ends for him.

1934

Mandalay

Following the success of Kay Francis’ other film about falling in love on a boat (One Way Passage), Warner Bros. followed up with this saucy drama that promised a story about “beauty aflame in a world where there’s only nine commandments!” It’s only a brief segment in the overall film, but Kay’s turn as the notorious “Spot White,” a high-class prostitute working in Warner Oland’s Rangoon brothel after being sold into white slavery, is one of her most sensual, lovable heel turns. Her first appearance in that alter-ego, descending the stairs of the pleasure house in sequins, furs and a Louise Brooks hair-helmet is one of the most iconic shots of Kay’s entire career.

Like The House on 56th Street, this was another Ruth Chatterton leftover that Kay turned into a whole, goddamn meal. It further solidified her as one of the biggest stars at Warner Bros. studio, and despite a “ban” by the Catholic League of Decency, it made a solid profit. As a reward, Kay was given a salary increase the following year. But great Kay films were becoming more and more rare with each passing year. What Kay called her “great struggle,” a contract dispute which saw Jack Warner actively trying to embarrass her into quitting (and thereby breach her studio contract), was looming. Still, we focus on the positives, and Mandalay is one of her greatest films, beautifully directed by Michael Curtiz and sneaking into theaters just before the Production Code would clamp down on the type of ending portrayed here—in which a sympathetic sinner escapes punishment and confidently strides into a new life that they fought and sacrificed everything for. Spot White asks for forgiveness, but none is needed.

1935

I Found Stella Parish

What the New York Times called “a somber tale of a woman who found life thwarting her at every turn.” Warner Bros. was genuinely trying to find good roles for Kay Francis in the mid-30s, snatching up plays they thought might be suitable for her. Written John Monk Saunders, Stella Parish was one of those plays, the dramatic story of a classic stage actress with a secret past. Audiences and critics seemed to be getting tired of roles that depicted Kay as the struggling heroine, but Stella Parish should not be lumped in with her lesser mommy melodramas. It’s a prestige weepie, an extravagant “women’s picture” with Kay playing a working mother (in gorgeous Orry-Kelly) trying to love and protect her children amidst the injustices of life.

When given a respectable script (and often, even when not), Francis could be radiant, and she’s never more so than when playing the titular character in Grecian gowns on the London stage. The same is true even when her great actress is reduced to “loose women” roles at the 25 cent Forum (with such tawdry titles as “My Secret Interludes”). Eventually she falls the furthest—burlesque!—but is rescued from rock bottom by the love of two men, and a still-adoring daughter watching from the first upper box as Stella makes her triumphant return. Clap for mommy. She was meant for the stage.

1936

Give Me Your Heart

After her disastrous turn as Florence Nightingale in William Dieterle’s The White Angel, Warner Bros. went back to the familiar well and cast Kay Francis in Give Me Your Heart, Archie Mayo’s weepy “mother loves her daughter from a distance” melodrama. It was a tried and true formula, and Kay was again paired with frequent co-star George Brent. Kay once again makes delectable chicken salad out of an unremarkable script. Here she plays a naïve American girl living in England who falls in love with a boy, gives birth to a daughter out of wedlock, and is forced to keep the secret and live apart. It is what biographers Lynn Kear and John Rossman accurately write, “might have been one of her last good Warner Bros films.” That is, if next year’s entry didn’t exist (but we’ll get there). Critics praised her performance as “her best modern characterization to date,” which may have been a subtle dig at the historical dramatics of The White Angel. The critics were right, though. Kay excelled at playing contemporary women in chic dresses with, preferably, the opportunity for witty repartee and radiant sensuality. The new enforcement of the Production Code in late 1934 stifled some of the latter, but Give Me Your Heart proved that Kay was still the mistress of melodrama, no matter how tired she was of the tropes.

We will continue with Part 2 next week, which will conclude the series by looking at the years 1937 to 1946, when Kay Francis’ career was on a downward trajectory and the world found itself at war again.