Poor Kay Francis! Bad enough to be pregnant & in love to already married titled Brit Patric Knowles. Worse, he still cares deeply for invalid wife Frieda Inescort, unable to provide an heir to the family. (Raise your hand if you see where this is going.) Yes, all the Woman’s Magazine Serial tropes you could ask for.* (It’s not a Cosmopolitan Production for nothing.) Duly & dully megged by Archie Mayo, it’s so visually inert the soundtrack could function as radio drama. (That’s old school for PodCast.) Yet, pretty entertaining all the same, with a lightweight cast fighting at just the right classification. Why even stolid George Brent as the man Kay marries after secretly giving up her little boy to help the Knowles’ family line is just right here. Only now, with Kay unable to expose her unspoken grief, there’s no chance for happiness till old platonic pal Roland Young tricks her into confronting her demons face-to-face. This is all fine as far as it goes, but what truly makes this valuable is watching Pre-Code setups play under onerous post-1934 Production Code rules. You couldn’t talk about certain taboo subjects and still get national distribution, so the whole cast speaks in ‘code,’ Production Code, that is. Like listening to a puzzle. Kids under 13 must have wondered what all the fuss & bother was about.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Hard to believe the author of the source material is the same Joyce Cary who wrote THE HORSE’S MOUTH/’58 about a scabrous modern painter; memorably filmed, from his own screenplay, by Alec Guinness.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In the film, ‘adoptive’ mom Frieda Inescort figures out that Francis is her boy’s birth mom by ‘something in the eyes’ and the way husband Patric Knowles reacts to Kay. But in an imagined Carol Burnett parody, the three-yr-old would suddenly start speaking with the same dropped ‘R’ that plagued Francis all thru her career. (That three-year-old played by Tim Conway.)
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