“My life? Well, I get up at a quarter to six in the morning if I’m going to wear an evening dress on camera. That sentence sounds a little ga-ga, doesn’t it? But never mind, that’s my life … When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can’t wait to be forgotten.”
— from Kay Francis’s private diaries, c. 1938
Kay Francis, ultra-glam and impenetrably confident, was a massive star of the pre-Code era, and in many ways representative of its pleasure-seeking freedom and its carefree disregard of propriety. Normal everyday concerns did not impact Francis’ persona. When compared to the other queens of pre-Code – Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, Miriam Hopkins, Jean Harlow, Ann Dvorak – Francis exists in her own atmosphere. Blondell, Harlow, Dvorak, Stanwyck … all lived in the world of hard knocks. They were tough, sometimes hardened by experience. Francis breezed through all of it unscathed. She was tall and willowy, clothes draping on her form with exquisite perfection. In the grim years of the Depression, Francis’ clothes had soothing capabilities. James Baldwin wrote about the pleasing properties of Joan Crawford’s back, and how that back made him see the world – and certain kinds of women – in a different way. In a harsh world, movie goddesses can lull their audiences into a daze of pleasure. The pleasure is momentary, but no less meaningful (and maybe even more so).
Francis was not an ingenue. Nobody this worldly and languidly self-pleasing could be an ingenue.
Francis’ fame did not translate into the more serious years of the 1940s and 50s, although she continued to work (in movies and on the stage), before retiring and becoming a near-recluse. The sea-change in her fortune started early: in 1939, she played Cary Grant’s unpleasant gold-digging wife in In Name Only, and her rival was an adorable warm-hearted Carole Lombard.
There are a couple of interesting things about In Name Only. In some aspects, Lombard played the role Francis would have played a mere 6 or 7 years earlier (albeit with a couple of quirks: she didn’t have Lombard’s adorable pliancy and sympathy). Francis didn’t play spider-women or femme fatales. If she stole your husband, it was just because she was so gorgeous: she wouldn’t fall in love with him or give you trouble in that way. And you could barely blame your husband if he messed around with Kay Francis. She wasn’t a dark-hearted schemer. But there’s more to it than that, especially in re: In Name Only and its status as an in-between-eras melodrama: 6 or 7 years earlier, “gold-digger” wasn’t an insult. It was an understandable strategy in the midst of widespread collective hardship. Yes, you could be too blatant about it (like Ginger Rogers in Gold Diggers of 1933 – but even there, she’s not presented as some grotesque beast, or hard-hearted – the way Kay Francis is in In Name Only. Rogers’ character is just sick of being poor.) The entire Gold Diggers franchise featured scrappy young women – teetering on the verge of outright prostitution – who were practical about what they needed to survive. It was 1932, 1933. Society judges those who haul themselves out of poverty by any means necessary only when it is fat with plenty. But by 1939, things had changed. War clouds were gathering. The Depression was over. And so in 1939 a gold-digging wife had to be un-loving and no fun at all, she had to be an obstacle in the way of our blameless leading man’s happiness. And Kay Francis, languid pleasure-loving inhabitant of the Pre-Codes, now got that role. It’s a bit eerie. In Name Only goes out of its way to condone Cary Grant’s infidelity: his wife is an unpleasant bitch, and Lombard is perfect. Cary Grant has to almost DIE in order for everything to turn out right. The decision has to be taken out of the yearning couple’s hands. Traditional conventional morality is present in In Name Only in a way unthinkable just 6 or 7 years earlier.
Francis flourished as an actress when convention didn’t make a dent in her consciousness.
For a time, Francis reigned as Queen of Warner Brothers. Her only rival was Bette Davis. Davis’ talent was more fluid and flexible, and Davis took more chances. Francis wasn’t the type to push. She’s a tricky one: what did she get out of acting? Who was she as an actress? Look at her diary entry opening this post. You can bet Bette Davis would never have said something like “I can’t wait to be forgotten.”
My friend Dan Callahan wrote a wonderful piece about Francis for Bright Lights Film Journal:
Francis’ detractors said she was a star just because women wanted to see what she’d be wearing next, but she was much more than that. Francis gives herself to the camera completely and you can read all of her emotions — she’s usually slightly out-of-it and weary, and this functions as part of her open-faced charm. Also charming is her most notorious drawback, a lisp that turned all of her r’s into w’s, which made her easy to mock.
Also:
George Cukor said that the great stars had a secret, and Francis’ face always seemed to carry a particularly wicked one.
Francis made many many movies, and I’ll just call out her two most famous:
Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), with co-stars Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins.
Trouble in Paradise‘s atmosphere is one of amorality cloaked in such glittering charm it makes morality look bad. Morality is for chumps only. Marshall and Hopkins are thieves who work in concert, making their way through the playgrounds of the rich, with Marshall posing as a baron, the better to insinuate himself into the wealthy’s rarified air. He accidentally falls for his “employer”, a rich woman – Kay Francis – and this throws his primarily relationship with Hopkins into crisis. The grifters infiltrate Francis’ home, making themselves indispensable to her, all while keeping a close eye on what goes into the safe. The dialogue is so witty, the trio’s chemistry is crackling. Everything is funny and light and inconsequential and therefore weirdly emotional. When Billy Wilder talked about “the Lubitsch touch”, it’s this sort of thing he was referring to.
And then there’s William Dieterle’s 1932 Jewel Robbery. Like Trouble in Paradise, the action features grifters, jewels, and heists. William Powell plays an unnamed talented jewel thief, and Kay Francis plays Teri von Horhenfels, a gorgeously attired married Baroness, clearly more in love with her jewels than her husband. Or, she loves her husband because he keeps her draped in jewels. The distinction is irrelevant. Powell has his eye on Teri’s glittering neck, fingers, wrists … but there is undeniable chemistry between the thief and his mark, making Jewel Robbery a subversive delight. The two fall in love at first sight, literally while the robber is in the process of robbing a jewelry store where the Baroness is shopping. Teri looks like she’s delighted at the prospect of being robbed, especially by someone as charming as he.
But also, and this is key: The Baroness may be a rich woman, with a chauffeur and a life of luxury, but she’s as in love with jewels as the thief. Is there REALLY a difference between Francis’ rich woman and Powell’s jewel thief? Doesn’t Teri have more in common with the jewel thief than her husband? This romantic comedy involves a thief and a married woman, making it pure pre-Code. She’s married the whole entire movie. She never even contemplates divorce. William Powell’s thief, on the lam, de-camps to Nice, leaving the married woman he loves behind. It’s clear he’s not going to reform. He is going to continue on as before. In the final moment of the film, Teri’s husband tells her she needs to go away for a rest after her time of struggle. Teri says, without a hint of shame, that she’d like to take her rest cure in Nice. As the music crescendoes, she strolls towards the camera, looking RIGHT AT US, breaking the fourth wall, saying, in a daze of humorous mischief, “Nice! Nice!” She “sh”es us to keep her secret.
There’s a difference between immoral and amoral. Kay Francis was the latter. “Sh”-ing the camera acknowledges the complicity Francis created with her audience. We loved her amorality.
It’s hard to picture Bette Davis “sh”-ing the camera, staring straight at us, as she embarks on a life of crime alongside her criminal lover. We might recoil. The movie would judge her. This is nothing against Davis. I am just pointing out the difference to highlight Francis’ unique effect. Francis was “naughty” and was never punished for it. There’s a catharsis in this.
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