During the years where Bette Davis sloshed around Warner's film after unremarkable film, Kay Francis was one of its major stars even if her work varied in quality. In 1933 alone she appeared in five movies (something perfectly common then), neither the one memorable. This one, THE HOUSE ON 56TH STREET, is a movie that covers three decades in a marked woman's life and does so in little more than an hour. We're told the story of Peggy van Tyle who is (wrongly) convicted of killing a former lover and is sent to jail for approximately 25 years, losing her husband and infant daughter, and when she comes out, she sets up shop in the same house where she once lived in marital bliss and with a partner in crime converts it to a speakeasy where similar events concerning her young, twenty-ish daughter (Margaret Lindsay) will essentially occur, mirroring the tragic ones in the past.
Quick, with little fat in between events, this is another of Warner's melodramas that showcases Francis' ability to look completely sad, forlorn, and eventually hardened, but it is not a memorable movie overall. Lindsay seems flat here; other than that, no one registers above what it expected in such a short movie.
Quick, with little fat in between events, this is another of Warner's melodramas that showcases Francis' ability to look completely sad, forlorn, and eventually hardened, but it is not a memorable movie overall. Lindsay seems flat here; other than that, no one registers above what it expected in such a short movie.