First: Let's begin with a quote from "Midnight Mass," an unpublished poem of mine (all rights reserved): (sorrry for the /s - there is a space limit here, and I have still more to say) - "What would the ancients have thought,/seeing the porcine wavering supports/of Saint Peter's canopy?//The seduction of Babylonia?/The wail of the Pharoahs?/The shimmy-shimmy of the two-buck dancer/caught on celluloid in '33, before the Code?//Sex and idolatry,/purple protuberances massing to the sky/are not what TV sees,/whether panning to the flowers in English,/or in Spanish mooning the faithful.//Both handed the lie by those serpentine columns, who say not truth not science,/but Hollywood excess begins here—/name dropping,/and the eternal celebrity of sainthood.//Though stars and saints come and go:/dropping from the firmament/like Kay Francis or St. Christopher."
Now isn't that a fine way to capture how Bette and Joan live and Kay doesn't? Life is inherently unfair and Kay knew it, always knew it, and in every performance knew that she was only as good as her last sale, and that there would be a last sale. No NE flinty will-to-survive like Bette, or pure white-trash-cum-French-(don't forget LeSueur) glamour like Joan: no Kay was always pure "noble glamour," and always with the understanding that while nobility is eternal, glamour almost always passes with youth (that's why Joan is so pathetic, she willed her glamour to survive, and paid a ghastly price for it), especially for a woman, as her hips widen no matter what she does, and she slowly pirouettes into middle age and and the inevitable desuetude of barrenness. (Oh and Ruth Chatterton needs a place, too, but not here.)
I like to think of Kay in the 1960s, her 60s too, as she faced her imminent young death (63 is young to me) from too many cigarettes and neglect. Was she able to rewatch her glamour-turns from the pre-code era, especially, "Trouble in Paradise," with her perfect American foil of Marian Hopkins? So that Americans could compare and contrast nobility with commercial will-to-live (yes Marian does the NE better than Bette, but that's another review)?
In the end, nobility must reconcile with commercial survival, as the Italians learned so difficultly (but they have learned it, yea!). And Kay always knew that, was always commercial in her nobility, but she couldn't stop her own aging, nor could she stop the changing mores of that "low dishonest decade," where the Democrats, with their new power, enforced their own version of 1930s fascism on American popular culture.
So if the other critics are right, and this is the first (and last?) Kay Francis hit "post-code," then the plot makes perfect sense, but I am not going to give any spoilers.
I never watch Robert Osborne's intros until after the movie is over, where he sometimes gives a coda as well. He does both with this movie, and he makes fun of it in both the intro and coda as only "rich liberals" can do, which you know Osborne is(though not so rich I would guess, but in his 80s, he has enough to keep him going, so who cares?).
So diss him here. And while I agree that Kay could have had a more butch male interest, Ian Hunter has enough "male beauty" to make her attraction believable, especially in the one scene where he briefly shows up in two-toned (with one tone white) shoes - I am sure there is a name for these 30s-specials (are they still called spectators when men wear them?), but anyway, he functions as a classy Brit silly enough to fall in love with an aging star.
For Kay is aging - now 30, which for a woman in the aptly named decade, meant she was approaching the third movement of the "Mary Astor dance" ("Who is Mary Astory? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Who was Mary Astor?"). She knows 1937 is coming, and she knows she won't get to say, in 1950, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small," because her story is more complicated than Gloria Swanson's - that quintessential Protestant girl gone big time, where she could always argue she hadn't gone bad (in the best Protestant female-empowering dialectic).
Swanson had no time for nobility - there was too much life to be lived, and she knew that in la coda nobilitas (someone check my Latin here, I'm winging it), la dama always gets screwed in the end. And maybe la dama wants it - vagina dentata and all that for some more Latin. Who knows, who cares? maybe in another life I will be that sex, but now I just do it. So while Swanson deserves her immortality, with her apotheosis being Sunset Boulevard (every scene memorized, trust me, and I too, always wanted a swimming pool- still not there yet), Francis needs to break into 21st-century post-modern popular culture, because she taught Americans the lesson, now lost, about Roman Catholic nobility.
Another review will need to riff on that theme, for IMDb is shutting me down, but let's end where I began - I cried like a baby, the plot is believable, and while not as great as her pre-code movies, this is a great movie, better than anything Bette or Joan ever did, and another example of why Kay needs to get her long overdue place in the pantheon.
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