Change Your Image
Lopopolobooks
Reviews
Street of Women (1932)
Kay Francis shines once again...she's a gorgeous heart breaker!
I happen to be a huge fan of Kay Francis...my mother and her sisters felt that Kay was the ideal woman when they were in their teens in the l930's. Kay made her best films from l930 to l939. In this film, she is the intelligent, successful, and gorgeous lover of a married man whose wife is a bejeweled stinker. Alan Dinehart, who I've seen in very few films, is the unhappy husband in love with the beautiful dress designer Kay plays. The wonderful Roland Young wants to marry Kay, but she adores her loving married beau. Young is always great and here plays the suitor who is also in business with her beau, yet doesn't give up proposing to Kay. Alan D. has a pretty daughter who adores her daddy and gives him lots of kisses on the mouth, and who is this darling, Gloria Stuart? None other than the actress from Titanic...who throws her jewels into the ocean at the end of the film...she was so pretty as a young actress. Here she denies her daddy her approval to leave her mother so he can marry Kay. And who does young Gloria fall in love with? Kay's beloved young brother who won't forgive Kay for having a married lover, none other than his own fiancée's father! In the end, it's a noble Roland Young who saves the day, and younger brother marries his love, Gloria Stuart,(their wedding scene is a heart breaker!), and Kay and Alan are united at the end. I adore Kay Francis films because of her famous sense of style..her dark hair contrasting with her very white skin, and her huge, light colored eyes are devastating. Women went to her films just to see her hairstyles and her wardrobe; she was also a very very good actress, very believable. She had an amazing figure and the oh-so-fashionable clothes hung on her tall figure so well. God bless her and TCM for these gems.
The Road to Singapore (1931)
Jungle drums can really get to you!
Loved watching this really dated film...William Powell in 1931 had already perfected his suave, self-assured persona on screen, and in this filmed play, he presents the wonderful self-assured and beautifully dressed image he gave us later in Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man series he's so well remembered for. Louis Calhern is the weak, career obsessed doctor who marries Doris Kenyon, a former nurse It's interesting to watch the young Calhern play the emotional, naive, career obsessed, wife-neglecting doctor, because we always knew him as an older actor, dignified and mustached in the 40's and 50's. Powell steals the movie as the hard drinking seducer of other men's wives, which of course, includes the doctor's bored bride. What's fun is how the film depicts the hot and humid tropics, complete with incessant jungle drums, as a place where passion can overheat the idle rich and cause near-tragic troubles for all. Doris Kenyon, whom almost no one remembers today, but may be best known for her role with Rudolph Valentino in the silent, Monsieur Beaucaire, holds her own, was 34 in this film and is quite the blonde beauty though one of her gowns, a black and white number, comes off as almost comical today. See this one for Powell, for the way he dresses and comports himself, and for those incessant drums.