Familiar, Forgotten

I watch a lot of old movies. In fact, given the chance, I'll set the DVR to record just about anything made prior to 1935 (even better if it was made prior to 1934, when the Hays Code really went into effect), and I'm almost never disappointed with what I find.

One of the pleasures in this is discovering large parts of pop culture history that seemed to be, before recently, all but forgotten. Once you begin watching these movies, faces you'd never seen (or heard of) before become familiar, and it's a surprise when you discover how many movies these actors were featured in, and how popular and well-known they were at that time. Warren William is one of them — he made 30 or 40 films as a leading man at Warner Bros. (most often as a heartless, amoral businessmen), yet before I started watching his films on TCM, I'd never heard his name.

Kay Francis is another. Through the mid-1930s, she was the top female star at the Warner Bros., and the highest paid American film actress. She often made more than a half-dozen films each year during that era, she was enormously popular and very famous. Yet again, though, I'd never heard of her before discovering her work on TCM.

In fact, it was a real surprise to recognize her caricature in a 1939 Columbia cartoon, Mother Goose in Swingtime (you can see her here, as the first of the three celebrity caricatures). Almost every studio did cartoons like these, full of popular, well-known celebrities of the day, but this was the only one I've seen that featured Kay Francis (though her career was beginning to decline by 1939, following a bitter contract dispute with Warner Bros. two years earlier).

That decline would bring her to Poverty Row, specifically to Monogram Pictures, where she made her last three films (albeit with star billing and a Producer credit), beginning in 1945. I watched one of those films, Allotment Wives, just last night, lured by the promise of an unknown film noir classic and curiousity. It was said to have been made in the wake of the unexpected success of Mildred Pierce, and several of the reviews I've read struggle to find a parallel in the Mother-will-do-anything-for-her-selfish-daughter story, but that's hardly the point of Allotment Wives. Other reviews want to place this in the pantheon of forgotten film noir, but it doesn't really fit there, either — not if you believe that great film noir ought to have great script and a compelling visual style, neither of which are to be found here. Still, it's fun to see Kay Francis in a less-familiar, less sympathetic role.

(And on the subject of something you'd never heard of — the plot of Allotment Wives is, in itself, a small history lesson. From the TCM synopsis: "Throughout World War II and into peace time, the U.S. government operates the Office of Dependency Benefits, which handles the issuing of allotment checks and family allowances to women with husbands serving in the [armed] forces. However, when evidence of many fraudulent claims for support come to light, Col. Pete Martin of Army Intelligence is assigned to O.D.B. to find the unscrupulous women who have been entering into multiple marriages with servicemen in order to claim their allotments and allowances.")