Kay Francis and Pre-Code

Kay Francis plays Penelope, the vampish bad girl who inspires the jewel robbery in The Cocoanuts.

If you don’t know the name, it may be surprising to discover that she became perhaps the biggest star of all Marx co-stars bar Marilyn, though sadly few others of her magnitude have been quite so thoroughly forgotten.

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She was an amazingly chic woman, a celebrated clotheshorse who set rather than followed the styles. She thought herself of little account and did not greatly enjoy her stardom, though it lasted until the end of the thirties (despite a considerable speech impediment and a far from conventional beauty), and only slowly and respectfully tapered off thereafter in low budget variations.

She said that she couldn’t wait to be forgotten and for reasons genuinely mysterious, more or less has been.
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In the movies, when she's remembered at all, it's usually as an ultra-fashionable modern woman, a big wage earner and a big spender, confident, independent, dressed in incredible gowns, with shiny, jet black hair and soulful make-up. Sometimes this character has a big, life-defining episode to live through over the hour and fifteen, sometimes she’ll just be effortlessly elegant and life will not trouble her. Think Lubitsch’s Trouble In Paradise.
Or, just as often, she’s a bitch, a vamp, a man-eater, a conwoman even; pretending to be some kid’s mother so she can carve off his inheritance, or nonchalantly, gloatingly stealing Fay Wray’s husband away from her. These are the roles where the hair is slicked right back, cloche hats are prominent, and Francis assumes the haughtiest manner imaginable as she seduces her way to gain; this is the Francis that robs Margaret Dumont of her jewels with Harpo under the bed and Groucho in the wardrobe.

It was, in fact, her first film role; she had been part of the huge contingent of Broadway actors and actresses imported to Hollywood to cope with the new demands of talking cinema. Her slightly decadent, aloof qualities and air of European sophistication ensured that she ended up at Paramount, most stylish of the major studios.

She followed up her stint with the Marxes with a host of great movies: Dangerous Curves (1929) with Clara Bow, Behind the Make-Up (1930) with Fay Wray and interesting Vaudeville settings, Paramount On Parade (1930; anyone know why the Marx Brothers are not in this movie?), Ladies Man (1930) with Carole Lombard, and the amazing Girls About Town (1931). All reward the effort of tracking them down.
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Despite the length and success of her career subsequently, Francis is one of the stars who most define pre-Code as an era. She seemed the embodiment of the sultry and languorous sensibilities of Paramount, for whom she did most of her voluptuary work. Like the Marxes, Kay left Paramount for another studio (in her case Warners) and her work altered significantly in the transition. At Warner Brothers, she made her high society issue films and weepy women's pictures. But her work in her early Paramount films still makes you sit up.

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Her appeal, I think, is that she was very much an icon of the ‘lost generation’; she would have made an excellent Brett Ashley. She often plays characters of great material attainment and deep existential dislocation; few actresses of her generation so ably conveyed ennui, fatalism and erotic gloom.
Watch her in the opening scenes of 24 Hours (1931), a fantastic pre-Code society drama from Paramount, in which (anticipating Trouble In Paradise) she co-stars with an equally top-form Miriam Hopkins.

She’s at a small party, depressed, bored, incredibly alluring in a very simple white dress, clearly the most fascinating woman in the room, but crippled with dissatisfaction and a physical beauty she carries like a hernia. (You have to go back to Louise Brooks in Germany for anything comparable.)

Any dedicated Kay fan will recognise this opening as trademark stuff. This is screen presence of a very particular sort, and hugely symbolic of its cultural moment. World-weariness was in at the time, combine it with sexual independence, the very latest outfits and a willingness to seduce or be seduced, and icons are born.

It is in this respect that Kay Francis is an icon not of old Hollywood merely, but of pre-Code specifically. Her world is one of great luxury, tired of the novelties in which it trades, from which she is always an arm's length removed, bored with the parties and the good times and the infidelities and superficiality.

Penelope in The Cocoanuts is how many of her later characters must have started out, before getting fed up somewhere along the way. (Or, in a few cases, carrying on just as she was: try The False Madonna [1931].)
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In many ways, we can also consider the Paramount Marx movies as themselves representative of pre-Code. I might even go so far as to suggest that in addition to all the reasons we normally cite, a huge part of why Paramount Marx Brothers movies are better than MGM Marx Brothers movies is because they look, sound and feel like what they are: pre-Code movies.
After 1934 the Brothers stop playing their satires against backgrounds like the Florida land boom or society parties and start hanging round circuses. Several things are lost in this transition.

First, the satire is inevitably blunted: if the world being deflated is not recognisable, real and modern, then the Marx Brothers have lost a huge part of their comedic edge: who cares if they are set in the old west or some boring department store? Without the ability to play against a milieu that is recognisable to the audience the team’s power is diluted.

Even the joyous A Night at the Opera (1935) is in this sense as much a portent of what is to come as a last hurrah. The fun of seeing them take on grand opera is far cosier and more remote from the everyday experience of most cinemagoers, and panders to their prejudices. Far better have them satirise inane, popular genre cinema (as they do in Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, parodies of society gangster films, college pictures and Ruritanian fantasies respectively) or take on the Long Island set in a spirit of genuine anarchy. They are not anarchists in A Night at the Opera, merely crazies. But in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers and Monkey Business they really are dangerous to have around. The Code era takes the danger away.