A Notorious Affair

Although Billie Dove is top-billed above the title and the rest of the cast, I'm with those who think Kay Francis the real reason for watching this nonsense - along with everything else in which she appeared during the first year of her contract with Paramount as a lisping 'other woman' in mannishly short hair and slinky plunging dresses. Aged only about 25 when the film was shot, but already exuding a mature sophistication that far surpassed Theda Bara, Francis makes poor Miss Dove looks positively homely by comparison.

Struggling with an incredible 'Continental' accent that increasingly slips as the film progresses, Basil Rathbone is saddled with the thankless part of a whiny violinist who Ms Francis soon tires of and abandons in the South of France the better to continue her tour of the rest of the opposite sex. Rathbone promptly succumbs to one of those mysterious debilitating illnesses so common in old movies; and the film becomes a real drag without her.

Photographed by Ernest Haller, the killer outfits Francis models and the imaginative sets are the work of Edward Stevenson and Anton Grot (both uncredited) in a surprisingly plush production to bear the name as director of veteran Warner Bros. workhorse Bacon.