Robert Florey's The House on 56th Street

Kay Francis, largely forgotten today, was a key actress in the pre-code period, when thieves and murderers could go unpunished.  Francis was never that assertive and did have a slight lisp but she could roll with the punches and finally departed from Warner Brothers when she could not get good parts and good directors, the way the feisty Bette Davis could.  Kay Francis was particularly adept at low-key comedy -- masking her fragility with witty brilliance, as anyone who watches Lubitsch's elegant Trouble in Paradise (1932) can see.  Unfortunately this was one of Francis's few films made with a director who understood her; she was often in weepies where she was wreathed in furs and diamonds.  The House on 56th St. is one of those films, but it is intelligently and briskly directed by Robert Florey, a director who could do wonders with a relatively low budget.

"The House on 56th St". is where wealthy Monty Van Tyle (Gene Raymond) takes his bride, Peggy (Kay Francis), a chorus girl, in 1905,and when they go to Europe on their honeymoon Monty convinces Peggy to give up gambling.  After they move permanently into 56th Street and have a baby Peggy goes to bid farewell to her former lover, Lyndon Fiske (John Halliday), who regrets having told Peggy that he is "not the marrying kind" and takes out a gun to kill himself.  Peggy struggles to take the gun away, Fiske is shot and Peggy gets twenty years for manslaughter.  Monty stands by her and while she is incarcerated a montage of newspaper headlines shows time passing during the Great War.  Then Peggy receives a telegram:  Monty was killed in action.  After twenty years Peggy is released, to a very different New York.  She is paid off by her mother-in-law to let her daughter think she is dead and takes up with crooked gambler Bill Blaine (Ricardo Cortez) to take money from suckers on ships.  Eventually they get offered a job at a speakeasy, which turns out to be the old house on 56th St., long boarded up.  Peggy become a successful blackjack dealer and one day her married daughter Eleanor (Margaret Lindsay) shows up to gamble  Peggy doesn't reveal her identity but sees that Eleanor loses $5000, to teach her a lesson.  Blaine doesn't know about Peggy and Eleanor and threatens to call Eleanor's husband.  Eleanor impulsively shoots Blaine with the gun in his drawer.  Peggy's boss gets rid of the body, Eleanor leaves for Europe with her husband, and Peggy remains in the house on 56th Street.

Florey tells this emotional story in 68 minutes,with passion and great deal of unobtrusive period detail.  Florey was French and came to Hollywood to learn the film business, eventually working his way up to director, though most of his films were B films; this did give him considerable leeway to make them stylish as long as he kept them on schedule and on budget.