Kay Francis was a once-popular actress in the thirties who is largely forgotten today. There are those who say that her decline in the forties, when she was reduced to working for Poverty Row studio Monogram, was due to her fights with studio bosses, her slight lisp, the excessive importance she put on the clothes she wore in films, etc., but my own feeling is that most of her movies were not that good, for the simple reason that she almost never worked with good directors. In 1932 she was directed by Ernst Lubitsch in the stylish comedy Trouble in Paradise; this is the only time she worked with a great director (and she complained about being billed second to Miriam Hopkins) and she was elegant, sexy and funny but never chose, as Bette Davis did, to demand better directors.
Guilty Hands was directed by W.S. Van Dyke, who was known as "One-Shot Woody'' because he never did more than one take and always stuck to his budgets. Guilty Hands has elements of sloppiness and continuity problems but is satisfying in a number of ways, including clever plotting by screenwriter Bayard Veiller and over-the-top acting by Kay Francis and Lionel Barrymore (who, according to some sources, had a hand in the directing). Because this is a pre-code picture there is a fair amount of lust and passion displayed as lawyer Barrymore plans to kill the bounder (Alan Mowbray) who is about to marry his daughter (Madge Evans) and almost gets away with it. Barrymore chews up the scenery while Francis, whom Mowbray plans to keep as his mistress after he marries Evans, works hard to prove Barrymore is the murderer, while a thunderstorm rages outside Mowbray's isolated mansion accessible only by boat.
For an intelligent analysis of Kay Francis's career I recommend Jeanine Basinger's book The Star Machine.
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