Kay Francis was one of the biggest stars of the early thirties but by 1945 she was working for Poverty Row studio Monogram and the programmer Allotment Wives was her penultimate film before she returned to the stage. Although Turner Classic Movies shows her films fairly often Francis is relatively unknown today. What happened? Simply put I think that Francis was overworked by first Warner Brothers and then Paramount and she seldom had good scripts or good directors. In 1932, for example, Francis made seven films and only one of them had a good director for her: Trouble in Paradise was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who knew how to utilize Francis's comedic abilities (Lubitsch also directed Garbo's one successful comedy, Ninotchka, in 1939). Too often Francis was stuck in mawkish soap operas as a glamorous clothes horse and didn't fight for good directors, the way Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck did.
Allotment Wives starts out as something of a film noir, with Francis running a racket where she uses women she recruits to marry multiple servicemen in order to get money from the ODB (Office of Dependent Benefits), of which Francis and her gang of men take a big cut. Unfortunately the film quickly swerves into another mawkish soap opera (because Francis was a co-producer for this movie?) as Francis's daughter (Teala Loring) runs away from her posh school and is kidnapped by Francis's rivals. Violence follows and Francis is killed, as fraud investigator Pete Martin (Paul Kelly), having fallen in love with Kay Francis, rescues her daughter. The cinematographer on Allotment Wives was Harry Neumann, who photographed fourteen films in 1945, while workmanlike director William Nigh directed two other movies that year.
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