The Keyhole (1933)

Director Michael Curtiz has to keep this compact tale moving forward as we've got a lot of ground to cover in seventy minutes. New York City trophy wife Anne Vallee Brooks (Kay Francis) has to go to Cuba and execute a fast legal action against an almost-but-not-quite ex-husband Maurice Le Brun (Monroe Owsley). Maurice had (falsely) claimed years before that he had executed a divorce with Anne after they split up (she hated his guts!) while they were in France. Since then, Anne married super-wealthy older man Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker). Sleazy husband #1 shows up in Manhattan with blackmail on his mind, and since Maurice didn't actually follow through on that divorce five years ago, a shocked Anne is now in a precarious legal situation.

What to do? Going to Cuba and getting a fast annulment against Maurice is an idea put forward by the sister of husband #2 (Helen Ware as Portia Brooks) who Anne has taken into her confidence. The two women plot how to keep this burgeoning disaster a secret. An older woman than Anne, Portia seems quit experienced with these sorts of problems, and she comes up with the strategem of getting Maurice out of the country, and since he isn't an American citizen, to then to use contacts at the State Department to deny Maurice a visa to come back.

Between getting the annulment in Cuba, which would solidify the legal foundation of new marriage #2, and keeping Maurice barred from the Home of the Brave, maybe the whole problem can be put to rest in a way that no public scandal can break out. With new husband #2 so busy running his vast financial empire, Anne simply tells him she needs a trip to clear her head and to get over some nervousness, and he hardly seems fazed by this (the couple appear to live 99% of their lives in separate activities). To make this plan work, though, it means making sure Maurice follows Anne down to Havana to get him outside of the borders of the USA. Anne does this by declaring she'll cash a $50K check in Havana to pay Maurice's blackmail, and greedy Maurice happily boards the same cruise ship as Anne to make the journey.

Meanwhile, this very busy super-wealthy husband #2 can sense something is amiss. He hires a detective (George Brent as Neil Davis) to follow Anne and keep tabs on her activities. When the two men discuss an outline of the job, Neil helpfully suggests he can trap Anne in a compromising position so that the wealthy husband will have grounds for divorce if he wants to discard her later. Husband #2 thinks this is a a pretty good plan and endorses the effort. This means Neil will also need to travel on the cruise ship that Anne is on.

Along for the cruise in The Keyhole is Glenda Farrell as a phony royalty-hangers-on who is looking for a man aboard ship who is gullible enough to exploit with a con. Junior detective Allen Jenkins is on the trip as George Brent's character's valet and after meeting Farrell's character at the ship's bar, he happily volunteers to be exploited, though he is in fact running a kind of con himself, pretending he is financially well off (he's not) and Brent's character, his actual boss on this trip, is the valet. Farrell and Jenkins inject a regular dose of humor into the otherwise heavy melodrama of The Keyhole.

Aboard ship and out on the Atlantic Ocean, Neil expertly ingratiates himself into Anne's reluctant company. Becoming her friend, they happily spend time together during the day, but Neil writes up reports each night that are then radio-telegrammed back to husband #2 in Manhattan. While with her, day by day, Neil keeps alluding to his growing affection for her and subtly edges her toward adultery, something she keeps dodging. Step by step, a growing uncertainty in Neil starts to confuse his goals, though he continues to follow through on the plan he hatched with Husband #2. Anne begins to trust Neil, and if anyone needs a friend while caught up in this crazy situation, it is Anne.

Originally, this Warner Bros film was intended as a follow-up pairing for Kay Francis and William Powell. They had made the very successful doomed cruise-ship romance One Way Passage in 1932, and this story was a natural way to get the two stars back aboard a ship again and together in a tense situation that would allow for Powell's easy humour and Kay's expert ability to stoically suffer on screen. But, ultimately Powell didn't take the role of Neil the detective for The Keyhole and so it was passed over to George Brent. This turned out to be just the first team-up of Francis and Brent, with four more films to follow.

George Brent is often characterized as being a "block of wood" for acting style, yet he does provide a kind of controlled, relaxed and steady opposition on screen to his leading ladies, such as Bette Davis, Ruth Chartterton, Barbara Stanywck, and of course Kay. In a way this builds them up but leaves Brent in a more subtle, to put it succinctly, low-key position that makes any raising of the voice or physical action something that stands out, but also plenty of room on screen for the more scene-stealing skills of his co-stars. Brent has a cheerful way of using dialogue, and that helps in this movie where the heavy weight of reputation and too many husbands has our main character, Anne, psychologically under siege.

Records indicate the 25-day shoot for The Keyhole cost $169,000 but brought in $528,000 in box office, a tidy profit during the harshest year of the American "Great Depression" when ticket sales were down and the motion picture studios had very real fears about financial collapse. Those numbers also helped prove that Kay Francis could fill seats without William Powell, and it also helped boost Brent's profile at Warners. On top of that, the incredible number of wardrobe changes (designed by Orry-Kelly) that Francis' character has throughout the story (23!) showed how much the linkage between clothing and Kay Francis was developing her box office pull in ways that went beyond acting and into the heart of early-30's fashion.

Does Maurice get his comeuppance for being such a predatory rat? In an ironic way, he does. Monroe Owsley's handling of the role is extra-greased and dapper but repulsive, making for a loathsome villain who has the drive but not the brains when it comes to bullying his way to success as a blackmailer.

Henry Kolker's portrayal of a wealthy but significantly older husband who seems to view all other humans, in particular his young wife, as an item listed in his investment portfolio, isn't criminal, exactly, but it isn't a way to get to the end credits with any respect from the audience. And that is what happens in The Keyhole: when the chips are down, money isn't the same as good character.

Kay looks splendid in the assortment of dresses, gowns and wraps that she wears, first in NYC, then aboard ship, then in Cuba. Kay shows Anne being put through the wringer with each man in her life turning out to be a betrayer, though she doesn't know the scope of what all the machinations mean until each man is stripped of their camouflage. At the end of the film (script by Robert Presnell Sr. and Alice D.G. Miller) we see that Anne wears her many outfits as a style statement, but the men use disguises to practice deceit. In that respect, it's quite a fashion show all the way through The Keyhole.

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Original page September 6, 2026 | Updated September 12, 2026