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 claimed years before that he had executed a divorce with Anne after they split up (she hated his guts!) while over in France. Anne is now married to super-wealthy older man Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker) who is new husband #2, and so sleazy husband #1 shows back up in Manhattan with blackmail on his mind, since he didn't actually follow through on that old divorce as claimed, putting Anne into a precarious legal situation.

Going to Cuba and getting a fast annulment against Maurice is the idea of the sister of husband #2 (Helen Ware as Portia Brooks) who helps Anne keep this burgeoning disaster a secret. Portia seems quit experienced with these kind of problems, and gives Anne a strategem to deal with it, which is to get Maurice out of the country, since he isn't an American citizen, and then to use contacts at the State Department to deny Maurice a visa to get back in. New husband #2 is so busy that 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 cruise ship to make the journey.

Meanwhile, the very busy super-wealthy husband #2 can sense something is amiss, and hires a detective (George Brent as Neil Davis) to follow Anne and keep tabs on her activities. When the two men discuss their plan, Neil happily 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 good plan and endorses the effort. This means Neil will also travel on the cruise ship that Anne is on, along with Maurice, who Husband #2 and Neil don't even know about.

Along for the ride is Glenda Farrell as a phony royalty-hangers-on who is looking for someone aboard ship who is gullible enough to exploit, and junior detective Allen Jenkins is on the trip as George Brent's valet and happily volunteers to be exploited. 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, becomes her friend, but writes up reports each night that are 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, with the result being a growing uncertainty in Neil about what he is doing in the employ of Husband #2. As the two spend more time together, 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 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. Brent also 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.

What's Recent

Original page September 6, 2026