I Found Stella Parish (1935)

the audience applauded

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Sad to see the unacceptable comments about Sybill Jason posted. She was a doll. Look at "I'm a little Big Shot" and watch her magic. Kay insisted that Jason take another part in a movie in which she played her daughter. Her acting is precious and remember folks, she was being coached. I feel that people are unjust in speaking of a child they way they did on the comments. Kay Francis and Ian Hunter are magic. The scene where Gloria (Jason) is crying for her mother to Hunter is so real. Watch it, enjoy it and remember when year it was made. There will never be another Kay Francis. I wish more of her movies were available to purchase. I recorded several and my DVR crashed and lost all of them so I am buying them little by little but some are hard to find and TCM shows them only rarely.

I Found Stella Parish masterfully engages the viewer. It is very stylized hokum, but yet it is sincere and rather poignant. Kay Francis plays an actress with a secret past that involves having given birth to a child out of wedlock. Taking a break from her stage career, she decides to focus on her role as a mother and travels incognito with her daughter, played by Sybil Jason. It's a nice bit of casting, and their performances nicely complement each other.Three years later, Warners would reunite Francis and Jason on screen in Comet Over Broadway. Once again, they are mother and daughter, and once again Miss Francis is an actress.

Even though the critics were happy to rediscover Kay Francis' flair for comedy in a trio of movies she made in 1935 fans stayed away. They wanted a fashion show and some highly emotional scenes and were rewarded with "I Found Stella Parish", a weepy tale of mother love. One cast member for whom big things were predicted was Sybil Jason who was billed as "the New Five Year Old Sensation". By the mid thirties every studio was looking for another Shirley Temple and Warners thought they had found theirs in South Africa but while Sybil was very cute she just didn't have the singing and dancing talent of Shirley. And Warners didn't go out of their way to find special vehicles for her - when she wasn't making shorts, she was given roles in support of Warner's big stars (ie Al Jolson and Kay Francis).The plot had to do with Stella Parish, England's premier actress of the stage who, even though American born, the British have taken to their hearts. Theatre owner Stephen Norman (Paul Lukas) loves her but cannot penetrate her inner life. She never goes to parties or opening nights but disappears to a secret life. Her "other" life revolves around her little girl Gloria (Jason) who wants to be an actress just like her mother. She is introduced singing a sort of "Barnyard Frolic" - and 20th Century Fox must have breathed a sigh of relief as Sybil was no Shirley.On the night of her triumph Stella is visited by a shady character, a Chicago thug (Barton Maclane, who even though prominently billed, his face is never seen, you only hear his voice) who threatens to expose her sordid past - so she disappears. Stephen has been puzzling over her existence for years but it takes newspaper reporter, Keith Lockridge (Ian Hunter, surely the most boring of all leading men of the 1930s) only a few hours to discover her country hideaway. He sails to America, hoping to find her trail, little realising that she is on the same boat, disguised as a spinster aunt. Lockridge also does a fine bit of detective work, tracing some of her costumes back to a 1930 play "The Lady Misbehaves" but then he delves deeper and finds, after she has innocently confided in him, that she was wrongly convicted of manslaughter and her baby was born in prison!!!!In true "weepy woman's picture" tradition the truth gets out and before you can say "Kay Francis" she is reduced to performing her story in honky tonks and burlesque, trying to earn enough money to keep Gloria, who she has sent away so she will not be part of her mother's shame.Honestly I have never noticed Kay's lisp - I have seen many of her movies but when her beautiful face is on the screen I am not concentrating on her speech impediment. Apparently this was the movie where critics and the public started to notice it - before this there were special readers to scan the script looking for words with too many of those pesky rs and ws!!

For KAY FRANCIS admirers, I suppose this one is one of their favorite vehicles. She gets a stunning wardrobe and close-ups to die for. But unfortunately, even Mervyn LeRoy's direction and Orry-Kelly's wardrobe and Casey Robinson's script can't bring reality to the mawkish story.She's a stage actress with a gilded reputation, but she's hiding her past transgressions in order to protect her child (SYBIL JASON). Improbably, IAN HUNTER is a reporter who's so anxious to get the inside scoop on where she has fled to, that he goes to extreme lengths to discover her whereabouts. Naturally, they fall in love and he has to confess that he's the journalist who spilled her story to the press.At this point, the plot forgets about reality and sinks into soap suds until the bitter end. It's typical slush for Miss Francis, who suffers and suffers until that magical moment when everything is coming up roses for the last reel.Forget about it.