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.

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.

This is a badly dated melodrama about an actress whose dark past is revealed by a conniving reporter. Kay Francis is luminous, but she can't play trash. When Stella gets tough and starts on her downward trend, Kay, with her patrician beauty and educated accent, can't do it. A very talky movie, supposedly set in England, but the atmosphere and language aren't very British.Apparently the play she appears in has something to do with Caligula - trust me, it's no starmaking play or performance. It was fun to see that the play actually had an orchestra, a reminder of the old days when "straight plays" were really huge events.

that drags in places. But Kay Francis is always worth watching. She plays an actress with a surprising past that catches up with her. Ian Hunter, Paul Lukas, and Jessie Ralph are all ok, but Sybil Jason is yukky as the kid. The play that Kay is a smash in a a total dog, but it hardly matters. Film could also have shown her burlesque tour in a seedier light. But this Warners programmer kills 84 minutes pleasantly.