STOLEN HOLIDAY

 

The month of August is when Turner Classic Movies presents their "Summer Under The Stars" series, in which a different actor is featured each day. Earlier this week the great Claude Rains was honored, and among the films shown in which he appeared in was one I had not seen, STOLEN HOLIDAY, a 1937 Warner Bros. production directed by the one and only Michael Curtiz. 

STOLEN HOLIDAY veers uneasily between the romantic entanglements of fashion maven Nicole Picot (Kay Francis) and the con artist shenanigans of Stefan Orloff (Claude Rains). The movie begins in 1931, where Nicole, a model working in Paris, is chosen by a mysterious man for a personal fashion show. Nicole learns that the man, Stefan Orloff, really wants her to pose as his companion so he can impress a potential client. The ruse works, and as Orloff becomes more and more successful, he helps Nicole in her quest to run her very own fashion house. Five years later, the two are at the top of their fields, but their relationship is more close friends than anything else. The French police are closing in on Orloff's shady activities, and in order to fend off any potential trouble, he asks Nicole to marry him. Orloff believes that the wedding will be a social highlight, and due to the many important guests he intends to invite, he assumes that the authorities will quit bothering him. Nicole surprisingly accepts Orloff's proposal, despite the fact that she's fallen in love with a British diplomat (Ian Hunter). 

Despite the fact that it was directed by Michael Curtiz, and produced by Hal B. Wallis, STOLEN HOLIDAY is a very middling film that has a very disjointed screenplay. It's meant to be a Kay Francis vehicle--she wears a different expensive outfit in every scene she is in, and she also has plenty of different hairdos--but it's Claude Rains and his financial dealings that the viewer is interested in. It's as if two films were mashed together. The overall relationship between the characters played by Francis and Rains is not developed very well, or even properly defined--are they lovers? Friends? Do they feel they owe each other something? Francis and Rains have no chemistry (according to David J. Skal's biography of Rains, the actor wasn't impressed with Francis), and while watching this film, you might notice than in the long shots, Francis in her high heels towers over Rains, while in the close shots she and he are about the same height. When Nicole agrees to marry Orloff, you just don't buy it--it feels like something that was put into the script to set up a climatic problem. (There's a very short montage sequence showing how Nicole and Orloff rise to the top, but it doesn't explain why the two have a connection to one another.) 

Kay Francis and Claude Rains in STOLEN HOLIDAY

As for Francis herself, while she definitely gets plenty of attention and glamour shots in this film, she also appears bored at times. She was a big star at Warners during the early 1930s, but at this point she was having problems with the studio. She had to have realized that Claude Rains got the better role in this film, and Ian Hunter as the romantic lead was no Clark Gable. 

Claude Rains doesn't get the amount of screen time that he deserves, but when he does show up, the movie shifts into a different gear. There's something dynamic and intriguing about Rains' Orloff--the entire movie should have been about him, and we should have gotten more info on his background and psychology. (Apparently the role of Stefan Orloff was based on a real-life Russian who caused a scandal in France, despite the fact that before STOLEN HOLIDAY begins we are shown a message trying to convince us that this film is not based on any real person or actual incident.) 

While watching STOLEN HOLIDAY you get the sense that Michael Curtiz wasn't that thrilled in making it. It's not a bad film, and it's not badly made, but it doesn't have that certain something to make it memorable. Michael Curtiz and Claude Rains would go on to work together for a total of 11 different times, and some of those pictures were among the greatest ever made in Hollywood history. As they encountered each other on the set over the years, I doubt the duo gave all that much thought to STOLEN HOLIDAY.