Give Me Your Heart (1936) review: Kay Francis, giant coats, and baby drama

If you have a soft spot for dusty 1930s melodramas where people sigh heavily in front of giant fireplaces, Give Me Your Heart is worth your afternoon. ☕ It is absolutely perfect for anyone who loves Kay Francis and her gorgeous, tragic wardrobe.

But if you are someone who needs things like "healthy communication" or fast plots, you will probably want to throw your remote at the screen. This is old-school soap opera at its most stubborn.

The Setup for Maximum Drama

Kay Francis plays Linda, a woman who has a baby out of wedlock with a married British lord. The lord is played by Patric Knowles, who spends most of his screen time looking slightly confused about how he got into this movie.

Because it is 1936, Linda has to give the baby up to his fancy family so the kid can have a "proper" life. It is the kind of noble sacrifice that makes you want to shake some sense into her, but hey, that is how these movies worked back then.

Then she marries an American lawyer, George Brent, who is nice but mostly just there. He feels like a placeholder husband while the movie waits for the real drama to start again.

Linda eventually ends up back in England, and of course, she runs right into her kid. And the father. And his wheelchair-bound wife, played by Frieda Inescort, who honestly steals every single scene she is in.

The Little Things I Noticed

Let's talk about Kay Francis for a second. She has this incredible way of looking at a baby carriage like it is a bomb about to go off. 💔

There is this one scene where she is staring out a window in a massive, ridiculous fur collar. The collar is so big it practically eats her ears, and I was mostly just wondering how heavy that coat must have been.

• The child actor they got for the kid is incredibly stiff. He looks at Kay Francis like she is a stranger trying to sell him insurance.
• Roland Young plays a family friend named Tubbs and tries to do comedy. It feels like he walked in from a completely different movie set.
• The lighting in the library scene is so dark you can barely see who is talking.

This film reminds me a bit of other domestic dramas from the era, like The First 100 Years, but with way more crying in grand hallways. It also has that same quiet, heavy guilt you find in The Bitter Truth, though this one has much fancier tea sets.

"A mother's heart does not care about oceans or laws."

The ending of this movie happens so fast you might blink and miss it. It's like the writers suddenly realized they only had three minutes of film left in the camera and had to wrap up three years of family trauma in one conversation.

One minute everyone is miserable and crying, and the next, they are smiling and saying goodbye like they just finished a pleasant lunch. It is totally silly, but I kind of loved how abrupt it was. It is not a masterpiece, but it is a very cozy way to waste an hour and a half.