Herz zu verschenken

Another delectable sweet-and-sour pre-Code entry of the early 1930s, nimbly skirting the edges of that era's morality with prodding grown-up material, satirizing the comedic and dramatic possibilities therein. Story concerns three gals who work in a New York City beauty parlor: one is dating a married man, another is pregnant by a no-goodnik, and the third spends her nights with a rich sugar daddy. Society cattiness at its most cynical; colorful performances by Madge Evans, Una Merkel and Alice Brady adds to the fun. Director Richard Boleslawski allows the bracing narrative to degenerate once or twice into slapstick, but if you can overlook that there's a great deal of sharp, salty wit here. Fine supporting turns by Otto Kruger, Hedda Hopper and May Robson. **1/2 from ****

Beauty For Sale stars a radiant Madge Evans as a good girl trying to make it as a beautician in Manhattan. The film is a little more than a multiplot soap opera but benefits from Evans, the unlikely romantic lead (Otto Kruger), solid direction by Richard Boleslawski, and most of all, superb photography by James Wong Howe (here credited simply as James Howe). The film is sublime when Howe's camera is most active, with superb lighting and set-ups and some scenes that look like they could be from films shot 20 or 30 years in the future. His sense of depth is particularly impressive, especially in a brilliant scene involving a slowly swinging bathroom door! The film feels like a classic at about the two thirds mark, but sadly cycles down to merely enjoyable by the final reel, as comedy and romance take over from tragedy and drama. Nonetheless, this is strongly recommended.

Richard Boleslavski directs this pre-Code drama for MGM about three women in the beauty trade who are there to find husbands, richer the better. All of them have a tale to tell why they want marriage and security in the same male package. Madge Evans, Una Merkel, and Florine McKinney are the three women.

Nothing here in language or really in sexual innuendo that would make the censors frown. I think that what got some tailfeathers ruffled was Beauty For Sale's showing that gold digging was the way to go. The only one who falls hard and has a real romance is McKinney with Phillips Holmes, the son of the women's employer Hedda Hopper. He's idealistic, but weak in the end and it's a formula for tragedy.

Merkel is the comic relief as she usually is and has some really great lines. The girls all live at Merkel's mom's boardinghouse. Mom is tart tongued May Robson and there's a brother Eddie Nugent they'd both like to see out their house and their hair.

The main story line is Madge Evans who falls for married Otto Kruger. He's married to society girl Alice Brady an empty head who likes the money and position Kruger gives her, no way she wants to divorce him. Looks for a while like Evans will to settle if she can't select.

The three girls flesh their characters out fine and there's some snappy dialog especially for Una Merkel. Two years from now, no way this ending would have approved by The Code.

The subjects of "Beauty for Sale" are three employees of a fashionable Manhattan beauty salon run by the haughty Hedda Hopper. There is Una Merkel, the hardworking but cynical daughter of a rooming house proprietress (May Robson), Madge Evans, a boarder fresh from Paducah, Kentucky hoping to make it in the Big City and Florine McKinney who falls for the charms of Hopper's rakish son (Phillips Holmes).

At various moments the main characters' faces are arranged at sharp angles in close-up as they converse about the hard choices in their lives; or off-kilter flashes of one beauty parlor customer after another engaged in varieties of gossip and small talk; we get glimpses of carefully choreographed throbbing studio-shot street life as we follow characters from plot point to plot point: Eddie Nugent (Robson's loquacious son) on a crowded Brooklyn street as he makes his way home; the minutiae of daily home life: Robson preparing a gargantuan lunch basket feast for a departing tenant; a beauty parlor client (Alice Brady at her ditzy best) fussing with her pillows, her dog, her tea as she chatters away as her long-suffering, patient husband (the elegant Otto Kruger) attends to her every whim. Every scene is filled with little bits of vibrancy and every featured player contributes something solid.

The Madge Evans character gets the most screen time as she struggles to figure out whether to pursue her relationship with the older, married Kruger who is taken with her. This could be Evans's most substantial screen role. Merkel provides her customary sassy humor as she stakes out an even older admirer, hoping to marry into riches. McKinney's romance is another story entirely.

Despite its rather hackneyed story (young women navigating the perils of romance) "Beauty for Sale" is well worth viewing for its details of character, perspective and environment.

This fast, fizzy, deft comedy skirts the Code so nimbly that I couldn't tell just by watching (on TCM this morning, thanks for the thousandth time TCM) whether it's pre- or post-Code. I appreciated so many unsung, supporting, and subtextual things about this ur-romcom that I can't mention them all here. In order of surprise/urgency, the top 5 are:

1. Otto Kruger! Here is the man who clearly should gotten all those roles wasted on Warren Williams - what were producers thinking? (Were they thinking?) They look about the same age, yet Otto's handsomer, less tedious, and possessed of actual romantic and comic acting chops.

2. The writing! Cattiness among beauticians, and the delectable Alice Brady brand of un-self-awareness: "I'm very intuitive." Her literal kiss-off scene with Kruger has never been done better in a comedy, not even by Meryl Streep and *insert leading man here*.

3. The bad boyfriend! An almost complex portrait of a goofball who clearly doesn't deserve the leading lady, but not because he's a bad guy. He's not all good, either. He's just not grown up. It's a forgiving, shaded character, played by Eddie Nugent with a subtlety usually missing from lame runner-up lover roles.

4. The slapstick! I don't care how many takes they went through to print the change-of-driver-in-real-estate-agent's-car scene. The result is totally worth it. I'm actually surprised I've never seen this bit in a TCM montage of silly scenes.

5. Madge Evens! Una Merkel! Listed low, but only for the surprise factor. Both are at or near their very best here. Miss Merkel never gets enough credit for delivering both sides of a double-entendre grilled to smoking hot perfection. Miss Evans does more-or-less blameless ingenue so well it's not boring - this is Carole Lombard territory, and she nails it, sweetly and demurely (well, mostly demurely, see no. 4).