Beauty for Sale

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.

It's probably been more than thirty years since I saw this movie on television. "Beauty for Sale" typifies the films of the thirties, which I prefer to the current crop. The wit of the script and the polish of the acting and directing are beyond anything Hollywood could produce nowadays. There were other films in the thirties that starred mostly character actors, who absolutely had what it took to carry the show. Why are there so many great thirties films that are not available on video? I'm sure there is a market for classic films, besides the most well-known ones.

The story opens with Letty (Madge Evans) sending her mother back to their hometown of Paducah after her father has died. In a front porch step conversation with her landlady's daughter (Una Merkel as Carol), we learn that Letty's "rich dad" died with nothing but debts and after paying them all off there was only 600 dollars, which Letty credited to her mother. A recent beauty school graduate, Letty now has to earn a living given that she has no money. This one little conversation tells you all you need to know about our main characters. Letty - hopeful despite her family's bad luck, courageous, full of class. Carol - protective of her friend, sassy, wise in the ways of the world and unapologetically a mercenary when it comes to men, and Carol's brother, Bill, not bad looking at all, but as grating on the nerves as Pee Wee Herman and just as appealing, and worse, he's in love with Letty -it s not mutual - and he's the moralizing kind. We also understand from this conversation that Madame Sonia's Salon is not for girls of the faint of heart - girls like Letty who were raised "like a Persian Kitten". Letty says she can take it, so Carol promises to get her a job there.

During the next prolonged scene, at Madame Sonia's exclusive salon, we get the lay of the land there - girls glad to be employed in the depression, but with wealthy bored beefy customers, these girls want a piece of the high life for themselves. If the salon's customers can afford to lie around half the day gossiping with mud on their faces, why can't they? During the first half of the film, whenever any of the beauticians are photographed together, they are usually in profile, oddly smiling and at an odd angle, like those "happy workers unite" posters in Old Soviet Russia. Later, as things do not work out quite so well, the photography becomes more individualistic and conventional as the focus is on what is, not what might have been.

Hedda Hopper is inspired as Madame Sonia who will do anything to protect her precious son, played by Philips Holmes. She considers the girls she employs so far beneath her she doesn't see the obvious relationship forming between her son and one of the beauticians. Alice Brady is hilarious as Mrs. Henrietta Sherwood, a rather housebound woman who has the beauticians come to her house, substitutes her dog for a child, and is obsessed with numerology. Her executive husband (Otto Kruger as Mr. Sherwood) falls for Letty, and we can sympathize with him, since he comes across as a guy who is just lonely for the wife he married but who transformed into this silly creature after he became wealthy and to whom he is now bound purely out of obligation and habit. He actually has a conversation with his wife talking about the "wife he remembers" when they were struggling. She shrugs it off and goes on chattering about her numerologist. Even Carol has a back-story that makes you realize that behind that adding machine exterior there beats a heart that was once badly broken and made her the mercenary she is today.

This film has a little bit of everything for the precode fan, and it's worth watching more than once to get all of the one liners and undercurrents going on. Highly recommended.

Beauty for sale is one of those classic movie treasures that you happen to come across by channel surfing one late, late Tuesday night and stop to watch for no other apparent reason than you happen to like classic movies so you watch. Perhaps it was Madge Evans' polished mannerisms, speaking voice or looks that catch your attention, or Una Merkel who you swear you've seen somewhere but you can't place your finger on it. (I later found out she played Verbena on the Hayley Mill's classic, The Parent Trap - I knew I recognized her) It's an endearing story that's probably been told a hundred times over, but you can't help falling in love with it anyway. Falling in love with married men, men who are old enough to be your father, men who are in no position to ever want commitment, adultery, unwed motherhood, and gold digging - sounds like Jerry Springer. Except this one has class. A wonderful movie, a great cast (including Hedda Hopper and Alice Brady), and even I fell a little for Otto Kruger.

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).