Il tempio del dottor Lamar

Kiss and Make-Up (1934)

** (out of 4)

Maurice Lamar (Cary Grant) is a famous plastic surgeon living in Paris where he works on making women beautiful all day long. His secretary Anne (Helen Mack) is secretly in love with him but the doctor decides to head off with the married Eve (Genevieve Tobin) who he feels is his masterpiece work. Eve's husband Marcel (Edward Everett Horton) ends up striking up a relationship with Anne and soon all four are on a crash course.

KISS AND MAKE-UP is without question one of the strangest films from this era of Hollywood. It got into theaters before the Hayes Office started to come down on sexuality and the Pre-Code nature of the film is something that would probably attract people to it. I will admit that the free sexuality running through the first half of the picture was quite good and seeing Grant kiss a married woman isn't something that too many movies did back in the day.

With that said, this is without a doubt a pretty bad movie on many levels. It remains slightly entertaining simply because of how weird the thing is. The first twenty-five minutes basically take place in the plastic surgeon office where we see several of the beautiful women as well as some of the ugly ones hoping to look better. Seeing Grant flirt and talk his way through the people was mildly entertaining but there's so much here that happens for no apparent reason including a meeting with an old college friend that never pays off. The blatant sexuality is a plus but things just get stranger.

From here we get the weird love story with the two couples basically trading off partners for whatever reason. None of these segment, clocking in around thirty-minutes total, adds up to anything entertaining and in fact it's just downright boring. Even worse if the final five-minutes where it seems director Harlan Thompson was trying to pay homage to the Keystone Kops and it just doesn't work. To date this here was Grant's biggest role and he's fun to watch but there's no question that there's not much else. Mack and Tobin are decent in their roles but but characters are poorly written.

KISS AND MAKE-UP is weird enough to where it's worth watching if you're a film buff but there's no doubt that it was Grant's worst picture up to this point in his career. With that said, he does sing a song!

I prefer to watch the classics of the 30's 40's & 50's over any of the mindless garbage todays writers come up with.

Cary Grant is Dr. Maurice Lamar, a Parisian plastic surgeon and beauty expert with a large fanbase of women, both previous and current clients, who adore him for his work and his looks. Rich husband Marcel (Edward Everett Horton) implores Dr. Lamar to not work on his homely wife, but the doctor does so anyway, and the newly beautified Eve (Genevieve Tobin) leaves her husband for the doctor. Meanwhile, Lamar's secretary Anne (Helen Mack) has secretly been in love with the doctor for a long time, but when he starts seeing Eve, she begins seeing Marcel, with the resulting inter-couple shenanigans. Also featuring Lucien Littlefield, Toby Wing, Mona Maris, Henry Armetta, and the "WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1934", including Julie Bishop, Gigi Parrish, and Helen (daughter of George M.) Cohan. 19-year-old Ann Sheridan also appears in a minor part.

This is a mix of several comedy styles: the European sophistication of an Ernst Lubitsch film, the screwball antics that would shortly become so popular, and even some broad slapstick, with a car-chase finale that seems lifted from a Keystone Kops short. Grant is good here, showing many of the qualities of his well-know screen persona. He sings a song at one point, and his warbling vocal isn't too awful. Mack and Tobin are okay in the female leads, but this may have been better with others in their roles. Horton is reliably funny. This was the final year of the WAMPAS Baby Stars lists of promising young actresses, a promotional endeavor started by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers back in 1922. "Baby Star" was another term for "starlet" back then, if the name confused anyone like it did me. While previous lists had included the likes of Joan Crawford, Clara Bow, Ginger Rogers, Mary Astor, and Fay Wray, this final year's roster didn't include any luminaries, with the biggest future name in the pretty-background-girl cast (Ann Sheridan) not on the list. Jean Negulesco is listed as "associate director".

An underrated picture of veritable wackiness, KISS AND MAKE UP is a forerunner to the classic screwball comedies of the late-thirties and early-forties. The storyline of a progressive plastic surgeon (Cary Grant) who becomes involved with his greatest creation (Genevieve Tobin) has a great FRANKENSTEIN-esquire aura that contains some surprisingly dark overtones for a film comedy of this era – a darkness which is present, but not really explored. The film is benefited greatly by Cary Grant, who gets an early chance to display his grand prowess at farce, which is one of the many qualities that inevitably made him a huge Hollywood star. The rest of the cast is also rounded out acceptably, with Tobin, Helen Mack, and Edward Everett Horton all turning in fine work.

On the downside, the film is extremely episodic, which is not inherently a problem in many cases, but here it prevents the picture from gelling into the knockabout farce it intended to be. Also somewhat detrimental is director Harlan Thompson's approach to the material, which often lacks energy or pizazz; make no mistake, Thompson's work is perfectly acceptable, but I could not help but imagine how truly dynamic the film could have been with Howard Hawks or (later) Peter Bogdanovich in the director's chair. Thompson earns major points for the frantic final chase scene, however, which concludes the film with a thunderous, side-splitting, wig-ripping bang! The movie as a whole is solidly enjoyable, but this terrific end sequence alone raises it's rating by at least a notch or two.

maybe I'm a fool for silly Depression comedies, but even though "Kiss And Make-Up" is a very minor comedy, and not particularly well written, it does have most of the elements needed for people who love pre-code Depression films to enjoy it.

Everybody knows that Cary Grant's Paramount films were generally weak, and that he was nowhere close to establishing his screen personality during these early years.

I had never seen this film before, and I quite enjoyed it. But, jeez, gang, you haven't lived until you've heard Cary Grant, Helen Mack and Edward Everett Horton attempt to belt out the songs! Absolutely incredible. Some of the worst examples of singing in a film from a major studio.

You will enjoy it too....if you sit back and not expect a "Citizen Kane"-quality screenplay!