This week’s “unsuitable” mystery movie was the 1934 Paramount film Search for Beauty, with Larry “Buster” Crabbe, Ida Lupino, Robert Armstrong, James Gleason, Toby Wing, Gertrude Michael, Bradley Page, Frank McGlynn Sr., Nora Cecil, Virginia Hammond, Eddie Gribbon and “Pop” Kenton.
Story by David Boehm and Maurine Watkins.
Screenplay by Frank Butler and Claude Binyon.
Dialogue by Sam Hellman.
Based on the play by Schuyler E. Grey and Paul R. Milton.
Photographed by Harry Fischbeck.
Directed by Erle C. Kenton.
Further information on Search for Beauty is available from the AFI Catalog.
Search for Beauty is available on Blu-ray from Critics’ Choice Video.
::
In my exploration of movies that were deemed “unsuitable,” I landed on Search for Beauty, which Harrison’s Reports deemed “unsuitable for children, adolescents and Sundays.” Perhaps I’m late to the party, but Search for Beauty qualifies as a camp classic that could easily be subtitled “March of the Beefcake,” with women constantly ogling Buster Crabbe, who seems oblivious to it all. There are Pre-Codes and then there is Search for Beauty.
I’m guessing that The New York Times will disapprove of such goings-on.
Aha! We have a previously unknown member of the “alphabet critics,” A.D.S. (February 10, 1934):
Search for Beauty is the film that Paramount manufactured as the climax of an international exploitation stunt in which thirty young men and women from various parts of the world received a free trip to Hollywood and an opportunity to get into one picture. The result is a tribute to the studio’s ingenuity but a less than thrilling tidbit for the man in the street. The contest winners, one must hastily explain, are entirely admirable specimens of health and beauty. The girls are modest, young and charming; the young men boast chest developments that would make a gorilla blush with shame.
For Monday in this week’s exploration of ‘‘unsuitable’’ mystery movies, we have a mysterious musical number with numerous mystery companions.
For Tuesday, we have a mysterious woman.
Update: This is Ida Lupino as a blond.
Brain Trust roll call: E. Yarber (mystery movie and interesting background on the mystery film), Stacia (mystery movie and mysterious leading lady), Mary Mallory (mystery movie), Suz n Chaz (mystery movie and mystery leads) and Anne Papineau (mystery movie and mysterious leading man).
For “Hm Wednesday,” we have a mysterious woman doing unsuitable things.
Update: This is Toby Wing, dancing on a table.
Brain Trust roll call: Mary Mallory (Tuesday’s mystery woman and interesting history about certain locations and people in our unsuitable mystery movie), E. Yarber (Tuesday’s mystery woman and more information about our unsuitable mystery movie), Mike Hawks (unsuitable mystery movie, Tuesday’s mystery woman), Stacia (Tuesday’s mystery woman), Anne Papineau (Tuesday’s mystery woman) and Bob Hansen (unsuitable mystery movie and Tuesday’s mystery woman).
For “Aha Thursday,” we have a mysterious woman.
Update: This is Nora Cecil.
We also have this mysterious beauty queen and a mysterious companion.
Update: This is Ann Sheridan and Alfred Delcambre.
And a mysterious couple.
Update: This is Gertrude Michael and Robert Armstrong.
Finally, this mysterious “Aha” gentleman.
Update: This is James Gleason.
Brain Trust roll call: Mary Mallory (Wednesday’s mysterious dancer), Anne Papineau (Wednesday’s mystery dancer), Dan Nather movie and mysterious cast), E. Yarber (Wednesday’s mysterious dancer and more on the history of our mysterious “Unsuitable” film) and Mike Hawks (Wednesday’s mystery dancer).
For Friday, we have our mysterious leading man and leading lady.
Update: This is Larry “Buster” Crabbe and Ida Lupino.
Brain Trust roll call: Sarah (“unsuitable” mystery movie), Greg (“unsuitable” mystery movie and Thursday’s mystery gent No. 2), L.C. (“unsuitable” mystery movie and mysterious cast), Mary Mallory (Thursday’s mystery guests), E. Yarber (Thursday’s mystery guests and their backgrounds), Sylvia (Thursday’s mystery gent No. 2), B.J. Merholz (Thursday’s mystery gent No. 2), Mike Hawks (Thursday’s mystery guests), Sheila (“unsuitable” mystery movie and Wednesday’s and Thursday’s mystery guests) and Anne Papineau (Thursday’s mystery guests).
ladailymirror.com 
Once in a while you set up a poser I can identify at once. This week we’ve got 1934’s Search For Beauty with Buster Crabbe, directed by Erle C. Kenton (whose next film, You’re Telling Me, would pair Crabbe with none other than W.C. Fields in the same year).
The startling pre-code nature of this film (including bare buttocks at one point) was a recurring theme in Kenton’s work, as he had helmed the notorious Island of Lost Souls the year before, and would return to exploitation film in 1948 with the Universal-backed illegitimate pregnancy epic Bob and Sally.
B&S was the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls of its day, as it was a blatant attempt by a major studio to tap into the huge profits of Kroger Babb’s sleazy independent “Birth of a Baby” sensation Mom and Dad. Unfortunately, while Babb could circumvent the production code by distributing his project himself, Universal couldn’t get their effort past the censors . Much like Bob and Sally’s kid, the film didn’t get a legitimate release. SOMEONE noticed the effort, however, since Kenton’s last theatrical feature before going over to television was a low-budget effort for Babb himself titled SECRETS of Beauty.
And if I’m wrong, I hope my bad guess was at least interesting.
LikeLike
This is SEARCH FOR BEAUTY (1934) and I feel like this is cheating a little because I just looked this movie up for a completely unrelated reason: my husband got the men in gym shorts number from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES as a suggestion on YouTube a couple weeks ago and it reminded me of a pre-Code also featuring tight shorts but in less suggestive colors. It took me a while but I finally remembered it was called SEARCH FOR BEAUTY… and then I discovered Ida Lupino was only 15 years old in it. I know she came from a showbiz family and started young, but still.
LikeLike
My first thought is the 1933 Paramount film SEARCH FOR BEAUTY, where nubile young men and women come to LA to compete in the Olympics and we see both sexes dressed as the above. I don’t remember musical numbers though. So wondering if it’s DAMES? This reminds me of the scene in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES with Jane Russell and a group of hunky guys dancing around the pool that you wonder how it got passed the code.
LikeLike
“Search For Beauty “(1934) with Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino
LikeLike
It’s a Monday so I’m sure this is not correct, but I’m going to guess anyway.
“Night World” 1932
The image looks very Busby Berkeley and the era seems right.
Again, I’m sure it’s wrong, but if it is this film, what a cast!
LikeLike
Two votes for Busby Berkeley. But alas…
LikeLike
Would this be “Search for Beauty” starring Larry “Buster” Crabbe?
LikeLike
Is this a Busby Berkeley?
LikeLike
An excellent guess! But not this time.
LikeLike
Not sure if first went through. Ida lupino, and male star Buster Crabbe came from olympics. A small group of ladies pose on the back steps of the Lasky DeMille barn, now the Hollywood Heritage Museum, in the film. The masseur giving massage to crabbe was the actual gym masseur Jim Davies, but you probably can’t show tgat shot because of the guys’ bare butts.
LikeLike
Since yesterday’s picture featured only the “chorus,” as it were, it makes sense to next go to our leading lady Ida Lupino. She’s not given much of a nuanced role in this film, but then again nobody really is. The real point of the exercise is to plant as many toned bodies on screen as possible.
Roadshow producers always made sure to place their stories within the position of redeeming social commentary in order to forestall local censorship, so it was customary to frame such subjects as drug addiction, prostitution and abortion under the guise of moral condemnation of such things even as the camera gleefully lingered on the most sordid details. Here we see a major studio present exploitation under the guise of an expose of exploitation.
The most obvious inspiration for this narrative is the career of Bernarr Macfadden, an exercise proponent who published both the fitness magazine Physical Culture and the sleazy tabloid The New York Evening Graphic. The latter specialized in strange photo collages dubbed “composographs,” which are directly referenced here in a scene where the publishers plan to depict “the perfect woman” by taking different body parts of a room full of models and assembling them into a single figure using the best feet, nose, back, etc. of the group. There are also allusions to Leopold Bloom’s bodybuilding idol Eugen Sandow (who flexed for Edison’s camera as early as 1893), John Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, and even the scandal of MGM starlets forced into virtual prostitution at executive parties.
The copious skin on display is presented with a combination of undisguised leering (monocles falling from widened eyes) and the righteous outrage of our young idealistic protagonists, who manage to prevail in the last five minutes just long enough for yet another scene of firm bodies in action (unwillingly joined by the decrepit villains). Virtue is redeemed, and many of the younger male viewers undoubtedly hung around for a second viewing just to let the sermon sink in further.
LikeLike
Ida Lupino in SEARCH FOR BEAUTY.
LikeLike
That’s Ida on Tuesday! That really is a lovely gown, I complained about her being too young in my earlier comment but also have to admit she looks good in this movie, despite some of the wigs. But I’m always picking on the wigs in old movies so it’s probably just me!
LikeLike
Ida Lupino?
LikeLike
I believe the movie is Search for Beauty from 1934, and Tuesday’s lady is Ida Lupino. Buster Crabbe also starred.
LikeLike
Toby Wing. I don’t get why people are so enamored of both she and Ida.
LikeLike
On Wednesday, Toby Wing at her “Young and Healthy” best.
LikeLike
It’s gotta be SEARCH FOR BEAUTY (1934) — Buster Crabbe, Toby Wing, Ida Lupino, et al . . .
LikeLike
Here’s Toby Wing doing what everybody remembers Toby Wing doing. Got her a star on Hollywood Boulevard, though, God bless her.
The afterlife of these films is a story in itself. Early television needed tons of fodder, yet it took a while for Hollywood’s back catalog to fill some of the space. William Boyd had wisely bought control of his Hopalong Cassidy series, but even then had to convince a local LA station to broadcast them. Once they were on the air, however, they became so popular that Hoppy got back in the saddle for a TV series and even had his own theme park for a while.
With the movie industry in decline, it made sense for studios to dump the rights to their pre-1948 inventory (films after that date were subject to residuals). RKO was the first, then Meyer Lansky got a piece of the Warner Brothers backlog. MCA, which had already heavily invested in TV through Revue Studios, made the controversial choice in 1957 to spend $50 million on Paramount’s titles. It seemed like a lot of money, but the deal ended up paying for itself before the studio got the last check, and wound up netting about a billion in the long term.
The agency then had to sift though what they’d gotten. Some films were tossed aside as “dogs” too poor to resell, while a large chunk of pre-code efforts were too hot even for the late late show. Outrages like Search for Beauty went unseen for decades, though Universal now handles them on disc.
Still, as a child I remember a local station touting they were going to show the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzans every week, then feeling confused when they omitted the first few films in the series. It took me years to finally see how racy those suppressed entries were. That’s how television was in those days. (These punk kids with their streaming video have no idea what it was like for an eight-year-old Sherlock Holmes buff to get up at 3 am for a rare showing of The House of Fear.)
Fun fact: I get my annual check-up at UCLA with Lew Wasserman’s former eye doctor. That’s democracy for you.
LikeLike
Toby Wing.
LikeLike
Betty Grable for Wednesday?
LikeLike
An excellent guess! But alas, I’m afraid not.
LikeLike
It’s “Search for Beauty” (1934).
LikeLike
Thursday’s “Aha” gentleman is James Gleason in 1934’s Search for Beauty.
LikeLike
Search for Beauty (1934) w/Buster Crabbe, Ida Lupino, James Gleason, Robert Armstrong, Gertrude Michael, Nora Cecil, Toby Wing…
LikeLike
Nora Cecil, Ann Sheridan, and Colin Tapley, Robert Armstrong and Gertrude Michael, and James Gleason.
LikeLike
Last night, as I watched an episode of Have Gun Will Travel with Paul Fix, Elinor Donohue and Whit Bissell followed by a My World and Welcome to It featuring Douglas Fowley, Vic Tayback and Joe Besser, it struck me that some permanently afflicted people compulsively spot character actors with the same addiction others apply to heroin or cell phone texting. Like Vaudeville, each player has a specialized act that they’ve honed through repetition, and as in jazz one’s pleasure comes from seeing them solo for a few bars within the fabric of the whole.
Today, we find a collection of troupers reflecting different tasks within their profession.
Nora Cecil is a pinch-hitter. Since she generally turned up for only a few moments at a time in over two hundred films, she’d immediately establish herself to the audience as an old biddy and make the most of what she was required to do before heading for the next movie.
Then we get the glamour pusses. As the opening credits note, the thirty beautiful people here were the finalists of an international beauty pageant Paramount held (not bad for the foreign markets, eh?) Representing Texas are newcomers Ann Sheridan and Alfred Delcambre, two of the few winners to actually wind up with studio contracts. Delcambre popped up in nearly twenty pictures over the next couple of years, and I’m reasonably sure Sheridan was in other films as well.
Next we find our scheming antagonists, roles that require a strong projection of attitude. Gertrude Michael is between Mae West and Murder at the Vanities in her career, and sets a firm tone as a cynical dame who might waver but is unambiguously wrong wrong wrong for nice guy Buster Crabbe. A year after King Kong, we still can’t get enough of Carl Denham (even after Son), so Robert Armstrong obliges with a rather depraved take on the character. We’d be disappointed if he’d strayed too far from that figure.
James Gleason managed to look consistently withered for thirty-five years of cinema, but his familiarity didn’t detract from the heavy lifting he usually had to do. Here, he’s the skeptical member of the conspiracy, the one with the widest character arc. His questioning pushes what passes for exposition here, but he’s also able to convincingly fall into place by the end in order to suffer the same fate as his companions. That’s trickier to pull off than it looks, but like all of these performers he’s able to handle his function within the wider canvas.
This is by no means a significant picture, but sharply demonstrates the need for careful casting in order to make it work at all. That’s something the studio system excelled at.
LikeLike
Last image on Thursday looks like James Gleason.
LikeLike
At least I know Jimmy Gleason when I see him. I even knew his sirt and tie once upon a time.
LikeLike
Nora Cecil, James Gleason, Robert Armstrong, Gertrude Michael and Ann Sheridan.
LikeLike
Toby Wing, James Gleason, Nora Cecil in ‘Search for Unsuitable Beauty’?
LikeLike
Thursday’s great group of people begins with Nora Cecil, then Clara Lou (later Ann) Sheridan, Alfred Delcambre, Gertrude Michael, Robert Armstrong and James Gleason.
LikeLike
Buster and Ida.
LikeLike
There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been about three dozen of them.
We finally end up seeing Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino at the exact point of latitude where their careers coincided before going in very different directions.
Did Lupino think back to Search for Beauty when directing such envelope-pushing films as Not Wanted, Outrage, or The Bigamist? She was probably trying to forget it.
I’ll always owe Crabbe. Much like vaccines for shingles or whooping cough, early exposure to the Flash Gordon serials permanently immunized me from being able to sit through Star Wars and its subsequent products. Over the years, the countless hours thus freed up have been spent reading the unabridged Arabian Nights, In Search of Lost Time, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire thrice over. Alec Guinness would approve.
That leaves us back with Erle C. Kenton. While critics will forever dwell on the ground-breaking auteurs of the medium, now and then it’s worth remembering those directors who were pulled along by the undertow of evolving business trends. Kenton began with jazz age melodrama, did his best to affront during the pre-code era, slid into formulaic programmers by the 1940s, and finally wound up in television.
Universal likes to package their old horror films as an unbroken franchise, but in fact there were two separate cycles. The first was marked by the revolution of Dracula and Frankenstein, spinning off into further experiments in perversity and alienation culminating with the Sapphic S&M of Dracula’s Daughter. It was Carl Laemmle Junior who initiated this series, part of a general cycle of experimentation countering his midwestern distributor dad’s desire to keep the studio closer to Republic Pictures. Such risk-taking ultimately drove the family out of the business.
After a gap of a few years, the money men who took over from the Laemmles started the second cycle by noting the profits from reissues of the original horrors but skipping any thought of further innovation. Aside from introducing the Wolf Man, the new films generally used already established monsters over and over, diluting their shock value and leaving them looking… well, dead. This cycle ended with the unenviable task of trying to make a young June Lockhart seem scary in She-Wolf of London.
This was where the business went after the pre-code days, and here Kenton finally joined the Universal canon after his rowdy earlier work. While Chester Gould felt compelled to make Dick Tracy’s villains more and more extreme in order to compete with WWII news, the new monster films opted to lure the same audience by piling on the number of creatures in large-economy-size vehicles that pleased viewers of the time through their sheer familiarity, just as Laurel and Hardy’s dismal work in this period sold tickets.
It couldn’t have been terribly exciting for Kenton, but he supposedly preferred such going-through-the-motions horrors to working with offscreen monsters Abbott and Costello in similarly rote vehicles. After briefly jumping ship for an independent fling with Kroger Babb, there was nowhere left to go but Racket Squad and TV westerns. He made a living.
LikeLike
Buster and Ida.
LikeLike
Buster Crabbe &co. in SEARCH FOR BEAUTY
LikeLike
Late to the party, as usual. Recognized Buster Crabbe on Friday, which led me to “Search for Beauty,” which led to me to the newspaper ad where the movie shared a billing with Sally Rand. For the record, any movie that achieved this is guaranteed to be worth watching.
LikeLike
Buster Crabbe advised me that Jimmy Gleason gets hired for his wardrobe so don’t search by that.
LikeLike
Wow! So many well knowns who were unrecognizable to me in this movie.
Search for Beauty 1934
Mon – maybe a shot from the “Symphony of Health” number?
Tues – Ida Lupino ( didn’t recognize her at first)
Wed – Toby Wing dancing. Gray haired guy screen R, is Larry Steers I think
Thur – Nora Cecil, Ann Sheridan (Clara Lou Sheridan) and Alfred Delcambre, Gertrude Michael and Robert Armstrong (wouldn’t have known him either), James Gleason
Fri – Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino
Fri –
LikeLike