Search for Beauty (1934)

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Three con artists trick two celebrity athletes into serving as editors for a new ‘Health and Fitness’ magazine. The athletes (Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino) soon learn they are just figureheads meant to draw credibility and increase circulation for the publication — not to teach America about health or fitness. Instead, the con artists fill the magazine with salacious love stories and suggestive photographs. The athletes try to gain the upper hand when they learn the magazine owners plan to pimp out the winners of a worldwide fitness contest to paying customers.

Search for Beauty is somewhat interesting as an ironic comedy that does not practice what it preaches. Scantily-clad athletes are showcased throughout the movie. The film’s major set-piece is a long choreographed dance number performed by a hundred bare-chested hunks and babes in swimsuits. In some shots, they march toward a camera perched at crotch level. We even see a handful of nude male bottoms when Buster Crabbe’s character showers after a swim race. It’s all very tame by today’s standards, but these depictions would never be allowed after the Hays Code came into effect a few years later, forcing Hollywood to sanitize their output for decades to come.

Director Erie C. Kenton (Island of Lost Souls, The Ghost of Frankenstein) dabbles at times with cartoonish camera and editing techniques, but these are more jarring than effective. The film works moderately well as an ensemble comedy piece. Buster Crabbe, who would later play Flash Gordon in the long running serial, is not a great thespian, but my, oh my, is he easy to look at. (Maybe the con artists are onto something?) Gertrude Michael gives my favorite performance in the film, playing the lone female con artist who holds her bumbling male counterparts (Robert Armstrong and James Gleason) at bay. Toby Wing is warm and funny in the quintessential ‘ditzy blonde’ role.