Search for Beauty

Goofy film about two Olympic athletes (Ida Lupino and Buster Crabbe) who are hired to bring some respectability to a fitness magazine that is using sex as its major selling point.

People who want to see an example of some pre-Code raciness will find much to like about this movie. Its overt treatment of sex as something people actually like instead of something covert that must never be mentioned is by itself enough to make this movie stand apart from the more sanitized films of the succeeding decade. But beyond that, it revels in images of the barely dressed human body, male and female, and includes a shot of bare butts in a men's locker room, and a jaw dropper of a production number in which all of the women are wearing sheer athletic tops with their breasts and nipples clearly visible.

Funny enough, for all of its reputation now as being representative of a certain kind of moral looseness in early 30s films, the movie's attitude about sex is as pure as freshly fallen snow.

Grade: B