Beauty for Sale

Richard Boleslavski directs this pre-Code drama for MGM about three women in the beauty trade who are there to find husbands, richer the better. All of them have a tale to tell why they want marriage and security in the same male package. Madge Evans, Una Merkel, and Florine McKinney are the three women.

Nothing here in language or really in sexual innuendo that would make the censors frown. I think that what got some tailfeathers ruffled was Beauty For Sale's showing that gold digging was the way to go. The only one who falls hard and has a real romance is McKinney with Phillips Holmes, the son of the women's employer Hedda Hopper. He's idealistic, but weak in the end and it's a formula for tragedy.

Merkel is the comic relief as she usually is and has some really great lines. The girls all live at Merkel's mom's boardinghouse. Mom is tart tongued May Robson and there's a brother Eddie Nugent they'd both like to see out their house and their hair.

The main story line is Madge Evans who falls for married Otto Kruger. He's married to society girl Alice Brady an empty head who likes the money and position Kruger gives her, no way she wants to divorce him. Looks for a while like Evans will to settle if she can't select.

The three girls flesh their characters out fine and there's some snappy dialog especially for Una Merkel. Two years from now, no way this ending would have approved by The Code.

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.

I was a little surprised how much I ended up liking this little film. It has all the signs of a typical 'B' pre-Code effort, without big stars in its cast, some corny humor, and women who are looking to improve their lot in life via romance (ok, gold-diggers if we must call them that). It grew on me though, through the strength of its characters, interesting story lines, and frank depiction of adultery and the emotions that go along with it.

Three young women work at a beauty shop attending to affluent ladies, and in the process, also meet their husbands (and in the case of one of them, the boss's son). The film is very direct about the affairs this leads to, and we see that each of them is in it for a different reason: the pursuit of wealth (Una Merkel), marriage (Florine McKinney), and just simple pleasure (Madge Evans). How refreshing is it to see Madge Evans so empowered and sexually free, as other pre-Code women were permitted to be (Norma Shearer in 'A Free Soul' comes to mind). Here's the exchange she has with Merkel's more mercenary character, who asks her what she's going to get out of it:

"Oh, I'm not trying to get anything out of it." "I hope he's not out to get anything either!" "Of course not. He was lonely." "Lonely? (laughs) Unless there's a mistake in the census report, there's 4 million other people in New York besides you." "Well anyway, his wife came back three days ago." "Oh, so now he isn't lonely anymore. I bet you haven't seen him since!" "Why should I? It amused him to take me out. It amused me to go. It was a pleasant friendship, that's all, and it's over. Why, I'll probably never see him again."

Note she's just a cheerful young woman with a good head on her shoulders who has enjoyed a fling; not a wanton creature doomed because she's sinned.

It's a dangerous game, though, as Merkel puts it so aptly when real feelings are involved: "You don't want to have to hang around the back door of his life, begging for a handout. You don't want to have to sneak and hide and keep outta sight the way I do. And in the end, when he turns back to his wife and his home, you don't want to be kicked out in the sacred name of respectability - the way I was." And aside from the frustrations of being the 'other woman', the film gives us some pretty dark stuff: unplanned pregnancy, an allusion to an abortion (a separate case we hear about via gossipers), and real despair. McKinney has one of the film's great scenes when she's trying to process an emotional shock, giving the film a depth I didn't expect.

Madge Evans is irrepressible, taking things as they come with a buoyancy that is never cloying, and in fact, we often see her resigned stoicism. Her character is a nice combination of being virtuous but also knowing the ways of the world, and she also has no inhibitions about smacking Una Merkel on the butt or kissing her on the lips in friendly affection (a common pre-Code bit of titillation, as are scenes of the women changing, revealing the lingerie of the day). Merkel is delightful too, though I liked her character more when she was putting her brother in his place than when she was seeking gifts from her aging sugar daddies.

This brother is played by Edward J. Nugent, and he's always joking around, and in pretty endearing ways early on. We see him pretend to drop a plate in front of his mother (May Robson) and then catch it, for example. We see an unpleasant sides of him as time goes by though, and his jokes get a little tiring ("Well, no harm will come to that, as the drummer said when he looked at the cross-eyed old maid"), though I confess I actually chuckled at just how bad they were. He's a nice enough guy, but he's just not all that sophisticated, and he's a little creepy too, for example, making it clear that he's had a variety of women succumb to his 'charms', and what he intends on doing on his honeymoon.

The supporting cast is deep, and part of the film's appeal. The manager of the shop (Isabel Jewell) and owner (Hedda Hopper) are given strong personalities and lines. Otto Kruger is smooth and refined as the lawyer Evans carries on with, and Alice Brady is fantastic as his wife; she's a pampered dingbat, and into things like numerology and astrology. "We vibrate in different planes," she says at one point, channeling the 1960's. In another hilarious moment she has Evans bend her legs back over her head 50 times as part of the "exercise" that will help her with her "undeveloped hips". The gossiping patrons also keep things lively with various comments we hear in between major scenes.

The wealth gap is on full display, which was another interesting aspect of the film. We learn that Brady's character wasn't always as she is now, and that wealth not only spoiled her, but made her lose touch with the realities of the world. The clients of the beauty shop have money to burn, and fritter it away. One of them brings her little girl in to also receive treatment, and after it's over, the girl impudently sticks her tongue out at the manager. The mother has just spent $42.50 for the two of them - that's over $800 in today's dollars - and this was during the fourth year of the Depression! The film falls into a common trope of the era - getting out of poverty by meeting someone rich (essentially winning the lottery) - but it does manage to get some satire of the wealthy in.

Beauty For Sale stars a radiant Madge Evans as a good girl trying to make it as a beautician in Manhattan. The film is a little more than a multiplot soap opera but benefits from Evans, the unlikely romantic lead (Otto Kruger), solid direction by Richard Boleslawski, and most of all, superb photography by James Wong Howe (here credited simply as James Howe). The film is sublime when Howe's camera is most active, with superb lighting and set-ups and some scenes that look like they could be from films shot 20 or 30 years in the future. His sense of depth is particularly impressive, especially in a brilliant scene involving a slowly swinging bathroom door! The film feels like a classic at about the two thirds mark, but sadly cycles down to merely enjoyable by the final reel, as comedy and romance take over from tragedy and drama. Nonetheless, this is strongly recommended.

A story like this in the 30s even with its relative mildness to today's movies could've only been made because it belonged to the pre-code era. It does have its share of problems with some outdated views but at the same time, there are a lot of things in it that are progressive even by today's standards. The story itself can be seen as a classic rom-com trope now but the film treats the subject quite bleakly while having enough stuff for levity. It is not much more than a studio movie from the 20s but it has moments of brilliance in the script that make it really interesting. Madge Evans and Una Merkel are charming and powerful on-screen, the two biggest reasons the film works so well. In most of the romantic movies, I've seen till the 50s and 60s the male lead is almost never really convincing enough for me. Maybe it's because of different sensibilities but I feel like it has to do more with how men looked upon themselves than how women chose them at the time. This is one of the rare times where I thought Otto Kruger's character was nearly convincing enough for me to not cringe while watching the romantic scenes.