I can't believe I watched this all the way through. The things one does for Ida Lupino! I waited and waited for her to appear on screen and nothing happened, so I peered more closely and blow me down, there she was, I hadn't even recognised her. She was playing the character called Barbara Hilton and I had not even noticed. She had bleached platinum blonde hair, all curly, with her eyebrows shaved off and replaced by a single thin pencil stripe. She was babbling like an idiot. THIS WAS IDA LUPINO? Well, you can imagine things got even worse. The director appeared to be having fun staging a kind of gay fantasy of muscle men striding around in shorts with Nazi-style belts, flexing their muscles, looking fey, and posing as if for a gay mag. This is definitely one of the silliest films I have ever seen. It was somewhat alarming also to see all this parade of Aryan youth and athletics and fitness going on in America in 1934, as it was like a tepid foretaste of what Leni Riefenstahl was shortly to show us from Germany. This film contains real footage of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, only two years before Riefenstahl's 'Olympia' from Berlin. The heath and fitness movement is clearly based on Bernard MacFadden, who was well known as a guru of the movement in the 1930s in America. This film is so nonsensical that it belongs in Dustbin Number One. How on earth did Ida Lupino survive such nonsense and go on to become a genius? I guess we all did things when young which are embarrassing, whether it was simply having acne or playing Barbara Hilton. The male lead is Buster Crabbe, better known as cartoon heroes Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Tell me I imagined seeing this, and didn't waste all that time, please.
Review of Search for Beauty
