«Search for Beauty» is a curio today, as a "daring film" released shortly before the Hays Code came into effect in 1934. Based on the play «Love Your Body» by Schuyler E. Gray and Paul R. Milton, the movie contains beautiful bodies, dirty old men, procuring, racism, military propaganda, male nudity, a never-emerging gay undercurrent, and crude humor.
Robert Armstrong repeats the role of the businessman in search of the easy dollar that had played a year earlier in «King Kong», but this time he does not take us on an adventurous trip to Skull Island in search of a giant ape, but instead he buys the businesses of an old bodybuilder who has just passed away. They include a health and beauty magazine, and a farm to keep the body in shape and healthy. For the magazine to be successful, he hires two young Olympic champions as directors (American Buster Crabbe and British Ida Lupino), but what he really wants to do is a publication with sexy photos and lewd stories.
When the champions discover Armstrong's cheat, they pressure him to give them the management of the farm, where beautiful athletes of both sexes will arrive to participate in a contest to choose the healthiest (and most beautiful) body. However, Armstrong also arrives there and tries to turn the business into a white meat market.
So the story goes for the white meat market, because the pattern of beauty that this film is looking for is Caucasian, "with 30 winners in the International Beauty Contest", in which only white and English-speaking athletes from "England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States" will participate and perform a horrible "Symphony of Health" with choreography a la Busby Berkeley and military marches by Sousa and other composers of similar music.
«Search for Beauty» is not a transgressive or daring film, but it was out of circulation for a while. However, it seems to me that, with a few cuts, it would easily have passed censorship. No need to worry, because in the end everything returns to "order" (in a vulgar and rude way) and everything is conquered by... pure, chaste and white love.
p.s. I should add that Ida Lupino here was not yet the beautiful actress-director she would become. Instead, Buster Crabbe, the Olympic champion and star of the Flash Gordon serial, was a splendid male specimen. They did not need to search for beauty: it was there, leading the film cast.
Robert Armstrong repeats the role of the businessman in search of the easy dollar that had played a year earlier in «King Kong», but this time he does not take us on an adventurous trip to Skull Island in search of a giant ape, but instead he buys the businesses of an old bodybuilder who has just passed away. They include a health and beauty magazine, and a farm to keep the body in shape and healthy. For the magazine to be successful, he hires two young Olympic champions as directors (American Buster Crabbe and British Ida Lupino), but what he really wants to do is a publication with sexy photos and lewd stories.
When the champions discover Armstrong's cheat, they pressure him to give them the management of the farm, where beautiful athletes of both sexes will arrive to participate in a contest to choose the healthiest (and most beautiful) body. However, Armstrong also arrives there and tries to turn the business into a white meat market.
So the story goes for the white meat market, because the pattern of beauty that this film is looking for is Caucasian, "with 30 winners in the International Beauty Contest", in which only white and English-speaking athletes from "England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States" will participate and perform a horrible "Symphony of Health" with choreography a la Busby Berkeley and military marches by Sousa and other composers of similar music.
«Search for Beauty» is not a transgressive or daring film, but it was out of circulation for a while. However, it seems to me that, with a few cuts, it would easily have passed censorship. No need to worry, because in the end everything returns to "order" (in a vulgar and rude way) and everything is conquered by... pure, chaste and white love.
p.s. I should add that Ida Lupino here was not yet the beautiful actress-director she would become. Instead, Buster Crabbe, the Olympic champion and star of the Flash Gordon serial, was a splendid male specimen. They did not need to search for beauty: it was there, leading the film cast.