Beauty for Sale

Director: Richard Boleslawski Richard Boleslawski

Overview

In this lively comedy, a group of beauticians amuse themselves by dreaming of finding the perfect man. One of the girls finds such a man. Unfortunately, he is married.

Product Details

Release Date:	05/21/2019
UPC:	0883316470671
Original Release:	1933
Rating:	NR
Source:	Warner Archives
Presentation:	[B&W]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono, Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:27:00
Sales rank:	59,792

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Madge Evans	Letty Lawson
Una Merkel	Carol Merrick
Alice Brady	Mrs. Henrietta Sherwood
May Robson	Mrs. Merrick
Otto Kruger	Mr. Sherwood
Phillips Holmes	Burt Barton
Eddie Nugent	Bill Merrick
Hedda Hopper	Madam Sonia
Florine McKinney	Jane
Isabel Jewell	Hortense
Louise Carter	Mrs. Lawson
John Roche	Robert Abbott
Charles Grapewin	Gordon,Freddy Gordon
Pauline Brooks	Actor

Technical Credits

Richard Boleslawski	Director
Lucien Hubbard	Producer

Editorial Reviews

Some eight decades after its release, Beauty For Sale is still worth watching for lots of different reasons, beginning with the sincere, affecting performance by Madge Evans. As a young woman forced by life's circumstances to compromise on the morality with which she was raised, she's very convincing as well as being pretty enough for the part without being unrealistically glamorous. The supporting roles, from Una Merkel as Evans' less introspective best friend on down, are also filled out to perfection, with the supporting and bit players all adding something significant to each scene and the movie as a whole. And the requisite MGM house style, which emphasizes elegance, gets projected to the hilt in the beauty parlor settings at the center of the movie. But then there is director Richard Boleslawski's personal style at work, smoothly elegant camera moves and edits quietly dressing up each scene and making the dialogue seem sharper and snappier than it is -- and the dialogue itself, a product of pre-Code Hollywood with amazing frankness about characters' peccadillos, proclivities, and infidelities, is also a treat, if not nearly as ripe and graphic as what one would have gotten from a Warner Bros. film of this era. Boleslawski pulls it all together, in front and behind the camera, like a conductor of a fine symphony orchestra attuned to his every bidding. The movie is a treat, if not quite in the first-rank of romantic melodramas of its time -- and with its beauty parlor setting and female-heavy cast, it also anticipates some of the tone and texture of George Cukor's The Women (1939), with which it would make a good double-feature.