Search For Beauty
Girl Without a Room
Ida Lupino’s riotous American screen debut is a risqué tale of two Olympic athletes duped by a pair of unscrupulous hustlers into fronting a nudie tabloid disguised as a fitness magazine. While the athletes dream of opening a fitness resort, their patrons have other ideas. Much like the magazine at the center of the film, Search for Beauty itself often seems to be little more than an excuse to parade cheese - and beefcake - before the camera. The result is an entertaining comedy with a playfully dirty mind.
This musical romp through bohemian Paris stars Charles Farrell as an amateur American painter who wins an all-expenses-paid trip to the City of Light to study art. But the Tennessee wallflower (who uses his imagination to paint nudes, out of modesty) falls in with a boisterous crowd in turn of the century Montparnasse and gets schooled in affairs of a more indelicate nature. In the film's très moderne nightclubs and starving artists' lofts, anything goes as Paris' finest vamps and chiselers exploit the "banjo-eyed numbskull" for a good time.