Young and Beautiful (1934)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Better Late Then Never

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This is one of those hodge-podge efforts that makes you wonder if it was planned so much as grew. The main plot concerns movie publicity man William Haines -- he appeared for two movies for Mascot this year, for no clear reason -- who promotes girlfriend Judith Allen into a star, but she leaves him over the constant work and pointless publicity stunts. This state of affairs is interrupted by some musical numbers. In the first, the WAMPAS babies get to dance with men in masks representing then-hot stars, and in the second, Shaw and Lee (yay!) wander by with a piano and Ted Weems' old vocalist sits down and kicks over a chorus show. This soon vanishes to resume the story.Perhaps this movie was begun before the Production Code bore down and the interludes were added to bring it up to Feature length. The individual bits are pretty good, although the line readings are a bit weak.

There's two fantastic production numbers that come out of nowhere in this poverty row romantic comedy that features the Wampas Baby Stars, a beauty pageant of young hopefuls, none of whom here went onto anything outside of some minor parts. The first production number has the Wampas beauties being escorted by masked look-alikes of stars of the time: Laurel and Hardy, Clark Gable, George Arliss, Joe E. Brown, Buster Keaton, Maurice Chevalier, and yes, even Eddie Cantor who originated the song "Keep Young and Beautiful" in the Samuel Goldwyn musical epic, "Roman Scandals", the previous year. Three years before "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" in "The Great Ziegfeld" and 36 years before Sondheim had his own salute to those "Beautiful Girls" in "Follies", this Mascot film saluted what Broadway and Hollywood were striving for in keeping the public entertained during the depression. For a film studio that never rose above the low B's, Mascot had its share of glamorous looking programmers, even though it focused on quickly filmed action films and mysteries.Having just finished up his long term contract at MGM, William Haines ended his career with two B films on Poverty Row, but in this one, he's still at the top of his form as the sneaky Robert Preston (!), a Hollywood publicity man out to find the next greatest female star. Like the real Robert Preston's Harold Hill of "The Music Man", Haines isn't above using a little bit of chicanery in getting what he wants, and what he wants is rising star beauty Judith Allen who is both amused and turned off by his antics. Tired of his sneaky antics, Allen turns to aging millionaire John Miljan whom she intends to marry for his money. Haines uses all his resources to get her back, and this leads to a very amusing finale where he cons her again, reminding me of the type of hijinks that fellow 30's fast talking actor Lee Tracy would get up to regularly. A second musical number, set on the studio streets, has an impromptu group of Wampas Baby Stars and some masculine crew men doing the same type of dance steps and is quite funny. Prints of this vary in length, the one I saw obviously a cut TV broadcast version, missing about 14 minutes. In smaller roles,Joseph Cawthorn and Vince Barnett give amusing performances. I would rank this high among poverty row films, one which I'd like to see fully restored. But what remains in its edited form is still worth seeing, surprising when you look at the history of the B-Z grade studios that tossed out movies on a weekly basis at the same rate as the people who went to see them were tossing out their weekly garbage. Some of those films are indeed garbage, but on occasion, a gem popped out, and this one is very close to being a gem.

The Plot. Bob Preston, publicity man for Superba Pictures, uses his publicity skills in an attempt to make this fiancée June Dale the most famous movie star in the world. But in doing so, he forgets that women want to be attended to for themselves, not as objects of fame.I was looking forward to seeing this picture giving the stellar reviews. Unfortunately it's actually a poor excuse for a movie. Starring a bunch of unknowns, made by an unknown studio and directed by a largely unknown director whose only claim to fame that I can tell was co-directing The Marx Brother's Coconuts 5 years earlier.Groucho said he didn't understand comedy.It's a strange movie where in one musical number people where masks of famous Hollywood stars like Keaton and Gable and Chaplin. It just never really comes together. It's not horrible, but it's not really interesting enough to recommend.

Right at the opening credits, we can see this one is badly in need of restoration. Alpha Home Movies has taken a scratchy, faded copy and put it on DVD, now available on Turner Classics page. I gave up waiting for this to come on TCM and ordered the DVD online. Some biggies in here... Franklin Pangborn, William Haines ( the second to last film that he did!) and the "Wampas Baby Stars"... the up and coming movie starlets chosen each year. We're sixteen minutes in, and there isn't really much of a plot yet... just an odd modeling show for the Wampas starlets. They are accompanied by guys wearing masks of movie stars of the day. One of the models (Judith Allen as "June") pretends to be almost kidnapped, and of course the papers put the story in big headlines. She gets a couple big breaks, and gets a contract and a husband, Bob. "Shaw and Lee" do a bit as piano movers... that bit goes on WAY too long. "Gordon" (John Miljan) is also after June, and never misses a chance to try to get between her and Bob. It's sort of a "behind the scenes" in Hollywood. All's well that ends well, I guess. It's mildly entertaining, but having seen it, I can see why no-one is in a hurry to restore it. Pretty simple plot, but the real story here is the collection of stars, at various stages of their career arc. Written and directed by Joseph Santley. According to IMDb, Santley had appeared in Pony Express in 1907, at the age of 17 !