A Slice Of Life-French Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up” (1934)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Kiss and Make-Up, starring Cary Grant, Helen Mack, Genevie Tobin, 1934        

New Introductory note by Sarah Lemoyne: I want to thank site manage Greg Green for manning up to what had happened to me in losing the coveted Hammer Production psychological thriller six-film series due to what he confessed was office politics and the cruel realities of the cutthroat publishing business. I had intended on leaving but his offer of giving me both the Star Wars and Marvel Comic studio film reviews was too good to pass up. Read below to find out just how treacherous this journalism business really is-stuff they don’t have a clue about in journalism schools.

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Admittedly, as I have freely admitted in my bracketed introduction to my first film review, I have a lot to learn about journalism, the ins and outs of journalism, and the internal politics of who and why certain personalities get, or don’t get, certain reviews. That naiveté on my part got me caught in a vise right after my second review of the six-part Hammer Production psychological thrillers when wizened and gnarled ancient Sam Lowell unceremoniously grabbed the series from under me on the basis of some good old boy connection. In that sense I learned fast that you make your own breaks in this world and that you had best defend your turf in this cutthroat business. I get that. What I don’t get is when a turkey of a film, well not a turkey but one that could have been left on the cutting floor and nobody would have cried one single tear, like this Kiss and Make-Up is assigned to me and I am clueless about what to say about the thing except I am fully confused by the point.               

That is when my newfound friend and mentor Seth Garth gave me some pearls of wisdom that he had learned at the feet of that same gnarled Sam Lowell who I refuse to talk to these days as one can understand. Seth told me Sam told him that when all else fails always go to a “slice of life” hook informing a new younger audience of what these old- time films showed about life in those periods. That will be my hook here although in a quirky way.

(By the way I am not talking to Sam especially since I have heard a rumor that the old cretin in taking over my Hammer series has decided that he had to give his take on my first two published reviews in order to make the series his own. Being from all observations practically senile he is looking for me, for Sarah Lemoyne, to write those reviews and basically trash my own reviews as so much insignificant babble since as a stringer I am at the beck and call of this mountebank. He had, has, a well-deserved reputation for either, at least in the old days, just doing a recopy job on the press releases the studios handed out or having a stringer like Leslie Dumont, who clued me in of on Sam’s having stringers write the stuff under his name, write it for him   

Probably for some women, maybe more in the past than now, although maybe I have been sheltered a bit by being around professional women, personal beauty and appearance drives their lives. That is the premise the studio was working on in this wacky sent-up of the very lucrative beauty business where handsome Cary Grant is in Paris as a doctor specializing in make-overs for the rich and ugly women who need all the help they can get in his temple of beauty. (Why the film had to be set in Paris, per se, instead of London or New York since nobody including French Nationals speaks French except I heard that Paris was, and still is, one of the beauty and fashion centers of the world with people like Coco Chanel and Christian Dior running amok). What the good doctor was trying to do is laughable by today’s plastic surgery standards where a tuck here and a pinch there will do wonders, thank you, exercise and diet standards but we will chalk this up to the times and let the chips fall where they may.

Now Cary, whom along with Clark Gable, was my grandmother’s idea of manly handsomeness and to an extend I see her point is not only running this beauty temple but sampling the wares of his transformations, especially one Madame Caron, who has not only been transformed but has become the bane of her husband since she came under Cary’s care. The solution, for the cuckolded husband anyway: sue for divorce with Cary as the co-respondent, the alienator of affections, in those tough divorce times especially in Catholic France in the 1930s when the Church still had some sway. That done Madame and Cary get married and run to the French Rivera for their honeymoon but find they are incompatible since she had become a beauty maven. (By the way what passes for beauty, genuine or bought, in those days would be hard-pressed to even get a date out in today’s meat markets since today pretzel thin upper body with long thin legs and long hair un-permed, or the appearance of un-permed hair is what is considered attractive by fashion magazine and cinematic standards.)           

   

Of course that was only the “front” story. Handsome Doc, who apparently had sold out his professional credentials for filthy lucre after medical school rather than making some research breakthrough that could lessen the ills of humankind, in the end sees the error of his ways. Made to see those errors by his smitten (with him) secretary and chief fixer Anne who is dewy fresh and who could today get dates without lifting a finger both as to looks and brains. Seth tells me this is an old Hollywood “hook” in the storied history of cinematic boy meets girl lines which have salvaged half the films ever made. If you don’t follow the bouncing ball you lose the fact that everything is heading toward some final romance between this pair, despite Cary’s ill-advised marriage, despite the playboy affect, despite the blindness to a genuine companion against some floosy affair.

In the end after being kicked metaphysically in the head Cary finally gets it. If that doesn’t give enough of a slice of life about what was fashionable in a previous age then let me throw this out. This is film is touted as a pre-Code film meaning after the enforcement of the Code came into play that each and every possible connotation of sex, sexual desire, even sexual knowledge was under pressure from the religious crazies and zanies banned from the screen. This included any nude scenes, profanity, erotic touching and the like. Those later post-Code films, especially with scenes of  married, happily married, couples in separate marital beds, certainly could provide a slice of life for the times but what passes for the sexually provocative in the pre-Code period would be laughed at today by eight- year olds with a computer and access to the Internet. How is that for slice of life.