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Plot:
- by Zoë Shaw
Lamar owns a beauty
salon, which is a haven for women who want to be beautiful. His plain
secretary, Anne, is in love with him. Lamar makes Eve (the wife of Marcel
Caron) into vision of loveliness, but she is so obsessed with the daily
routine to keep herself this way, that he leaves her. She marries Lamar, who
soon realizes he has just married a load of cosmetics. He then realizes his
true love has been with him all the time, Anne.
Review:
- by Debbie Dunlap
Is this a good movie?? No way!! Is it worth taking the time
to watch? Definitely!! This movie has so many great lines, that it's well worth the time
watching "Kiss and Make Up." An additional incentive is that Cary sings an
entire song, twice, in this movie!! Quite a distinctive singing voice, but then his
speaking voice compares with none other, either.
Cary Grant is Dr. Maurice Lamar, a world famous,
egotistical, Parisian plastic surgeon whose delightful job it is to make women beautiful.
"Mother'd like her hips cut down before she sails." He prides himself in making
women slaves to their new beauty. No sun, no swimming, "lean ham, plain lettuce, and
dry melba toast," lots of exercise and massage. Cold cream every night, all night, on
the face and gloves on the hands. Maintenance, always maintenance.
He enjoys the beautiful benefits of the fruits of
his labor. Overt innuendo abounds that his patients, once transformed by his skilled hand,
become his conquests. His affairs he refers to as "lovely episodes."
Madame Caron is his masterpiece. "You are my creation,
you know. When you first came to me you were merely pretty. Little by little, I molded you
as Pygmalian molded his statue, until you became my most beautiful achievement."
Edward Everett Horton is Madame Caron's husband. He is NOT
pleased with the transformation of his wife. E.E. Horton delivers his lines with wonderful
timing, inflection and character. Cary plays the straight man to Horton's disgruntled
husband routine several times. Always hilarious.
Dr Lamar: You're Madame Caron's husband?
Mr. Caron: I am, yes, on those rare occasions when you're
not messing around with her.
Dr. Lamar: Messing around! I'll have you understand that my
mess... My contact with your wife is purely professional.
Mr. Caron: That's what I resent!
Dr. Lamar: What do you mean?
Mr. Caron: What right have you to make my wife over? You've
enlarged her here and reduced her there. And you've even done something to her knees! And
I liked them as they were. I married those knees for better or for worse.
Dr. Lamar: Madame Caron merely asked me to add a couple of
dimples.
Mr. Caron: And I contend, and every right thinking husband
will back me up, that dimples give a distinctly ga-ga expression to the kneecap. Quite
unsuited to my wife!
Dr. Lamar: Listen, when you make motorbuses for the public,
you improve their lines, don't ya?
Mr. Caron: Oh, have you seen ... What right have you to
classify my wife as a public conveyance? Huh? Where is she? Now you've got her around here
somewhere!
Dr. Lamar: You can't go in there!
Mr. Caron: Why not?
Dr. Lamar: She might not be dressed! I'll see her!
Mr. Caron: Well, you tell her that ... OH! You'll
see, but I can't!
Dr. Lamar: Show this gentleman out!
Mr. Caron: Doctor! Put my wife back the way she was when I
married her or I'll take steps. I don't know in what direction, but I'll take steps!
The moral of the story (and believe me, there are very few
morals in this story) is that Dr. Lamar discovers that it's no fun to love (Kiss) a woman,
when that same woman has become obsessed with her looks, figure and Makeup to the
exclusion of all else. Beauty, truly, is in the eye of the beholder.
This movie is great for a laugh! Or several!!
VARIETY
Film Review - July 10, 1934
- by "Chic"
- submitted by Barry Martin
Either a gag comedy with a romantic
thread or a light romance with gag comedy, but more gags than
romance. Some of the gags are corkers. A nice picture
lacking sufficient strength to wow but should do all
right.
Plot is thin, though
sufficient. Fashionable beauty doctor makes an especially
neat job on a patient and her husband divorces her. She
marries the doctor but her strict adherence to diet and treatment
disgusts him. He turns to his secretary but meantime the
latter has fallen for the former husband. Love dies when in
a taxi accident she discovers he wears a toupee, so she goes back
to the doctor. There is a gigolo to console the beauty.
Not much to hang a
plot to but shows considerable effort along comedy lines, and one
of the best gags is a Maharajah who brings his whole harem in for
treatment. He's been in Paris and saw a tableau, 'Night in
the Orient,' in a music hall. He wants his wives made over,
feeling he's been cheated. They are beautified, and get jobs
appearing in the tableau, so he's out of luck.
Cary Grant does well
as the doctor but both he and E. E. Horton play too strongly for
laughs. Genevieve Tobin fills the specifications as the
beauty, but acting honors go to Helen Mack as the secretary.
A delightfully sincere performance. The Wampas stars are
somewhere in the picture, but appear prominently only in the
pictorial introductory program. Plenty of sight stuff and
plenty of laughs in spots.
New
York Times Film Review - June 29, 1934
- by A.D.S.
- submitted by Barry Martin
The picture entitled, with such
knowing and antic humor, "Kiss and Make-Up" is a
first-class lingerie bazaar and a third-class entertainment. It
represents a triumphant attempt to achieve pictorial allure
without disturbing its pious editorial point of view on the
impersonal worship of feminine beauty. It crowds the screen so
thickly with silk, satin and nymphs that it is with some
difficulty that such agreeable players as Edward Everett Horton,
Cary Grant and Genevieve Tobin succeed in projecting themselves at
all.
The setting is a beauty salon in
Paris where unlovely females are miraculously transformed. Here
are miles of white cubicles where, under Dr. Lamar's messianic
leadership, miles of dissatisfied women participate in the
barbaric rites by which they are added to and subtracted from
according to the advanced mathematics of the good doctor.
There is a theme in the new film
which, in more skillful hands, might form the basis for a good
comedy. Carrying the principles of beauty culture to their logical
conclusion, Dr. Lamar finally produces a masterpiece of
loveliness, who is, unfortunately, so bound to the harrowing
ritual of lotion, massage, diet and rest that she becomes entirely
useless. Thereupon her husband (Mr. Horton) casts her off and she
becomes the wife of her doctor. After a honeymoon, during which
his wife devotes herself chiefly to the preservation of her face
and figure, the doctor in desperation returns to Paris and wrecks
his temple of beauty.
The picture occasionally achieves a
briefly comic episode, like that in which an Oriental potentate
leads his wives into the salon, displays a sketch showing a
Western conception of the delights of the harm and angrily
announces that he has been bamboozled. But "Kiss and
Make-Up" succeeds to a remarkable degree in being dull.
Max Baer, the motion-picture actor
and heavyweight champion, heads the stage show in a revue which
also offers Benny Rubin, Buddy Baer, Henrietta Schumann, Harrison
and Fisher and Carolyn Marsh. A.D.S.
CHICAGO
DAILY TRIBUNE Film Review - August 26, 1934
- by Mae Tinée
- submitted by Renee Klish
Artificial Sirens
Take a Rap in 'Kiss and Make Up'
Good Morning!
Ah ha! Methinks me spots a
great back to nature movement - Hollywood sponsored - on its way!
Show the ladies many pictures like
"Kiss and Make Up" and blood red finger nails, carefully
creamed bedtime faces, and lean ham and lettuce diets will be
things of the past. Soap and cold water, healthful
housework, and that nature gloss to the finger tips will be
favored by the fair, and papa can kiss mama without becoming
lipstick branded. CERTAINLY no woman will ever be able to
forget the look on Cary Grant's face as, all set to embrace a
blushing bride on his wedding night, she appears before him
greased, bound up, mittened - a fearsome armful from whom he flees
as if the devil were after him.
True, all unrealizing, he'd made
her what she was that night, but - well, let's bite into the
story:
Love Flees from Beauty
"Kiss and Make Up" is a comedy drama localed in
Paris. Here Mr. Grant, as a certain glamorous Dr. Pierre
Lamar, owns and presides over a celebrated salon de beaute
to which flock ladies who wish to be made over.
It is a gorgeous establishment,
fully equipped with devices for turning stylish fats into tempting
thinsies, ironing out wrinkles, reducing beefy ankles to a state
of devastating slimness. Dr. Lamar gives skilled personal
service to patrons who wish their faces remodeled.
And Mme. Caron is his
masterpiece. A masterpiece of whom her husband definitely
and finally washes his hands, infinitely preferring her as she was
when he married her. But madame is purring satisfied, as is
the doctor . . . And so the artist and his handiwork are wed - to
the sorrow of the former's devoted young secretary, a beauty au
naturel, who forgets to powder her nose and loves her employer
plenty.
Enamored of his gorgeous bride, Dr.
Lamar, immediately after the ceremony, carts her off to a
beauticians' convention at the seaside. A raging secretary alos
goes along . . .
It is here that the famous exponent
and producer of feminine pulchritude discovers what a boudoir
lemon a beauty parlor rose can be . . .
Ending Involves a Lot of Fun
The happy ending is a regular Keystone comedy affair with racing
autos, squealing guinea pigs, flowers, upset fruit carts, and
deserting toupes to give it life and color.
Cary Grant, almost too good looking
to be true in this number, is pulse quickening as Dr. Lamar.
Despite his manly beauty and the feminine adulation of his
patients which seek to trip him up at every step he conducts
himself with praiseworthy professional decorum, and all women
observers will be viciously glad to see Mme. Lamar finally routed
and that nice, pretty, sensible Anne scheduled to take her place.
Genevieve Tobin is excellent as te
perfect man-made beauty who hasn't one idea to rub against
another. Helen Mack - she looks enough like Frances Dee to
BE Frances Dee, and one can only hope that Joel MacCrea doesn't
make any mistakes on a dark night - plays the earnest little
secretary - earnestly. Edward Everett Horton is farcical as
the stampeding husband - all other roles are aptly enacted. There
are several song numbers - unremarkable but pleasing. And is
Cary booful when he sings!
The picture fools you at the
start. You get the idea it's going to be naughty-naughty -
and it really isn't at all.
Review
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Reviews at the Cary Grant Shrine
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