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"Dress Industry Menaced by Pirates" is the news headline, the protagonist takes a more practical view: "I'm the bootlegger. You're just the customer." Golden Harvest Investment Corporation goes under, the sharpie on a business call (William Powell) can't fool the creditor who's disconnected the phone. Secretary (Dorothy Burgess) jumps ship, partner (Frank McHugh) sticks around, designer (Bette Davis) joins the move from New York City to Paris. The haute couture costumes of Monsieur Baroque (Reginald Owen) are the target, the ally is the phony-baloney Russian duchess (Verree Teasdale). "Instead of the fly in your coffee, so to speak, I could be the cream." A forgery racket for a cyclical medium, a respectable front for a seasoned hustler, in other words William Dieterle on art. Orry-Kelly creations captured by the feline camera concealed in the assistant's cane, the clandestine snapshots get confiscated so he settles happily for French postcards. The investor (Hugh Herbert) is a tippling ostrich farmer stuck with a load of feathers, just the ingredient for a revue called Elegance. (A cut from a dancer's shapely gams to crusty avian tarsi punctuates the rehearsals, the title lights up on the marquee next to a freshly laid egg.) "Madame, our patented plucking process is practically painless." Main event, oneiric Busby Berkeley playlet—a profusion of blondes, playing harps made of other blondes in Dalían sights, wielding plumed fans pulled together into vast sea anemones, sailing across the undulating fabrics of a sweatshop worker's subconscious. The trump card is a noblewoman's compromising strawberry mark, the way home is a con man's promise of domesticity. "Well, I think you're lying, but you do it so beautifully." With Henry O'Neill, Phillip Reed, Gordon Westcott, Etienne Girardot, William Burress, and Nella Walker. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |