Search For Beauty (1934), dir: Erle C. Kenton

Available to watch on archive.org in a surprisingly pristine copy:

https://archive.org/details/search-for-beauty-1934-

Wikipedia:

Search for Beauty is a 1934 American pre-Code dramedy film with some musical athletic sequences in the style of Busby Berkeley. It was directed by Erle C. Kenton and stars Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino. The film was released shortly before Lupino's 16th birthday.

Plot
Jackson, a swimmer, and Hilton, a diver, are Olympic champions and a romantic couple who become the face of a sleazy health magazine.[1] A pair of ex-cons team with the magazine's publisher to bring them down.

Production
To promote the film and to find some of the cast, Paramount sponsored a worldwide beauty contest. One of the winners, who made her first appearance in the film, was Ann Sheridan.[2]

Some have considered the magazine publishing company depicted in the film to be a parody of the publishing enterprises owned by Bernarr Macfadden.[3]

Reception
The film was widely panned. New York Times critic Andre Sennwald wrote: "Search for Beauty is the film that Paramount manufactured as the climax of an international exploitation stunt in which thirty young men and women from various parts of the world received a free trip to Hollywood and an opportunity to get into one picture. The result is a tribute to the studio's ingenuity but a less than thrilling tidbit for the man in the street."[4] Variety agreed: "Story is just so much applesauce ... Miss Lupino, to save her kid cousin from the clutches of a roomful of evil-minded stews, does a snakehips atop a table. She didn't learn that in England."[5]

My letterboxd review:

In which two ex cons set themselves the noble task of distributing pornography through the only means the repressive society of the time allowed for - by disguising it as a health and fitness magazine. Sadly though good intentioned they are not very smart, enlisting squeaky clean athletes Buster Crabbes (whose bland awkwardness works well for the character) and Ida Lupino (far too good for this, but she was at the start of her career), not even as celebrity spokespeople but as EDITORS. This predictably does not go well and the squares split off to run a creepy fitness camp featuring the winners of an international beauty contest, "international" of course meaning "white anglos only".

It is truly heartbreaking to see what people had to go through just to access some porn back in the day, and obviously this would have been even worse for queer audiences, so it is heart warming to watch the last 20 minutes or so of this film collapse into several sequences of half naked studs playfully manhandling some rogues attending the event under false pretences. There's also a shot of an actual naked dude (from behind) and THE END gets stamped on Crabbe's (clothed) posterior.

Badly paced, terrible editing and a profoundly stupid plot - everyone here knew they weren't making high art. But it's too bizarre to dislike, and the precode patter is smart and smutty. Kind of a must see!

I am very interested in what anyone on ILX has to say about this bizarre piece of culture. It's less than 80 minutes long if you want to give it a go.

Those musical/athletic sequences aren't just inspired by Busby Berkeley; they have uncanny parallels to Leni Riefenstahl's work. But I can't hate a movie in which a woman takes a pair of binoculars and immediately zooms in on Crabbe's crotch.

The whole insistence on physical fitness did scan pretty fash to me, but I assumed this was due to a) anyone talking about this kinda stuff in the 30's/40's registering a bit creepy and b) my own strong bias against getting off my couch. Maybe my subconscious picked up on those Rieffenstahl paralels!