REDUCING

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 182, 26 March 1932, Page 7

REDUCING

NEW MORAN -DRESSLER COMEDY PACKED WITH JOYOUS LAUGHTER. THE BEAUTY SPECIALISTS. "Fun in a Beauty Parlour" might easily be a substitute title for "Reducing," the new Marie Dressler-Polly Moran co-starring comedy which will head the bill at the Majestic Theatre starting on April 1. In the same manner that the stock market served as the subject of fun in the successful "Caught Short," so are beauty parlours, their proprietors and their patrons used as the subject of the lampoons in the new attraction. The story revolves about two sisters, Polly Roach, who has become the successful New York beauty special-

ist, "Madame Rochay," and Marie, wife of a smalltown mail carrier, portrayed by Lucien Littlefield. Fun begins when Marie piles her husband and three children, including Anita Page, on to a Pullman car en route to visit Madame Rochay. The scenes which ensue will be familiar to those who have been in sleeping cars when a large family boarded the train in the middle of the night at some wayside station. Further humour is evolved when Marie becomes an employee in Polly's beauty establishment. Inexperienced with the various devices, she has the place in an uproar when she pulls the wrong levers and almost kills customers by blundering manipulation of the various reducing machines. The laugh episodes reach their climax when in Polly's absence Marie tries to show the place to two inspeetors from the health department. Polly returns to find chaos in her beauty parlour while her efforts to unscramble the tangle only make it worse and the uproarious sequence ends with Polly being hurled into a mud bath in all her finery. According to Charles Riesner, the director, every possible adjunct of a beauty parlour, including permanent wave machines, steam rooms, showers, swimming pool, etc., was used to obtain laughs. The underlying drama is provided by the growth of jealousy between Anita Page and Polly's spoiled daughter, played by Sally Eilers, last seen opposite Buster Keaton in "Dough Boys." A wealthy young man, William Collier, Jr., complicates the affair by interposing himself in a romance between Miss Page and William Bakewell. When the affair reaches a climax, Marie steps into the breach and consummates a tumultuous midnight marriage — but to outline the rest of the story would' be giving away too much of the plot. Lawrence Tibbett sings a duet with himself in "The Cuban Love Song." In one scene Tibbett sings to a vision of himself as, he was in his youth. M-G-M technicians made a record of his voice, played it in the scene, and Tibbett answered it. Now Larry insists that a man who can play himself twice at once ought to get a double salary. Who says an opera star isn't a business man? * * Long speeches do not bother Jackie Cooper. When they dragged past ten o'clock at the banquet of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scien^/es, Jackie pfromptly went to sleep in Marie Dressler 's lap.