The Half Naked Truth

For sheer comedic preposterousness, you can't beat the plot points of Gregory La Cava's pre-code comedy The Half Naked Truth (1932): Lee Tracy plays ambitious two-bit press agent Jimmy Bates, who hopes to jump-start the show-biz career of his carnival hootchee-kootchee dancer girlfriend Teresita (the Mexican-born beauty Lupe Velez) by ensconcing her in a fancy New York hotel and passing her off as a Turkish princess. At one point, room service is dialed and 30 pounds of raw meat are requested - not for the princess, but for her pet lion. Once the goods have been delivered, the noble beast pads over to the table where they've been laid out and begins gobbling them down, to the horrified delight of the press photographers who have been assembled for the event. That's the kind of craziness that stretches the boundaries of credulity. What's even crazier is that it's almost true. The Half Naked Truth is based, albeit loosely, on the shenanigans of real-life press agent Harry Reichenbach. In the course of his career - Reichenbach died in 1931, the year before The Half Naked Truth was released - Reichenbach worked for several studios and stars including Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Ethel Barrymore, and Pola Negri. According to an article in a 1923 issue of Photoplay, he drew a salary of $1,000 a week - a princely sum at the time - for hatching ingenious publicity schemes for Broadway and Hollywood alike. For example, the lion stunt in The Half Naked Truth evolved from a campaign Reichenbach devised to promote the 1920 Revenge of Tarzan (also known as Return of Tarzan): He booked a room in a Manhattan hotel under the name "Thomas R. Zann," asking if pets were allowed. After being told the answer was yes, he arrived with a crate the size of a piano - and a piano is exactly what onlookers presumed was inside - and ordered it raised to the hotel-room window by a series of pulleys. Inside, of course, was a live lion. Reichenbach then proceeded to call room service to order a number of raw steaks for his "pet," which attracted the attention of the press, just as Reichenbach intended. In another stunt reflected in the film, Reichenbach brought a half-dozen or so men masquerading as Turks to another tony Manhattan hotel. The men claimed they were looking for a missing woman known as the "Virgin of Stamboul," offering a $20,000 reward for her return. The whole thing, of course, was a scheme to advertise Tod Browning's 1920 Universal release The Virgin of Stamboul. The Half Naked Truth captures the spirit of that freewheeling flim-flammery. By the time La Cava made the picture, he'd been working in Hollywood for nearly a decade. He'd begun his career as an animator, and was hired by William Randolph Hearst in 1915 to run International Film Service, a studio that would bring Hearst newspapers' comic strips to life on the movie screen. After the dissolution of the studio, La Cava headed for Hollywood, where he began directing live-action two-reelers. Though La Cava's biggest successes would come later in the 1930s, with pictures like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937), The Half Naked Truth shows sparks of the verve and wit that La Cava would later perfect. Upon its release, New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall seemed delighted with the film, claiming that it delivered "salvos of good fun," though he did say it might be better if it hewed more closely to the book that inspired it, Phantom Fame, co-written by Reichenbach and David Freedman. But for the most part, Hall's enthusiasm wasn't terrifically off base: As Reichenbach's fictional doppelganger Jimmy Bates, Lee Tracy gives a rakish, free-spirited performance. His loose-limbed physicality, in particular, is something to behold - his bones seem to be connected by springs. And his banter with the sultry-funny Velez - who spends much of the movie clad in filmy veils and skimpy bandeaux -- is wonderful, and frequently rather naughty. (Of particular interest is Velez's saucy musical number, a song about looking for a carpenter to fix, among other things, her non-functioning doorbell.) Frank Morgan plays a lascivious Broadway producer who gets caught in a rather compromising position with Teresita, who becomes his protégée (and more). The always-wonderful Eugene Pallette also appears, looking particularly fetching when disguised as a Turk, his fez perched rakishly across his bushy, perpetually annoyed eyebrows. The Half Naked Truth also holds the distinction of featuring the only screen appearance of Max Steiner, who also composed the music for the film: Look for him in a brief appearance as a bandleader. Producers: Pandro S. Berman, David O. Selznick Director: Gregory La Cava Screenplay: Screenplay by Gregory La Cava and Corey Ford. From a story by Ben Markson and H. N. Swanson. Suggested by Phantom Fame, by Harry Reichenbach and David Freedman. Cinematography: Bert Glennon Music: Max Steiner Film Editing: Charles L. Kimball Cast: Lupe Velez (Teresita), Lee Tracy (Jimmy Bates), Eugene Pallette (Achilles), Frank Morgan (Farrell), Shirley Chambers (Gladys) By Stephanie Zacharek SOURCES: The New York Times IMDb JTA Achive (http://www.jta.org/jta-archive/archive-page) Michelle Vogel, Lupe Velez: The Life and Career of Hollywood's Mexican Spitfire Photoplay, August 1923