Thursday Movie Picks #401: Movies With a Body Part in the Title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. The theme this week is "Movies with a body part in the title". This one was pretty easy, with the big question being whether I had used any of the first three selecions I had in mind before. Thankfully, a search of the blog says that I didn't, and so was able to use three old movies, all of which precede the enforcement of the Production Code starting in July 1934. Working from the bottom up:

Loose Ankles (1930). Loretta Young plays a young woman who is set to inherit $1 million from her late grandmother, except that there are a few stipulations in the will: that she can't be the cause of any public scandal, and that her two aunts approve of her choice of suitor. She doesn't particularly care for the money, so she puts an ad in the paper looking for a man to help her create that scandal. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. answers the ad and falls in love with Young. Meanwhile, Fairbanks has his roommates put the aunts in a compromising situation, resulting in a nightclub scene only Hollywood could dream up. It's the sort of "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" plot some early talkies have, which might not be for everybody, but can be very interesting.

Tanned Legs (1929). June Clyde plays a daughter in a family where everybody else is making bad choices in terms of romance, and she'd like to fix that if she could. Things get more complicated when the family goes to a Florida result and the sister's (Sally Blane) boyfriend, a blackmailer, comes along and starts blackmailing the sister. Meanwhile, Clyde starts having problems with her own boyfriend (Arthur Lake, who would go on to play Dagwood in the Blondie movies a decade later). Mixed in are a lot of musical numbers that really just serve to show why Busby Berkeley was so revolutionary.

Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934). Wheeler and Woolsey (Woolsey is the one with the glasses and cigar), RKO's extremely popular comedy team of the 1930s up until Woolsey's untimely death, play a pair of salesmen selling flavored lipsticks. Wheeler's girlfriend (Dorothy Lee) works for a struggling cosmetics company, and they're able to get her boss (Thelma Todd) to agree to sell the flavored lipsticks. One thing leads to another, and Wheeler and Woolsey get involved in a case of stolen bonds as well as a cross-country car race (yeah, the plots were convoluted).