Like every other starlet working in Hollywood in 1939, Lucille Ball screen-tested for the role of Scarlett O'Hara. Her zany talent packed inside that fiddle-dee-dee character strikes modern audiences as an obvious impossibility, but for Ball that screen test was a ray of hope. She had appeared in over 50 movies by 1939, and as her thirtieth birthday approached it seemed like her chance at stardom was running out. Still, when RKO gave her work, she gave it her all, like in this glamorous fable about beautician Jean (Ball) who, after being dumped by her cosmetic salesman beau (Patric Knowles), gets back on her feet by concocting a marvelous face cream. But when her ex's new wife (Frieda Inescort) becomes a major investor, will Jean rekindle her love for her old flame - or succumb to the charms of her face cream's advertising director (Donald Woods)? Socially conscious screenwriter Paul Jarrico (later a victim of the blacklist) exhaustively researched the chemistry of some of the questionable ingredients in beauty products of the time, intending to expose the "beauty racket", but little of his findings made it into the final draft which was heavily colored by the real life rags-to-riches story of cosmetics mogul Helena Rubenstein.

By Violet LeVoit