Lady For A Day: NOW PLAYING, Sept. 24, 1933

Milwaukee, I have not forgotten you. It's just that the resources available on the Google News Archive aren't so great for September 1933. The Sentinel is almost completely missing, while the digital pages of the Journal are often of poor quality. Fortunately, whoever scanned the Journal cleaned up their act somewhat for the days leading up to the release of Lady For a Day. That film is now remembered as Frank Capra's breakthrough film, though Capra had been Columbia's ace director just about since the coming of sound. What's different about Lady -- which Capra would remake as his final feature, Pocketful of Miracles, nearly thirty years later --  may be that, as an ensemble piece, it was the first one thought of primarily as a Capra picture rather than as some star's vehicle. Speaking of ensemble, this is virtually a Warner Bros. co-production with three of that studio's hottest personalities -- Warren William, Glenda Farrell and Guy Kibbee -- in the mix. They can't hurt.

Columbia and Milwaukee's Palace theater went to town promoting Lady for a Day. Here's a double-page spread of movie ads from the Journal for the film's opening day, September 22.

The theater itself puts two ads in the spread, while the makers of Lux soap join in with a tie-in ad promoting (but not actually featuring) Glenda Farrell. Let's take a closer look:

 

What's Glenda's secret? She uses soap!

 

The film itself is inescapably a bit Capracorny, but it has plenty of Pre-Code attitude, too. Let's let Glenda demonstrate, with help from Farrell fan extraordinaire WB Kelso: