Gregory La Cava, best remembered for the 1936 My Man Godfrey, was a curious director, erratic, undisciplined, open in his contempt for front-office phonies. He was not well liked by the executive echelon, and yet for all of his apparently off-the-cuff methods of shooting, he did bring his films in efficiently, on time, on budget, and while they were rarely major blockbusters, they usually showed a decent profit. Tonight's double-bill affords an opportunity to see two widely different films made consecutively in his most prolific years, 1932-33. For reasons which we'll go into prior to the screening, The Half-Naked Truth achieved a near-notorious reputation at the time (unjustified then, almost inexplicable today) which somehow clung to it through the years. It has become virtually a lost film, seldom if ever even shown on television, and never revived theatrically. While a lesser satire of press-agentry than Lee Tracy's other 1932 film Blessed Event had been on columnists, newspapers and commercial radio, The Half-Naked Truth is an enjoyable little frolic, La Cava's crackling pace and Tracy's rapid-fire dialogue delivery keeping it on the move even when nothing very much is happening. As in many La Cava films, some elements are totally unexpected - as in the Lubitsch-like sequence where office noises somehow form a song - while an enjoyable bonus too is the quite extensive New York location work. Only in its climax does it disappoint a little, running out of steam and contenting itself with just tying up the loose ends instead of continuing to hit hard until the fadeout, as Blessed Event did. Too, it's fairly superficial as satires go, without the bite and honesty of Nothing Sacred -- but it's still too enjoyable a comedy to have been relegated to a 40-year obscurity.