Smartest Girl in Town

Smartest Girl in Town

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Joseph Santley
Produced by Edward Kaufman
Screenplay by Viola Brothers Shore
Story by Muriel Scheck
H. S. Kraft
Starring Gene Raymond
Ann Sothern
Music by No credit listed.
Musical director
Nathaniel Shilkret
Cinematography J. Roy Hunt, A.S.C.
Edited by Jack Hively
Production
company
Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.
Release dates
  • November 27, 1936 (1936-11-27)
Running time
 58 minutes
Country United States
Language English

Smartest Girl in Town is a 1936 American comedy film directed by Joseph Santley and written by Viola Brothers Shore.[1] The film stars Gene Raymond, Ann Sothern, Helen Broderick, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes and Harry Jans. The film was released on November 27, 1936, by RKO Pictures.[2][3]

Plot

Model "Cookie" Cooke (Ann Sothern) is urged by her unsatisfactorily married practical older sister Gwen (Helen Broderick) to find a wealthy husband. On a modeling assignment she runs into millionaire Dick Smith (Gene Raymond), but assumes him to be a low-earning male model. Dick falls in love with her, but she insists on dating eccentrically mannered Italian aristocrat Baron Enrico (Erik Rhodes). Dick installs another mannered character, his valet Philbean (Eric Blore) in the position of a casting agency president who would then pair Cookie on the same pre-arranged modeling jobs with Dick. Ultimately, Baron Enrico, who is so obsessed with birds that he cannot concentrate on romance long enough to propose, is goaded by Gwen into presenting Cookie with an engagement ring. Forced to act fast, Dick pretends to have attempted suicide by a gunshot to the head and asks Cookie to marry him on his deathbed, but she tastes the "ketchup blood" on his face and then embraces him.[4][5]

Cast

  • with Helen Broderick as Mrs. Gwen Mayen, Cookie's sister
  • Eric Blore as Lucius Philbean, Dick's valet
  • Erik Rhodes as Baron Enrico Torene
  • Harry Jans as Terry, Gwen's perennially-unemployed estranged husband

Casting notes

RKO Pictures was also the studio which produced the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers series of films, thus Smartest Girl's comic supporting players, Helen Broderick, Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes, all had prominent roles in the previous year's Astaire-Rogers hit, Top Hat. Furthermore, two months before Smartest Girl's release, Blore and Broderick were seen in the dancing duo's very successful 1936 effort, Swing Time and, the previous year, had been in another RKO musical comedy, To Beat the Band. As for Blore and Rhodes, both had earlier appeared in the first Astaire-Rogers vehicle, 1934's The Gay Divorcee and also interacted as comedy relief in two other RKOs, the 1935 musical Old Man Rhythm and the 1936 murder mystery Two in the Dark.[6]

One additional Astaire-Rogers title for RKO, the pair's initial teaming as supporting players in 1933's Flying Down to Rio, starred Gene Raymond (with leading lady Dolores del Rio) and included Eric Blore as the typically mannered assistant hotel manager, Mr. Butterbass. Blore also supported Raymond in two other films, the 1934 Paramount drama Behold My Wife! (minor role as Benson, the butler) and the 1935 RKO mystery-comedy Seven Keys to Baldpate (third-billed, after co-star Margaret Callahan, in the key role of Harrison who masqueraded as Professor Bolton). The same year, Blore sported a French accent playing a major, fourth-billed role, in the musical comedy Folies Bergère de Paris, with top-tier stars Maurice Chevalier, Merle Oberon and Smartest Girl's Ann Sothern.

The last of the five 1935–37 RKO vehicles for Gene Raymond and Ann Sothern was She's Got Everything, with third-billed Victor Moore and fourth-billed Helen Broderick. In addition to the two films with Raymond and Sothern, Broderick also supported Raymond in three other RKO romantic comedies, 1936's Love on a Bet (third-billed, after co-star Wendy Barrie) and The Bride Walks Out (fifth-billed, after the other two leads, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Young and supporting player Ned Sparks) as well as 1937's The Life of the Party, a Joe Penner vehicle, with Raymond as co-star and, for comedy support, Parkyakarkus, Harriet Hilliard, Victor Moore and Broderick. It was the third of six RKO films in which was teamed with Victor Moore. In addition to the Astaire-Rogers Swing Time and the Raymond-Sothern She's Got Everything, they were given two 1937 B-picture starring vehicles, We're on the Jury and Meet the Missus, as well as roles among the numerous players in the following year's Bob "Bazooka" Burns–Jack Oakie-Kenny Baker musical comedy, Radio City Revels.

Listed in opening credits

  • Song "Will You" by Gene Raymond
    [Gene Raymond sings the song to
    Ann Sothern while she reclines in
    a beach chair during a pretend
    modeling assignment which he
    arranged]
  • caption appearing on-screen before the film's opening scene:
    The characters and events
    depicted in this photoplay
    are fictional.   Any similarity
    to actual persons,   living or
    dead,   is purely coincidental.

Tagline

"She was the smartest girl in town, looking for the richest boy in town. She was gorgeous… a real stunner–and he fell for her at first glance"

Smartest Girl in Town on Turner Classic Movies

Smartest Girl in Town was shown on Turner Classic Movies January 22, 2009 and again on March 4, 2015 as part of its "Star of the Month salute" to Ann Sothern.

Introductory comments

"Hi, I'm Robert Osborne. Up next, in our star of the month salute to Ann Sothern, we have her in a romantic comedy that teamed her with one of the actors she worked with most often early in her career, Gene Raymond. In all, they made five films together in the mid-thirties. Not serious stuff, as you can tell by their titles, Hooray for Love, Walking on Air, There Goes My Girl, She's Got Everything and our next film, which is called Smartest Girl in Town. And that was it, for almost thirty years, until nineteen sixty-four, when they were both cast in the film version of Gore Vidal's political play, The Best Man. Six films in total and, according to some sources, neither Ann nor Gene were ever keen on working together. They weren't particularly fond of each other in real life. In our movie, Ann plays a fashion model who attracts the attention of Gene, the man she thinks is also a model, but is actually a millionaire in disguise. And she's looking for a millionaire, it's just that she's looking elsewhere, because she doesn't know he's loaded.

This was a movie that Ann made on her new contract she just signed with the RKO studios which kept her very busy for a couple of years. If there wasn't an RKO film that fit Ann, she was then sent off to work for other studios around town. Ann made a total of six films in nineteen thirty-six alone, and eight more in nineteen thirty-seven. And in those days, making movies was a six-days-a-week affair. Exhausting, yeah, but also why those people like Ann Sothern were so good at what they did — they had ample opportunities to work and improve their craft. So here's Ann Sothern at RKO along with three fugitives from the Rogers and Astaire musicals being made at that studio at the same time, Helen Broderick, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore. Here's Ann Sothern as Frances Cooke, also known as Cookie, a smart cookie, in fact, she's the "Smartest Girl in Town."

Robert Osborne's closing comments

"This movie was directed by Joseph Santley, a name not many people know today, but a man who had one of the longer careers on both stage and screen. He began in vaudeville at the age of three. By the ripe old age of nine, he was billed as America's greatest boy actor, at least that's how his parents had him billed in theater ads. Later he became a writer and director and among the films he directed was the Marx Brothers comedy The Cocoanuts. He also did six comedies with Judy Canova, he directed Music in My Heart with Rita Hayworth and three of Ann Sothern's movies, including a comedy called She's Got Everything, which we'll be showing later tonight. Up next, though, Ann joins Fredric March and Joan Bennett in a film from nineteen thirty-eight which made a big change in the future of Ann as a movie star."

References

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