Turner Classic Movies August 2022

 TCM has an excellent series of classical movies in August, including the films of Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, Clint Eastwood, Spencer Tracy, Constance Bennett and Peter Sellers.  Many of these films I have recommended previously but if you have questions about any of them please send me an e-mail and I will respond.

The highlights of August include:

Aug. 2:  Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the best civilian aviation film.

Aug. 8: W.S. Van Dyke's Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

Aug. 15: Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet, one of the best Astaire/Rogers films; Budd Boetticher's beautiful Western Ride Lonesome (1959)

Aug. 16:  Andre DeToth's The Bounty Hunter (1954)

Aug. 17: Fritz Lang's Fury (1936)

Aug. 27:  John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Howard Hawks's Monkey Business (1952)

Aug. 28: Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952) and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959)

Aug. 30:  Raoul Walsh's boisterous Gentleman Jim (1942)

Jack Conway's Red-Headed Woman (1932)

 Red-Headed Woman was written by Anita Loos (after F.Scott Fitzgerald's script was deemed inadequate) based on Katherine Brush's novel, and Jean Harlow, playing Lil Andrews, tears through it as a secretary trying to break into high society.  The first scene in the film shows Lil trying on a dress and asking "can you see through this?"  When the answer is "I'm afraid you can" she says she'll take it.  

Director Jack Conway started directing in 1917 and gradually became a bland house director for MGM, following the script and coming in under budget.  In Red-Headed Woman Jean Harlow is a force of nature that Conway makes little attempt to control and she is even occasionally sympathetic in her attempts to use her sexuality to break into society.  When Lil seduces her boss Bill Legendre Jr. (the square-jawed Chester Morris) his society wife Ilene (Leila Hyams) discovers them together and files for divorce.  Bill and Lil get married but Lil is annoyed that Bill won't involve her is his social circle and they have a big fight; Bill slaps her and Lil says, "Do it again, I like it!  Do it again!" 

Next Lil seduces Bill's business associate Charles Gaerste (Henry Stephenson), who doesn't know Lil is married to Bill; she also is having an affair with Gaerste's chauffer Albert (Charles Boyer).  Although Lil is doing well financially she still is not socially acceptable to Bill's friends and goes out of her way to denounce them when they leave her party to visit Ilene.  If there's any doubt that this is a pre-Code film:  at the end of the film Lil shoots Bill when he drives off with Ilene, she gets away with it because Bill survives and won't press charges and Lil ends up in Paris with an older man with a long beard and Albert as their chauffer!

John Dickson Carr's The Eight of Swords (1934)

 "Ma'am," said Dr. Fell urbanely, "one of the most unfortunate features of police work is that it brings us into contact with people whom we should otherwise run a mile to avoid.  Pray accept my assurance, ma'am, that nobody appreciates this more than I do."                                                                       -- John Dickson Carr, The Eight of Swords (1934, republished by Penzler Publishers 2021)

The so-called "golden age of detective fiction" never really existed, unless one thinks that English writer Agatha Christie has a great deal in common with Americans Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr; as a splitter rather than a lumper I don't see it.  Most of Carr's novel's do take place in England, but usually include a certain level of subdued American irony.  The Eight of Swords is the third of twenty-three books with detective Dr. Gideon Fell, who looks rather like G.K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown novels.  This is not a locked room mystery; indeed there are many open doors and windows to the room where Nick Depping was killed and no one in the neighborhood seems to have a motive.  But Fell begins to figure out that not everyone is who they claim to be; Depping himself has something of a secret past and was even known to wear a disguise at one point the night he was killed.  There are poltergeists and bishops sliding down banisters, crooked lawyers and incompetent police, writers and servants, attractive young ladies and dowdy old wives.  Fell gradually sorts it all out as two additional murders take place during his investigation while Fell narrows down the dwindling number of suspects.  As Fell concludes, "the one-little-damning clue was a large and many-caloried dinner, steaming before your noses."

Alfred L. Werker's Rebel in Town 1956

 Another austere Western from director Werker, with a tightly-plotted script by Danny Arnold and black-and-white cinematography by Gordon Avil (who photographed King Vidor's Hallelujah in 1929 and Vidor's Billy the Kid in 1930 before turning to B movies and television).  It stars John Payne, who made an effective transition from song-and-dance man in the forties to Westerns and film noir in the fifties.

We start with a view of John and Nora Willoughby's (John Payne and Ruth Roman) small farm in Arizona with their son Petey (Bobby Clark), who idolizes his father for his Civil War record and dresses up in a uniform of his own.  Petey gets a cap pistol for his birthday and when he sees former Confederate soldiers in town he shoots his cap pistol at them and one of them, hearing the noise, turns around and shoots him.  Petey dies and John swears vengance.  The killer turns out to be part of the Mason family, Confederates burned out of their home in Alabama and wandering the West, robbing banks, headed by bible-quoting patriarch Bedloe Mason (J. Carrol Naish) and including his sons Gray (Ben Cooper), Wesley (John Smith), Frank (Ben Johnson) and Cain (Sterling Franck).

John Willoughby seeks revenge and goes looking for the Mason family and finds an injured Gray, who had started back to town to find out about Petey and is stabbed by Wesley, who had shot the boy.  John and Nora nurse Gray back to health until John finds out that Gray is part of the killer's family and brings him in to the sheriff in town, where a lynch mob gathers.  Bedloe and the rest of his family show up and Bedloe points out Wesley as the killer, who immediately flees.  John Willoughby chases Wesley and kills him, somewhat in self-defense, and reunites with Nora, who had known all along who Gray was.  Bedloe, saddened, says "what the sons of some men do to the sons of others is the tragedy of the world."

This stark moral tale shows how the wounds of the Civil War festered -- and still do even today -- after the conflict ended, with Willougby's and Mason's children continuing to suffer and director Werker showing the hatred and suffering of the children from both sides. 

Alfred L. Werker's Three Hours to Kill (1954)

 I've written how the conventions of film noir can elevate even routine films and that's also true of the Western.  Werker's Three Hours to Kill is obviously influenced by Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952) and William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).  In Wellman's film Dana Andrews is lynched for something he didn't do while in Werker's film the attempted lynching fails, Dana Andrews's Jim Guthrie escapes and comes back three years later to find out who killed the man whose murder was blamed on Guthrie. Guthrie's friend Sherrif Ben East (Stephen Elliot) gives Guthrie three hours to find the real killer.

There are plenty of suspects, Niles (Richard Coogan), who has married Guthrie's sweetheart Laurie Mastin (Donna Reed) while Guthrie was on the run, and gambler Marty (Laurence Hugo), part of a menage-a-troi with Betty (Charlotte Fletcher) and Polly (Carolyn Jones); practically everyone in the town took part in the attempted lynching and they all had a reason to murder the victim, Carter (Richard Webb).  When Guthrie finds the real killer he kills him in a gun battle and rides off, realizing that he and Laurie can never be together again.  Guthrie, however, is followed by dance hall girl Chris Palmer (Dianne Foster), who had always loved him; it's an unusual twist in Westen iconography. 

Although one often thinks of Dana Andrews as the urban figure from his films with Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang he also did a number of excellent Westerns, including Jacques Tourneur's Canyon Passage (1946).  Alfred L. Werker was also better known for his film noirs (They Walked by Night, 1948) though he did a number of interesting Westerns near the end of his career;  he made four films after Three Hours to Kill and though his direction is intelligant and often subtle credit also goes to cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. and producer Harry Joe Brown.  Lawton started as a cinematographer in 1937 and worked with John Ford and Budd Boetticher, among many other directors, and helped to create the beautiful palette -- browns, blues and yellow -- of Three Hours to Kill.  Harry Joe Brown went on to produce Boetticher's superb Westerns with Randolph Scott.

Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire (1971)

 I wrote previously about Rothman's Terminal Island (1973) on Feb. 14, 2017.  Rothman was mentored by Roger Corman after her graduation from film school and made seven movies between 1967 and 1978, all of them low-budget exploitation films (small budgets, nudity, violence and unknown actors) and eventually started her own company, where she was unable to find financing for additional films; it was thought she could only make exploitation films -- which she had done mainly to get a foothold in the business -- and she was a woman, few of whom were allowed to direct in the seventies.  She quit making movies and went into the real estate business.

My own feeling is that part of the problem was that the exploitation films Rothman made all had strong leading women asserting themselves, as in The Velvet Vampire, where Susan Ritter (Sherry E. DeBoer) battles it out with vampire Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) for the soul of Susan's husband Lee (Michael Blodgett) in the desert (LeFanu is a reference to nineteenth-century writer Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote the lesbian vampire novella Camilla).  The film takes place mostly in the desert and the desert home of Diane, though after Diane kills Lee she chases Susan into the Greyhound bus terminal in Los Angeles, where Susan kills Diane with a cross and bright sunlight.  Rothman and her cinematographer Daniel Lacambre shot the film in bright primary colors, primarily red (of course), yellow and blue and included a number of effectively erotic scenes, with Rothman (who wrote the film with Maurice Jules and Charles S. Swartz) using some standard vampire lore while also inventing new rules of her own. 

Eric Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert 1986

"I saw an Eric Rohmer film once; it was kind of like watching paint dry."                                                      -- Harry Noseby (Gene Hackman) in Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975, written by Alan Sharp)

The first Eric Rohmer film I saw was Ma nuit chez Maude in 1969, after waiting in the rain on a long line at the 72nd St. Playhouse on Manhattan's East Side.  It was fascinating both verbally and visually, intensive with a unique point of view. I looked forward to each of Rohmer's films after that and saw all of his films after that as they arrived in the United States, including his six "Moral Tales" and his six "Comedies and Proverbs," of which Le Rayon Vert ( The Green Ray) is the fifth, shot on 16 mm. during the summer of 1985.  Rohmer made his last film in 2007 and died in 2010.  I recently ordered the biography of Rohmer, by Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe, and decided to see some of Rohmer's films again that I had not seen in years 

Le Rayon Vert is the story of Delphine (Marie Rivere, who collaborated on the screenplay), a secretary in Paris who has her summer vacation in Greece canceled when the friend with whom Delphine was going cancels Delphine in favor of the friend's boyfriend.  Delphine is desperate and eventually goes to Cherbourg with a friend but doesn't get along with the family (they mock her for being a vegetarian), goes to the Alps and only spends a day there and ends up at the beach in Biarritz, where she overhears a conversation about Jules Verne's Le Rayon Vert and how if one is fortunate to see the green ray at the second the sun goes down one's thoughts and those of others are revealed.  At Biarritz Delphine meets Lena (Carita Holmstrom) from Sweden who tries to teach Delphine about picking up men but Delphine flees when two men join them for drinks.  She heads to the train station where she meets a man she is attracted to and they go together to a fishing village, where Dephine sees the green ray for a second as the sun goes down.

The film consists of Delphine's awkward conversations with others, as Rohmer focuses on her listening and rarely talking, her long walks by herself and her tears in lonely hotel rooms; she occasionally picks up discarded playing cards in the street that she thinks may have something to do with her destiny.  Marie Rivere's character is complex, sometimes charming, often irritating, as she insists on being herself and is not interested in "holding back her cards," as Lena suggests, Delphine being one of many Rohmer characters who will not compromise their moral integrity.

Rickey: The Life and Legend of An American Original by Howard Bryant

While Bob Ryan argued that Rickey could could have been even better had he played more, how much better could Mays or Aaron have been if they played less?  ...The practices of of Mays's time and earlier had filled  a virtual graveyard of dead, shortened, or never-was careers; victims of over-use, players had been afraid of being discarded if they disclosed an injury.                                                                                 -- Howard Bryant, Rickey (Mariner Books, 2022)

Rickey is an elegantly written book about one of baseball's greatest players, who brought style and excitement to a game now dominated by strikeouts and home runs.  When I was a kid in the 50's the one major league record we thought would never be broken was Ty Cobb's 96 stolen bases in 1915; in 1957 Willie Mays was the major league leader in stolen bases with 38.  Then things changed, with Maury Wills stealing 104 bases in 1962, Lou Brock stealing 118 in 1974 and Rickey Henderson stealing 130 in 1982; Henderson ended up with a total of 1406 stolen bases in his career, 50% more that Lou Brock at 938 (Cobb stole a total of 897).  Now one thinks Henderson's record will never be broken, as  dominant analytics say that a player should not attempt to steal because he might get thrown out (Sterling Marte lead the major leagues in steals last year with 47).

Bryant's book covers all aspects of baseball and its relationship to society during Rickey's playing years (1979 to 1993), when free agency had taken over from the reserve clause, which had bound players to a particular team.  Bryant is particularly perceptive and detailed about the role of African-American players during this period and the racism still endemic in the game, as the percentage of African-American players has gone from 19% in 1986 to 8% in 2021, for complex reasons not fully understood, though some think that it's because teams carry many more pitcher than they use to and African-American are discouraged from pitching.  Bryant analyzes Rickey's relationship with each of his managers and team owners -- Rickey and Billy Martin were particularly compatible in their aggresssive approach to the game -- and gives deserved credit to Rickey's wife Pamela as well as Rickey's good friend on the Oakland A's Dave Stewart.  Bryant tracks down the truth and exaggeration of the many stories told about Rickey and ends with the text of Rickey's eloquent speech at his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2009.  

John Reinhardt's Chicago Calling (1951)

 Chicago Calling is a downbeat film about an alcoholic, (Bill Cannnon,played with subtlety and intelligence by Dan Duryea), in Los Angeles whose wife Mary (Mary Anderson) and young daughter Nancy (Melinda Casey) have left him to live with Mary's parents in Chicago because after all his lies Mary has "lost faith" in Bill.  Bill goes on a drunken binge and when he finally wakes up there is a telegram from Mary telling him that they have been in an automobile accident and Nancy is in the hospital; Mary will call him later.  Unfortunately Bill's phone has been cut off because the bill hasn't been paid and even after robbing Nancy's piggy bank Bill can't raise nearly enough money to pay it and he has no idea how to reach Mary.  Then Bill's odyssey to raise the fifty-three dollars he needs to pay his phone bill begins and it lasts all day and night, as banks and loan companies laugh at him, welfare would take weeks before he received anything and his one drinking buddy, who works as a short-order cook can't afford to help him.  A waitress at a lunch wagon (Marcia Mae Jones) gives him five bucks but that's all the money he can find.

As he walks through Los Angeles in despair he is accompanied by his dog, Smitty, who is accidentally hit by a young boy, Bobbie(Gordon Gebert) on his bicycle.  The dog is unharmed and Bobbie offers to loan him the money that he's saved from working at a produce store.  Bill relunctantly agrees but when they get to Bobbie's house his guardian sister has hidden the money so Bobbie steals the money from his sister's boyfriend and he and Bill go to a Holllywood Stars baseball game, where Bobby loses the money; they find it at the lost-and-found where the clerk says "you must be in a good place," which convinces Bill to tell Bobbie to return the money and then Bill finds a one-night job on a construction crew.  When Bill gets home the phone rings and the phone guy says he fixed it for Mary's call to come through that day.  Just then the cops arrive to take Bill in; he had been reported for theft.  The phone rings and the cops let him answer and the news from Mary is not good, based on Bill's responses.  Bill's despair deepens and he leaves when the cops let him go, on an apparently aimless walk, with Bobbie following him.  

The cinematographer is Robert De Grasse, who made a film with Douglas Sirk, The First Legion, also in 1951, and had been making movies starting in the 20's.  Bill Cannon's apartment was in a seedy section of Los Angeles, Bunker Hill, and Reinhardt and De Grasse capture the poverty and desperation of the area with their location shooting.  Duryea is remembered by most people for his superb slimeball roles, as in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950) but in Chicago Calling he is a sympathetic and resilient character, even though he has brought all his problems on himself he deserves one's sympathy and understanding for the moral lessons he teaches the fatherless Bobbie and for his fight for survival in a mostly heedless world. 

John Reinhardt's High Tide (1947)

 John Reinhardt was Austrian and made his start in films directing foreign versions of American films, with completely different actors speaking languages other than English.  He ended up at Poverty Row studio Monogram in the 40's and directed a number of interesting low-budget melodramas there with film noir elements, including dark urban streets, betrayals and femme fatales.  High Tide was one of them.  It starts out with the swirling waters of the ocean, suggesting the swirling and changing plot, and moves to two men trapped in a wrecked car as the tide comes in.  The men are Tim Slade (Don Castle) and Hugh Fresney (Lee Tracy) and the film quickly moves to flashback, with newspaper editor Fresney hiring Slade as a bodyguard.  Fresney had been in love with Julie Bishop (Julie Vaughn), currently married to newpaper owner Clinton Vaughn (Douglas Walton), and when Julie tries to renew the romance Slade turns to Vaughn's secretary Dana Jones (Anabel Shaw).  Then things become complicated, as Vaughn is killed and so is Pop Garron (Francis Ford), a man with a portfolio of secrets.

Slade investigates, with the help of Dana and tells Fresney, as they drive together, what he knows about Fresney's role in all this, including three murders.  Fresney drives off the road and crashes the car at the edge of the ocean as the tide comes in.  Slade is able to dig himself out but Fresney insists that he be left in the wrecked car as the tide comes in.  High Tide is dark, both literally and figuratively, as Reinhardt and cinematographer Henry Sharp (who worked on films with Fritz Lang) shot this low-budget film almost entirely at nigth in a claustrophobic environemnt with only back projection supplying any light. 

July 10, 2022: Staten Island Ferry Hawks 4, Charleston(W. Va.) Dirty Birds 1

 It was wonderful to see a baseball game live after more than two years on Sunday, a beautiful day for a game and my thanks particularly to my wonderful wife Susan who arranged the attendance of family and friends to celebrate my birthday.  We attended a game between the Staten Island Ferry Hawks and the Charleston (W.Va.) Dirty Birds in the Atlantic League, an independent league affiliated with Major League Baseball.  The ball park, now known as Staten Island University Hospital Community Park, originally was built for the AA Staten Island Yankees and my family attended many games there before MLB decided to eliminate a fair amount of minor league teams; the rather cynical rationale being that minor league teams are costly and don't produce enough major leaguers in any case.  Fortunately some investors stepped in to form the Ferry Hawks as an expansion team in the Atlantic League

The ball park is a ten-minute walk from the Staten Island ferry terminal and has a lovely view of the harbor and the New York City skyline; tickets and concessions are reasonably priced so the whole family can afford to go; the park seats 7,000 people and all the seats have excellent views  The game we saw was at a fairly high level of performance, with Ferry Hawks pitcher Anthony Rodriquez giving up only one run in 6 2/3 innings and closer Victor Capellan getting the save, his fourth in six days; outfielder Joseph Monge, who played in six seasons for the Boston Red Sox, had three runs batted in and at one point stole both second and third.  One slight disappointment was that Kelsie Whitmore, the first woman to play in the Atlantic League and a member of the Ferry Hawks, did not play in Sunday's game but, all in all, a delightful day of baseball on a lovely day at the ball park, seeing the white ball against the blue sky with family and friends.

William Keighley's Easy to Love (1934)

Easy to Love  comes at the end of the pre-Code era and is considered by some as a "screwball comedy", a term which I, as a splitter rather than a lumper, do not much care for; the idea that one can lump together films by Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, and Gregory La Cava just because they are comedies I find absurd.  Unlike film noir "screwball comedy" is not a genre that can transcend directors and writers, as we can see in Easy to Love, a comedy in search of a better director than William Keighley, whose first film this is (after co-directing two movies) and who spent most of his career directing gangster and adventure films.

The screenplay -- by Carl Erikson, Manuel Seff, David Boehm -- is clever in its pre- Code way ("funny how marriage is; you start in a double bed, move to twin beds and end up in separate rooms") and some of the casting is okay, especially Genevieve Tobin as Carol, who tries to win her husband John back by "accidentally" dropping the soap on the bathroom floor when taking a bath so John (Adolphe Menjou) can see her naked when he hands it back to her; John is carrying on an affair with Charlotte (Mary Astor) every afternoon when he tells Carol that he is playing polo, but Keighley's direction is somewhat slack, depending as it does on slamming doors and hiding in closets. Eric (Edward Everett Horton) has been romancing Carol but ends up with Charlotte when Carol and John become reunited in their outrage at their daughter Janet pretending she is moving in with her lover Paul (Paul Kaye) without benefit of marriage.

There is at least one amusing scene when Eric and Carol visit Charlotte and John one afternoon (Carol had hired a private detective); while John hides in the closet Charlotte hides John's hat and pretends to be smoking the cigar John leaves out.  Eric then takes John's hat when he leaves (it's too small) and John ends up with Eric's hat (it's too big).  I don't know if Leo McCarey ever saw Easy to Love but he directs a similar scene of switched hats in The Awful Truth (1937) that's much funnier than Keighley's scene.  Of course McCarey had Cary Grant in his film; whenever I see Adolph Menjou I'm reminded of what Jack Webb says to William Holden in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard when Webb sees Holden after Gloria Swanson has given him some clothes, "Where did you get that suit, from Adolphe Menjou?"

The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World by Claire Tomalin

Wells has given his own account of his life in his Experiment in Autobiography, published in 1934, when he was nearly seventy.  It is a book of great charm; it made me love Wells when I first read it, and led me to reread many of the books and stories I already knew, and look for more.  It soon became clear to me that the books of his I most admired were all written -- apart from the autobiography and the Outline of History (1920) -- in the period starting in 1895, when he published his first story, The Time Machine, at the age of twenty-nine, and up to 1911.                                                                                                             -- Claire Tomalin, The Young H.G. Wells (Penguin, 2021)

One of the reasons I read biographies is to see what methods people use to overcome poverty and illness and achieve their desired ends.  According to Tomalin, as she also said in her biography of Thomas Hardy (see my post of Aug. 30, 2016) the answer is perseverance and hard work.  Wells was born in relative poverty and originally worked as a draper's apprentice before taking an exam that got him a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, followed by teaching jobs and writing assignments, before hitting it big with The Time Machine.  Tomalin follows Wells life in fascinating detail through 1911 and sums up his later life (he died in 1946) in one concluding chapter (more details of his later life can be found in Michael Sherborne's biography, published in 2011). 

Tomalin is particularly fond of Wells's novels through The History of Mr. Polly in 1910 and also praises his work for the Fabian society and for politics in general, "he never lost his enthusiasm for revolution and republicanism."  Wells, however, was not a particularly good husband or father. His first marriage was so sexually disappointing that when he married again he felt he was entitled to extramarital affairs (he claimed his second wife, Amy Robbins, understood and accepted this) and he had children with Amber Reeves and Rebecca West in addition to two children with Robbins. Wells was a very social person, on friendly terms with other writers, including George Bernard Shaw, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Tomalin describers Wells's early years intelligently and succintly, concluding that "the best of his books will go on being read for generations, entertaining, surprising, and provoking different readers to different questions -- as good books should."

Professional Sweetheart and Chance at Heaven, both directed by William A. Seiter in 1933 and starring Ginger Rogers

William A. Seiter had a long career directing both movies and televison, movies from 1919 to 1960 and television from 1960 to 1965; working with everyone from the Marx Brothers to Rogers and Astaire.  Both Professional Sweetheart and Chance at Heaven were among the six movies Seiter made in 1933, the first one a comedy, the second a soap opera of sorts.  Both were pre-Code, with Professional Sweetheart being particularly racy, while both films are particularly class conscious. 

In A Chance at Heaven Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea are charming young lovers who hope to get married soon until, that is, wealthy Marian Nixon comes into town and seduces McCrea and they run off and get hitched.  But Rogers sticks around, even helping to paint their new house and teaching Nixon to cook.  Marian Nixon becomes pregnant and her mother insists she come to New York.  McCrea follow her there and Marian says the marriage is over -- she loves expensive things too much -- and when McCrea asks about the baby Marian's mother says the doctor made a mistake, not-so-broadly hinting at an abortion.  McCrea returns to Ginger Rogers and they reconcile while eating McCrea's favorite that she cooks for him: chicken pie.  The film is essentially a paen to small towns and the working class, writtten by Julian Josephson and Sarah Y. Mason and photographed in sparkling black-and-white by Nicholas Musuraca (who would later be the cinematographer on Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past in 1947, among many other films.  This is one of ten films that Ginger Rogers made in 1933,  including Flying Down to Rio, the first of her partnership with Fred Astaire.

Professional Sweetheart is something of a show business comedy, with the business here that of radio.  Ginger Rogers is a radio star who is known for her "purity" but she wants to drink and go to Harlem, which her sponsors, the executives of IpsiWipsie Wash Cloth company, don't want her to do.  So they pick a name from her fan mail and pick someone from Kentucky (Norman Foster, who was so good in John Ford's Pilgramage) for Rogers to marry. So far so good, until Foster takes her forcibly to Kentucky and spanks her.  Her handlers decide to put Theresa Harris, her Black maid, on in her place and she convinces Foster to take her back to New York by promising to read his primitive poetry on the air.  Theresa Harris's role is an unusual and interesting use at this time of a Black performer in Hollywood, as Harris's singing is particularly sensual, though we don't find out what happens to her when Ginger Rogers returns.  Professional Sweetheart is full of wonderful character actors, including Zasu Pitts as a gossip columnist who says that all actors love her --"I eat with them, I sleep with them" -- and prissy Franklin Pangborn as a costume designer who spills coffe on his pants and sends the pants out to be pressed; when Zasu Pitts opens a door and sees Pangborn without any pants she simply walks right in and shuts the door behind her.