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.