Professional Sweetheart

Lovely Romantic /Pre~Code Comedy. Watching Ginger dance in her lingerie was a sweet pre~code treat. Run time 69 min. Excellent cast features: Ginger Rogers, Norman Foster, ZaSu Pitts, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Edgar Kennedy.A fun movie. I definitely recommend.Enjoy

The sponsors of a rowdy radio singer find a somber PROFESSIONAL SWEETHEART to keep her satisfied and out of trouble.

Ginger Rogers dominates this Pre-Code comedy with her saucy performance as the spoiled warbler. This was her first starring role and she makes the most of it, pouting and prancing across the screen (often in her lingerie) talking bold & brassy, but actually just longing for the right male to come along and knock her into submission. Disturbing implications aside, she is an eyeful and a great deal of fun to watch.

Norman Foster deftly underplays his role as a stolid Tennessee backwoodsman whose whole life is commandeered by Ms. Rogers and the avaricious makers of the Ippsie Wippsie wash cloth. His eventual break for freedom, with Rogers in tow, will elicit deep approval from at least one gender in the viewing audience.

A wonderful cast of character actors help support the stars: Gregory Ratoff as Ginger's scheming sponsor; Frank McHugh as his eager beaver press agent; ZaSu Pitts as a silly sob sister; Franklin Pangborn as a nervous decorator; Edgar Kennedy as owner of a rival wash rag company; Allen Jenkins as his factotum; and Sterling Holloway as a slow-talking reporter.

Movie mavens will recognize an unbilled Akim Tamiroff as a hotel room service waiter.

Mostly boring pre-code comedy with some nice direction and very few laughs. With a cast like this, it really should be better. The story is about a radio star (Ginger Rogers) known as America's Sweetheart who wants to live it up and go dancing, drinking, having sex, etc. So her PR team compromises by getting her a husband: a rube from Kentucky (Norman Foster). Some slightly saucy pre-code dialogue seems to be the main selling point for many. But it's still pretty tame stuff. Ginger dancing around in her underwear and one scene where she gets spanked are the movie's racier moments. Funniest scene is when Frank McHugh cons the rube into proposing. Ginger gives it her best but the script just isn't strong. Only a must for hardcore Ginger fans.

This is a very early film in the career of Ginger Rogers. It is somewhat saucy and always goofy. It portays people in radio show business and the press that covers it as both overly ambitious and naive. There are several character actors such as Zazu Pitts that are totally hilarious. The plot is basicly girl wants fun and freedom rather than fame, and boy wants girl. After several very funny misadventures they both get what they want and each other. Sexuality is very frank in this movie even though the characters are very innocent. For the naughty in us there is even a spanking scene. Ginger Roger's voice is dubbed in a couple of songs because the producers did not think she was good enough. A very funny film worth repeated viewings. It can be seen occaisionly on the Turner Movie Channel. In the final scene there is a reference to television long before it would become available as if it was just around the corner.

"Professional Sweetheart" was Ginger Rogers' first film for RKO studios after she left Warner Bros., and with Allen Jenkins and Frank McHugh in the supporting cast it almost seems like a Warners film in exile. It's a marvelous movie, smart and funny, with a script by "Chicago" author Maurine Watkins that, though it isn't a crime story, takes up another of Watkins' favorite themes: media manipulation and the gap between what we're told about celebrities and what they're really like. In "The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book," Arlene Croce wrote, "Almost any Ginger Rogers role is successful to the degree that it reflects the dualism in her personality (tough-vulnerable, ingenuous-calculating) or plays on her curious aptitude for mimickry or fantasy or imposture." Croce was writing about the major roles of her post-Astaire career — "Bachelor Mother," "Tom, Dick and Harry," "The Major and the Minor" — but it applies here just as well; by casting Rogers as a wise-cracking hard-bitten orphan girl forced to pose as the "Purity Girl," and having two radio sponsors and a husband (from an arranged marriage!) all with their own ideas of what they want from her, "Professional Sweetheart" gives Rogers an early showcase for the characteristics that would have made her an enormous star even if she'd never set foot on a dance floor with Fred Astaire. I can't understand why some of the other commentators on this film have criticized Watkins' script, since it seems to me to be well constructed and vividly satirical on celebrity and its discontents in a way that rings true even today.

Another thing I liked about "Professional Sweetheart" is that it's one of the Gayest movies Hollywood ever made — so much so that I can't understand why TCM isn't showing it in their current "Screened Out" festival of Gay and Lesbian films when some other titles with much more peripheral Gay content did make their list. The supporting actors seem to be competing as to who can be the queeniest, with Franklin Pangborn (not surprisingly) winning: his looks of horror and disgust when any of the other characters suggests that he date a woman are priceless. Also pretty astonishing, even for the relatively liberal "pre-Code" era in Hollywood history, is Sterling Holloway's obviously cruising Allen Jenkins at the reporters' reception — imagine a Gay scene involving Jenkins in which he's the butch one!