Smartest Girl in Town

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.

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."