Queen High

The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto showed this as their kick-off film in a Ginger Rogers Retrospective. A fun, fast-paced film with Ginger Rogers in a cute role as the female lead. Charles Ruggles and Frank Morgan play well off each other as rivals in work and romance. Betty Garde is a little over the top as a harassed maid. Her mugging and blank expressions are definitely from the old vaudeville school of acting. However, Ginger Rogers definitely shines as the female lead, playfully acting opposite Ruggles and Morgan. Also look for Nina Olivette (Mother of Dean Stockwell) in a saucy bit. Watch quickly for a bit by Eleanor Powell. This film will also be shown at Cinefest 2008.

... and not think very hard. The title brings forth images of perhaps the world's first film about high school angst with Ginger Rogers as the queen of her senior class? Not at all. Instead "queen high" is a card term that has to do with a bet that feuding partners in a garter company have made at the encouragement of ... their lawyer? The bet will have the winner running the business alone for one year and the loser being the winner's manservant during that same time. Wouldn't a simple split of the assets be easier? Well, yes, but not nearly as much fun as this early screwball comedy.

Frank Morgan and Charles Ruggles play the feuding captains of industry and play off of one another like a high-class version of Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen in their buddy movies. Paramount always cast Ruggles as the drunk in his early films, but here they let him play it sober and it suits him. The fact that the business is a garter manufacturer gives an excuse for lots of scantily clad young ladies to wander in and out of scenes modeling the concern's latest products.

Complicating matters for the feuding business partners is that Ruggles' character's nephew (Stanley Smith) and Morgan's character's niece (Ginger Rogers) have fallen in love. They mainly handle the musical scenes which are quite charming. Ginger Rogers was still going through her flapper persona phase in 1930 and her singing is pretty good and adds to the fun.

The plot resolution is rather abrupt and not very satisfying, but the journey getting there is lots of fun. Highly recommended.

This is a great comedy with a few songs, which pop up at just the right moment. Unlike many 1929-1930 musicals, the songs usually pertain to the action and fit right in. None of the melodies are intrusive: they fit right in and are played in the score.... which is better than most 1929-1930 films. Music is used for effect in several key comedy scenes.

Also, this should be labeled one of the earliest screwball comedies. Ruggels and Morgan are great in their roles, and a VERY young Ginger Rogers is great as a cute flapper. You can also catch Elanor Powell dancing in one scene very briefly.

It is a shame that this movie is not widely available, as I enjoyed it more than most musicals of the 1929-1930 cycle.

I don't completely understand poker terminology but "Queen High" refers to the card game. In the plot, a poker hand determines which business partner gets to run their ladies garter company for a whole year. The loser has to be subservient for the full year and this crosses over into personal life in the form of becoming the other man's butler. The stakes are high. And it's a pair of sixes that wins the contest. Charles Ruggles (Johns) and Frank Morgan (Nettleton) are the two business partners who can't stand each other and enter into the deal as suggested by their lawyer Rudolph Cameron (Vanderholt). Can they resolve their differences?

There is a mini love story played out by Ginger Rogers (Polly) and Stanley Smith (Dick) as the relations of both the feuding bosses but it really takes second stage to the bickering of the 2 male leads. And they are very funny and constantly at each other's throats. The dialogue is amusing and we get a couple of songs as well as an entertaining song and dance section started off by Ginger Rogers and ending with Eleanor Powell briefly tap dancing on a table. You won't realize it is her so watch out. It's fascinating if you are interested in this kind of stuff.

An amusing film that is acted very well by the two main leads and definitely worth another watch. Unfortunately, the sound isn't always as crisp as would be preferred and although it is a fairly short film, I found that it seemed longer. This is usually a bad sign that a film is boring but that's not what I felt whilst watching this effort. Highly enjoyable.

'Queen High' is ever so slightly a musical, based on a 1914 Broadway play that became a 1926 stage musical: the film jettisons most of the Broadway score and adds two new songs. Top billing goes to Stanley Smith (who?) and Ginger Rogers as the young lovers, but they warble their songs in operetta voices, and Ginger stands aside while the only dance number is performed by others! Smith's singing voice is badly dubbed by some guy who rolls his R's and broadens his A's, bearing no semblance to Smith's speaking voice. Ginger speaks all her dialogue in Gracie Allen's voice, and sings ditto.

The actual lead roles are performed by Charles Ruggles (reprising his part from the 1926 musical) and Frank Morgan as equal partners in a firm that makes only one product: ladies' garters. (What we Brits would call "suspenders".) This premise offers huge potential for musical numbers (I kept expecting "Garter sing, garter dance!") but is ultimately wasted. Ruggles went through most of his film career with an annoying little moustache; midway through 'Queen High', he trades it for some annoying sideburns. For once, Ruggles isn't typecast as a meek husband; here, he earnestly courts Betty Garde and shows some backbone. He's also pursued by Nina Olivette, who's quite pretty but she's lumbered with a hideous hairstyle and even worse dialogue ... which is written in some horribly phony bad grammar that's vaguely prole American and vaguely prole British but really from Movie Cliché-Land. In one scene Ruggles cries her 'Australian', but she's definitely no Ozzie sheila, too right. (Another IMDb reviewer is mistaken; it's Olivette, not Garde, who plays the 'harassed maid'.)

The two best songs here were written for the movie, both with lyrics by Yip Harburg: "Brother, Just Laugh It Off" (tune by Ralph Rainger) and "I Love the Girls in My Own Peculiar Way" (Henry Souvaine). The latter is a bizarre ditty in which Ruggles claims to be a serial killer of women. He's not much of a singer; he gets one of Yip Harburg's trademark wordplays -- "When you get pneumonia, I'll 'phone ya" -- but Ruggles clearly enunciates "phone YOU", queering the rhyme. He also mistreats a black laundress.

In the opening shot, William Steiner's camera trundles forward lugubriously, twiddles its casters awhile, then trundles back again. The rest of the camera-work is merely adequate, except for one impressive set-up with Ruggles in a doorway. There's an attempt to give Stanley Smith an "entrance" by staging his first scene with his head hidden, gradually revealing his face. William Saulter's set designs throughout are excellent, especially a very convincing sequence on a New York subway platform and aboard the rush-hour train. Frank Morgan's tycoon character and his wife have a huge mansion, with twin beds about twelve feet apart.

Modern viewers get the usual old-movie reminders that money's not what it used to be: in 'Queen High', Mrs Rockwell has an annual income of $6,000 yet serves her guests caviare.

Most of the dialogue (from the original play) is quite witty, though we get a few clunkers. An orchestra musician plays "second bass", so we know this is the set-up for a baseball joke. Still, any movie that ends with a lawyer getting chucked into a pond can't be all bad.

There's an acetate print of "Queen High" in the Library of Congress, duped from a bad nitrate print; the soundtrack pops, and many scenes are dark. In one dialogue sequence, Smith calls himself "red-headed", yet throughout the movie (this LoC print, at least) his hair looks jet-black. "Queen High" really isn't good enough to rank high on the list of films wanting restoration. This movie was released while Lon Chaney was on his deathbed, but I'll bet he wasn't dying to see it. The original 1914 play was titled 'A Pair of Sixes': I'll add one more six and rate this movie 6 out of 10.