Sat 5 Mar 2011
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: QUEEN HIGH (1930).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[5] Comments
QUEEN HIGH. Paramount, 1930. Charlie Ruggles, Frank Morgan, Ginger Rogers, Stanley Smith, Helen Carrington, Rudolph Cameron, Tom Brown. Music arranged by John Green. Director: Fred C. Newmeyer. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.
This early sound musical, based on a Broadway musical comedy that co-starred Charlie Ruggles and Frank McIntyre, was adapted for the screen with McIntrye replaced by Frank Morgan, and an enlarged ingenue role for Ginger Rogers.
Morgan and Ruggles are combative partners in a garter-manufacturing business, which is the basis for some naughty dialogue and semi-risque situations in the opening scenes. When the two partners decide to dissolve their relationship, their lawyer devises a plan in which the loser at a game of cards will serve as valet to the other partner for a year, after which the partnership will be dissolved.
Ruggles loses the game and his increasing dissatisfaction with his new role and his attempts to sabotage it fuel the comic situations until it’s all happily resolved. There’s a nicely staged musical number early in the film, but the music is generally incidental to the comedy.
March 6th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
That’s a pretty good cast — Ruggles, Morgan, and Ginger Rogers.
My favorite Ruggles starring role is probably in RUGGLES OF RED GAP as the uncooth westerener who wins English butler Charles Laughton in a poker game. He’s also fine in the 1930 CHARLEY’S AUNT, though the film is itself a bit creaky.
And he has a Mystery File connection of sorts. In the wake of the San Francisco earthquake he worked as an insurance investigator. You have to wonder if he worked with famous private eye Ray Schindler who also got his star then.
March 6th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Ruggles is also superb as big game hunter Maj. Horace Applegate, coincidently visiting Susan Vance’s (Katherine Hepburn’s) aunt on her suburban estate, when Baby the leopard gets loose (as does also a vicious circus leopard) in BRINGING UP BABY.
The expression on Ruggles’ face when he imitates the call of a leopard in CT. and a real leopard answers is priceless…
March 7th, 2011 at 12:35 am
Truthfully Ruggles was priceless in about anything he did. He even has a starring role in the radio adaptation of John Dickson Carr’s THE BURNING COURT on SUSPENSE.
But that look on his face in BRINGING UP BABY is one of the great double takes of all time.
March 7th, 2011 at 7:23 am
I think this was re-made as a Wheeler-Wolsey flick, but the title escapes me. Ah well….
March 7th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Here it is:
On Again–Off Again (1937).
From a viewer’s comment on the latter: “The boys are partners in a pill company but they battle constantly. So their lawyer finally decides to settle it by a wrestling match. The loser has to serve the other as a valet. But what they don’t know is that there is a take-over bid by a bankrupt company waiting to take advantage of their bickering.”
Both films were based on the play “A Pair of Sixes,” by Edward Peple (1914).