Smartest Girl in Town "ketchup blood" on his face and then embraces him. RKO Pictures was also the studio which produced the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers series of films, thus "Smartest Girl's" comic supporting players, Helen Broderick, Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes, all had prominent roles in the previous year's Astaire-Rogers hit, "Top Hat". Furthermore, two months before "Smartest Girl's" release, Blore and Broderick were seen in the dancing duo's very successful 1936 effort, "Swing Time" and, the previous year, had been in another RKO musical comedy, "To Beat the Band". As for Blore and Rhodes, both had earlier appeared in the first Astaire-Rogers vehicle,
Ginger Rogers at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997 and posthumously renamed in her honor as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. Rogers spent winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford. She continued making public appearances (chiefly at award shows) until suffering a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and dependent on a wheelchair. Despite her stroke, she was a practitioner of Christian Science and never saw a doctor or went to a hospital. Her last husband, William Marshall, would trick Rogers to take insulin since she