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,
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for Astaire and Rogers, "Shall We Dance", which co-starred Edward Everett Horton. Although the film was RKO's biggest film of the year with worldwide rentals of $2.2 million, it did not perform as well as expected by the studio. "Shall We Dance" had the first Hollywood score by the brothers George and Ira Gershwin, and included the song "They Can't Take That Away from Me". Although Astaire and Rogers would go on to make two more films together for RKO, the film's comparative disappointment in the box office was the beginning of the end for their partnership. After an unusually