Heartbeat (1946)



Of all the Ginger Rogers films I have seen I have generally like them all. Heartbeat I can say is the only film of Rogers’s that I did not like. She plays an eighteen year old girl (yes eighteen when she was thirty-five years in 1946!!!), Arlette, who has run away from her boarding school in France. Arlette has entered a school for pickpocketers where she receives room and board. On her first pickpocket assignment she messes up and gets caught by an ambassador (Adolphe Menjou). The ambassador sees that she was a good pickpocketer and gives her an assignment or more like a bribe: she has to come to a party with him to pickpocket from someone or he turns her over to the police.

            At the party Arlette has to pickpocket a young handsome diplomat named Roland Latour. She begins to fall in love with the diplomat. Arlette does her job and keeps Roland from getting in trouble with the ambassador. Roland is completely in love with Arlette but when she gets in trouble with the pickpocket school she runs to his house and he becomes annoyed with her.

            But as in all “love” stories the two main characters wind up together at the end.

            I was so bored with Heartbeat. I seriously could not get over the fact that Ginger Rogers was playing an eighteen year old when she was thirty-five. This is what Rogers looked like when she was nineteen years old:

                                             And this is this is a promotional picture from the film:

Yeah a bit of a difference.

 I was not into the story I felt that it was not well written nor was it well acted. Rogers was not too bad but she was not at her best and neither was Menjou and I always like his performances. The actor who played Roland Latour was never really popular and not in too many films. I did not like him at all.

            I guess if you would really like give Heartbeat a try. I believe it is on Youtube right now because it is public domain (I have it in a one hundred pack of classic films).