SMART BLONDE (1937)

Director: Frank McDonald

Writers: Kenneth Gamut, Don Ryan, adapting Frederick Nebel’s story “No Hard Feelings”

Producers: Jack L. Warner, Hal B. Wallis

Cast: Glenda Farrell, Barton MacLane, Winifred Shaw, Addison Richards, Charlotte Wynters (as Charlotte Winters), Robert Paige (as David Carlyle), Craig Reynolds, Max Wagner, Jane Wyman, Tom Kennedy, Joseph Crehan, George Lloyd, Joe Cunningham (uncredited), George Guhl (uncredited) 

When racetrack, fight arena, and nightclub owner Fitz Mularkey (Addison Richards)  decides to “go legitimate” by getting married and settling down, he agrees to sell his businesses to his reputable friend “Tiny” Torgenson (Joseph Crehan) for much less than some shady operators were offering. Torgenson is soon gunned down. Police Lieutenant Detective Steve McBride (Barton MacLane) is trying to solve the case while warning Mularkey not to take the law into his own hands for vengeance. McBride’s girlfriend, ace newspaper reporter Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell), assists and exasperates the hard-boiled cop in her zeal to solve the mystery and get the scoop for her paper. 

The Flashback Fanatic movie review 

Nowadays journalism often seems to be either an anachronism or an affectation. While journalistic standards have always had lapses, those lapses used to be a source of shame when exposed. Much of today’s so-called news is shamelessly crafted just to be clickbait and biased barbs spewed by celebrity talking heads pandering to their chosen ideological market.

The traditional competitive standard of the news media getting the real story quickly and accurately was an inspiring ideal. In the good old days of fewer media outlets in the 1930s, newspapers were probably the most respected conduits of information for public awareness. Newspaper reporters were often regarded with a bit of reverence and romanticized. That’s because the public had not lost the faith in the notion that a free press was vital to truly informing the public so that elected officials could be held accountable. Reporters were the workaday heroes doing their part to maintain a democracy.

To the moviegoers in the depths of the Great Depression, newspaper reporter characters ferreting out the truth were very appealing. There was certainly no more appealing representative of the press than Theresa “Torchy” Blane. Actress Glenda Farrell set the standard for brassy, beautiful reporters back in 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum. I was smitten with her in that film and was delighted to find out that she brought her spunk and humor to another female reporter character in the Torchy Blane film series. 

Smart Blonde is the first of nine Torchy Blane films made in just two years. Seven of those films star the two-and-only Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane. Most of these hour-long B films are mysteries that are the duty of Police Detective Steve McBride to investigate and are only solved with the additional wits and daring of his girlfriend, reporter Torchy Blane.

Beautiful blonde Glenda Farrell had been acting on the stage since childhood. She became a very busy film actress at Warner Bros. Pictures throughout the 1930s. Farrell appeared in gangster pictures, dramas, mysteries, and comedies. Her fame probably peaked when she starred as the sassy, daring, and fast-talking heroine of the Torchy Blane films. Farrell’s performance is great fun and the main reason these films became so popular. 

Barton MacLane is the perfect surly and burly foil to sassy and sexy Glenda Farrell. MacLane was also under contract to Warner Bros. in the ’30s. He usually played supporting character roles and villains during his film career. It must have been a nice change of pace for MacLane to play the heroic co-starring lead in the Torchy Blane series. By 1939 MacLane would marry Charlotte Wynters who plays Marcia Friel, the fiancée of Addison Richard’s Fitz Mularkey, in Smart Blonde. 

Farrell and MacLane play well off of each other. They both portray down-to-earth urbanites dedicated to their professions that benefit the public. The banter and bickering between these two characters are the main charms of these flicks. Torchy loves to tease her hard-boiled cop boyfriend and resents often being told to mind her own business. Of course her newshound instincts can’t be tamed, and she continues to compete with or assist Detective McBride until the culprit is exposed. 

As these films are brisk crime dramas full of humor, running gags are established in this very first series entry. Torchy seems to have an insatiable appetite for more than news and is always nagging McBride to take her to dinner (usually a steak). These meals are often postponed due to the demands of McBride’s detective duties. The films are also always teasing the prospect of marriage between these two characters that keeps getting delayed due to the demands of the latest case. 

The particulars of this case fly by pretty fast and, as in many B films with their mile-a-minute dialogue, you really need to pay attention. While the story is meant to present our crime-solving couple with a mystery to unravel, the real draw here is being amused along the way with their mutual antagonism and affection. 

Farrell’s iconic portrayal of pushy female newspaper reporters inspired the creation of the Lois Lane character by writer Jerry Siegel for his DC Comics Superman stories. It is also interesting to note that the first actress to try replacing Farrell for the fifth film in the series was Lola Lane. That similarity of names could just be an amazing coincidence as the Torchy Blane film that Lane starred in was released one month after the Superman and Lois Lane characters debuted in the first issue of Action Comics. However, many years later Jerry Siegel said that he liked the name of actress Lola Lane whom he was aware had also played Torchy and claimed that suggested his naming of the Lois Lane character. Perhaps prior to the publication of that first Superman story, Siegel had noticed Lola Lane in earlier film roles or else he had read some movie news about Lola Lane replacing Farrell for Torchy Blane in Panama (1938)? 

In this nine film series, Warner Bros. Pictures tried replacing the leads Farrell and MacLane twice. Each time the moviegoers did not embrace those replacements. The last film in the series, Torchy Blane... Playing with Dynamite (1939), had Torchy played by Jane Wyman. In this first Torchy Blane film, Wyman appeared in the small role of Dixie, the hatcheck girl. 

So, if you long for the days when journalism meant showing the cops how to solve murder mysteries (and looking absolutely fabulous while doing it), tag along on the newsbeat with The Morning Herald’s Torchy Blane. She certainly knows how to increase my circulation.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

Director: Michael Curtiz

Writers: Don Mullaly, Carl Erickson, Charles S. Belden (original story)

Producers (uncredited): Henry Blanke, Hal B. Wallis

Cast: Glenda Farrell, Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Frank McHugh, Edwin Maxwell, Allen Vincent, Gavin Gordon, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Holmes Herbert, Claude King, Thomas E. Jackson, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Monica Bannister 

In 1921 London, sculptor Ivan Igor’s (Lionel Atwill) waxworks museum is set on fire for the insurance money by his unscrupulous business partner Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell). The two men fight amid the blaze, and Igor is left unconscious as the museum burns down. Twelve years later, Igor is opening a new wax museum in New York City. Due to injuries suffered in the fire that destroyed his London museum, Igor is crippled and can no longer sculpt, but he instructs other artists to do the work of recreating his exhibits. Meanwhile, newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) is investigating the suicide of a beautiful model (Monica Bannister) and learns that the woman’s body has disappeared from the morgue. She soon notices that the Joan of Arc wax figure in Igor’s museum bears a striking resemblance to the missing suicide victim. 

The Flashback Fanatic movie review

Mystery of the Wax Museum is director Michael Curtiz’s horror follow-up to his Doctor X (1932). It inherits many of that earlier film’s advantages, while benefiting from a more logical plot. Once again, it stars Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, it is filmed using the innovative two-strip Technicolor process, it touches upon some pre-Code subjects that would soon be glossed over or removed from later Hollywood films, and its depression era, big city setting provides grit and energy to the proceedings.

The film even shares set pieces with the earlier Doctor X. There is another morgue scene dealt with in more sinister fashion, another shocking reveal of the movie’s menace, a strange, vast set where we learn of the villain’s weird motives, and the final battle while trying to save the damsel in distress. 

This film’s greatest attribute is Glenda Farrell. As brassy, beautiful, blonde newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey, she provides the mile-a-minute banter and the perseverance to dig out the story that leads us to the revelations behind this movie’s menace. She also provides plenty of caustic contrast to the innocence of her lovely roommate, Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray). Despite her hard-boiled front, Farrell’s Florence Dempsey manages to be a very appealing character. Farrell would go on to star again as a feisty newswoman in the '30s Torchy Blane film series. Superman’s co-creator and writer, Jerry Siegel, was inspired by Farrell’s performances when he added reporter Lois Lane to his hero’s supporting cast of characters. 

The edgier topics touched upon by this pre-Code film are Dempsey’s potential love interest having a history of living with a woman out of wedlock and buying prohibition era bootleg booze, another character being a drug addict and the cops waiting for his withdrawal pains to make him spill some information, Dempsey snatching up a few bottles of bootleg booze right under the noses of the police and telling them that they’ll also take some for themselves, and Dempsey’s greeting to a cop reading a Naughty Stories pulp magazine, “How’s your sex life?” All of these bits ground the film in an earthy, urban environment that humanizes the characters and reminds us that this bizarre mystery is happening in a real world. 

Overall, the film’s construction is more measured and its characters more engaging than the earlier Doctor X. While both films have their very satisfying horror highlights, striking sets, and thrilling climaxes, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a bit more polished and rational as a whole. Both films are fine examples of horror in the early talkies era, and it is a shame that director Curtiz only returned to the genre once more with The Walking Dead (1936). 

When the film was remade as House of Wax (1953), it featured another contemporary cinema innovation/gimmick by being shot in full color 3-D. Like Lionel Atwill in the earlier version, House of Wax star Vincent Price would soon become a horror movie mainstay. 

Both versions are great fun, but I tend to lean toward the original. It seems just a bit more subversive and crackles with that hard-bitten, depression era energy radiating from Glenda Farrell that can always inspire a bit of hope in hard times.