A Major Disappointment

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

After watching the profoundly mediocre Torchy Blane in Chinatown I decided that I wouldn't bother watching any more movies in the Torchy series. But when I saw this on TCM, I thought, well, it's the first movie in the series so perhaps it's a bit better. After all, it inspired a series.Maybe it is better - I didn't watch enough of it to be sure - but it's certainly not very good. There is a clunky amateurishness about the film and its performers that puts it below a big percentage of B movies. It's more of a C movie.Still, if I hadn't already had a poor impression of Torchy I might have given the film more than 20 minutes. Maybe it gets better after that.

Entertaining entry in Warner Bros. "Torchy Blane" series. In fact, it's very entertaining, with all the usual trimmings of the series and with a good, solid mystery to boot. The best murder mysteries are the ones that keep you guessing right up to the end, and this one delivers.There is the usual back story, the relationship between Torchy (Glenda Farrell), the reporter/ sleuth, and Det. Steve McBride (Barton MacLane); are they an item or not? The role of Torchy is tailor-made for Glenda Farrell, the prototypical wisecracking blonde of 30's movies, and she doesn't disappoint.For Golden Age movie fans, there is another wisecracking blonde in the supporting cast who is tough to recognize - none other than Jane Wyman, who most of us remember as a brunette. Maltin says this is the only entry in the series taken from material from its author, Frederick Nebel, which could account for the better storyline than most of the other entries.

"Smart Blonde,' an above-average entry in the very popular "Torchy Blaine" B-film series about the feisty girl reporter who inspired the Lois Lane character, may be guilty of the same subconscious prejudice that pervaded many of the films of the Thirties.Although it is otherwise a wonderfully entertaining low-budget mystery, there is an isolated scene where tough guy cop Steve McBride, Torchy's boyfriend, insists that she remain in a locked car after he leaves her because they're in a "rat-hole" of a neighborhood. Glenda Farrell's Torchy is an especially aggressive and brassy professional in the typical fashion of other 1930s Warner heroines like Joan Blondell and Bette Davis, and she usually is confidently resourceful enough to strike out on her own in pursuit of a story in any circumstance.Four individuals are then shown in the street of that "rat-hole" neighborhood The first is an African-American aimlessly loitering by leaning against the wall of the building where Steve enters. The second is an Orthodox Jewish-American with beard, glasses, and hat walking past the door. The third is a Chinese-American who walks past Torchy in her car and suspiciously eyes her. The fourth is in the far background and not clearly identifiable as a ethnic type."Smart Blonde" was nothing more pretentious than any standard, assembly line programmer of the period. The "rat-hole" neighborhood was meant to suggest an area that the usually plucky and independent Torchy should be wary of. Although it's doubtful that any overt racism was intended, it's notable that the signifiers of the bad neighborhood are three readily identifiable minority types.Director Frank MacDonald was a workmanlike studio journeyman who told stories as quickly and efficiently as possible. The source material was one of the Kennedy and McBride stories by Frederick Lewis Nebel and went through six different Warner staff writers, emerging as assembly line product.Kennedy, the reporter half of the crime-fighting duo, was a male alcoholic in the original stories, so the problems of presenting drunks heroically under the newly-implemented motion picture code was easily solved by transforming him into the sober, female Torchy Blaine, whose only vice was a good sirloin steak. That change eliminated the problem while maintaining tensions in the relationship.It should be noted that pulp crime fiction writer Nebel(under the name Brett Halliday) was also the creator of another popular screen detective, Michael Shayne, portrayed by Lloyd Nolan in seven films for Fox in the Forties. Given the alterations of both characters by the studios only confirmed Nebel's contempt of Hollywood.

Smart Blonde is the first film of the Torchy Blane series with Glenda Farrell as former showgirl turned reporter with a real keen sense of a scoop. She works the police beat where she constantly runs up against her boyfriend, homicide cop Barton MacLane. Depending on how you view things, Torchy's a help or a hindrance. But in this case she was literally on top of the story. Seconds after being interviewed by her, nightclub impresario Joseph Crehan is shot down in Union Station.Crehan was going to buy a nightclub owned by Addison Richards who was getting out of the business and getting ready to marry Charlotte Wynters and go into the real estate business with her and her brother Robert Paige, leaving his club singer Wini Shaw all in distress. Another one in distress is Max Wagner, Richards's gunsill because there's not much call for his line of work in real estate.One murder later of course Torchy's put it all together for MacLane and gets her paper the scoop. But the plot does take an interesting twist or two, it's not who you think it is.Jane Wyman has a small supporting role as a hatcheck girl with a tendency to gossip which aids Farrell in her story. This was of course at the beginning of Wyman's career which included a film as Torchy Blane herself when Farrell quit the series.Smart Blonde proves how popular the Torchy Blane series was at Warner Brothers and why it was so well received in the late Thirties.