The Adventurous Blonde (1937)

The Adventurous Blonde was the third of the nine Torchy Blane B-movies made by Warner Brothers between 1937 and 1939. Glenda Farrell played the title rôle and Barton MacLane played her boyfriend and partner in crime-solving, Lieutenant Steve McBride, in all but two of these films.

Feisty girl reporters were a regular feature of Hollywood B-movies of that era but it was something that Glenda Farrell did particularly well. She’s one of the two big assets in this movie, the other being the delightful chemistry she has with Barton MacLane. In this movie Torchy and McBride are about to get married. In fact it seems like they’re about to get married in every one of the Torchy Blane movies. It becomes a kind of running gag. Every time they’re about to walk down the aisle somebody gets murdered. There’s only one thing McBride loves more than Torchy, and that’s a good murder case. And there’s only one thing Torchy loves more than McBride, and that’s the chance of getting a scoop on a murder case. So the marriage keeps getting put off.

The Adventurous Blonde begins with a joke. Due to her connection with Lieutenant McBride Torchy keeps scooping her rivals. Several of those rival reporters decide to teach her and McBride a lesson - they’ll set up a phoney murder, Torchy will think she’s got another scoop, then when her story gets printed they will reveal (in a rival newspaper) that it was a hoax and that there never was a murder.

A once-famous actor whose career is on the downslide agrees to further the hoax by faking his own murder.

Of course things don’t turn out as those jealous reporters had hoped. The fake murder turns out to be all too real, and Torchy gets her scoop.

Now Torchy and Steve McBride have an actual murder to solve.

McBride follows the obvious leads while Torchy suspects there’s more to this case. The plot gets quite involved with some good twists. It’s hard to keep up with the games Torchy is playing, and that of course is her intention - to mystify and then trap the real killer.

Naturally you don’t want to take any of the plot seriously. No reporters would ever pull a stunt as crazy as the murder hoax. No reporter would trample journalistic ethics quite so thoroughly as Torchy does in this movie. But this is not real life, it’s a movie. Things happen in movies that could never happen in real life and the characters in movies take those things for granted. Actual murder investigations involve huge amounts of incredibly boring routine police work. Nobody would ever watch a movie that approached police work in a realistic manner.

This is movie escapism and you just have to enjoy the ride.

The Torchy-McBride romance doesn’t feel like a mere tacked-on gimmick. While the murder investigation is wildly unrealistic the Torchy-McBride relationship does feel at least partly grounded in reality. A relationship between an ambitious cop and an ambitious reporter is going to be tempestuous and filled with tensions. But they’re both likeable and we want them to work things out. We just don’t want them to work things out yet - we want to see more fireworks between them in the next movie in the series.

I’ve already mentioned Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane as the movie’s biggest assets. Homicide cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy) is a comic relief character but he’s kept in the background and never becomes irritating. The other cast members are perfectly competent.

The 61-minute running time is a plus - it demands rapid pacing and that’s what the movie delivers.

The ending is quite satisfactory, both in terms of the mystery and the romance angles.

This movie is light breezy fun. If you accept it for what it is, a B-movie with no ambitions to be anything more than a B-movie, it’s highly recommended.

All nine Torchy Blane movies are included in the Warner Archive DVD boxed set. The transfers are quite acceptable.

I’ve reviewed the two earlier Torchy Blane movies, Smart Blonde (1937) and Fly-Away Baby (1937).