Blondes at Work (1938)

Blondes at Work (1938) was the fourth of the Torchy Blane B-movies. Between 1937 and 1939 Warner Brothers made nine Torchy Blane movies, seven of them starring Glenda Farrell. It was one of the most successful B-movie series of its era.

In Blondes at Work ace girl reporter Torchy Blane sees two guys leaving an office building. There’s nothing suspicious about that except that one of the guys looks ill but Torchy is a reporter and she notices little things like that.

The sick guy was department store tycoon Marvin Spencer and now he has disappeared. The fear is that he’s been murdered. The police have to find him - he’s an important man. And that makes this a big story, so Torchy is interested.

Torchy has been getting regularly scoops for her paper, The Star, and that has upset the other papers who have sweetheart deals with the cops. Torchy is making them look silly and she’s making the cops look silly. Torchy gets her inside dope from her boyfriend, Lieutenant Steve McBride (Barton MacLane). McBride’s chief wants these leaks to stop. McBride agrees not to give Torchy any more information but Torchy soon finds a way around that. She figures out a way to get the info from his driver, the poetic but dim-witted Detective Gahagan (Tom Kennedy).

Marvin Spencer has of course been murdered, and Torchy gets the scoop. At every step of the investigations Torchy scoops her rivals.

The plot is nothing special. That doesn’t matter at all because this movie has lots of other things going for it. Its biggest asset is Glenda Farrell. She’s funny, she’s charming, she’s feisty, she talks like a machine-gun and she’s adorable. She plays Torchy in seven of the nine movies. The two movies without her were flops. The seven movies with her were hits.

Torchy is a reporter which means she has no morals whatsoever. She’d sell her own mother for a scoop. But she’s so adorable that we love her anyway, and apart from her lack of professional ethics she’s a nice girl.

The movie’s second asset is the pairing of Glenda Farrell with Barton MacLane as her cop boyfriend. They have perfect chemistry. They have romantic chemistry - they seem like a real couple. And they have superb acting chemistry. In every scene together they strike acting sparks off each other.

The film’s third asset is its pacing. There may not be much to the plot but director Frank McDonald makes sure that there always seems to be something happening. This film has so much energy and vitality.

It also benefits from the right blending of the mystery, romance and comedic ingredients. The romance and the comedy never slow down the action. Tom Kennedy as Gahagan is a comic relief character but he’s amusing without being irritating and he and Glenda Farrell really work well together in comic scenes. And the makers of the film, very sensibly, realised that there was no need to add any other comic characters. Everyone else plays it dead straight, which makes it even more fun to watch Torchy running rings around them.

Stylistically it’s standard Warner Brothers fare which means it has that slightly tough look which works perfectly here.

Blondes at Work is bright and breezy and a lot of fun and Glenda Farrell is a delight. Highly recommended.

The transfers in the Warner Archive DVD Torchy Blane set (which includes all nine movies) are extremely good.

I’ve also reviewed the first three movies in the series - Smart Blonde (1937), Fly-Away Baby (1937) and The Adventurous Blonde (1937).