by Ray Hagen
The play opened on March 11, 1930. For their supporting roles in Penny Arcade, Cagney and Blondell got most of the notices. It lasted only 24 performances, but it would propel both actors to Hollywood.
“Al Jolson saw the show,” Joan explained later, “and he bought it, then sold it to Warner Brothers with the stipulation that they take and use two people from the Broadway company, Cagney and Blondell. So they had to take us, and that’s how we got into pictures. We arrived in Hollywood the same day and we were signed the same day, for just that one picture, of course, which ended up being [retitled] Sinner’s Holiday.”
Contrary to popular belief (and Joan herself), Cagney and Blondell didn’t switch their original roles with Grant Withers and Evalyn Knapp for the film version; they played the same roles they had on Broadway. Cagney plays a weak-willed son shielded from a murder rap by an over-protective mother, while Joan is his snappy girlfriend (“Don’t do anything while I’m gone you couldn’t do on a bicycle”).
The two might have come to Warners for just one picture, but it didn’t take long for the studio to act. “[The] whole bunch of them saw the first day’s rushes,” Joan recalled. “We were shooting on the back lot—I’ll never forget that day… Cagney and I had done our scene the day before and we were there to do a little more. All the bosses came down: Warner, Zanuck and all of them, with a contract, a long-term, five-year contract, and they signed us on that back lot in the broad daylight. So that’s how that started, and from then on, it was one picture after another.” Her starting salary would be $200 to Cagney’s $400 a week.
No time was wasted. Blondell started making movies at a fast and furious clip, although at first her parts were minimal. Before Sinner’s Holiday was released, she was rushed into The Office Wife (1930). She played either wisecracking pals to the heroines, sexy dames, or both, in Illicit, Millie, My Past and God’s Gift to Women (all 1931). Today Joan is just barely in existing prints of the then-controversial, now-classic The Public Enemy (1931), as Eddie Woods’ gal pal. After mandatory cuts from censors, several of her scenes were removed, including one where she and Woods share a bed.
Blondell was the only bright spot in the otherwise dreary Big Business Girl (1931), appearing in the last ten minutes as a professional divorce correspondent (“My life is just one hotel room after another”). Her bawdy, earthy presence (“Well, I’ll be a dirty drink of water!”) was a relief, and numerous critics took note of that fact. In Night Nurse (1931), an unsavory story of an attempt to starve a wealthy child, Joan was a flippant nurse (she chews gum during her nurse’s oath) who joins star Barbara Stanwyck in uncovering the conspiracy. Many reviewers at the time, and still today, fondly recall Night Nurse for the scenes where the girls strip down to their scanties.
Columnist Jimmy Starr was one of those taking notice of this lively film newcomer. “Joan Blondell, in her favorite role of the wisecracking sister, again saves the day, or cinema, in this case,” Starr wrote about The Reckless Hour. “Miss Blondell has a way about her that is fascinating because she can spout off the most obvious lines without making them the least bit obvious. It’s her knack—and a good one.”
She was rewarded with her first lead (replacing Marian Marsh), opposite James Cagney, in Blonde Crazy (1931). Bellboy Cagney teams up on the road with Blondell to “take from a lot of wise guys. Cheat a lot of cheaters.” It was an ebullient pre–Coder with sex, brash banter, frame-ups and two stars totally in control and having fun with their material—and each other. Their chemistry was so good that Warners eventually placed them together three more times (The Crowd Roars, Footlight Parade and He Was Her Man), as well as announcing them for all sorts of projects (Saturday’s Children, Blessed Event).
The year 1932 would be her busiest. Gathered together with Blonde Crazy, these ten films solidified Blondell’s screen persona to her growing audience. “I’m no Pollyanna, or sweet 16 either,” she tells Doug Fairbanks, Jr., in Union Depot. “I’ve been around, I know what it’s all about. But, gee, I always try to keep decent. There’s a few things I draw the line at.” Or put more simply in Central Park, “Of course I’ve got nerve, but I’ve got a little principle too.” It was a principle that took her through most of her films. If she was a tart, as in Three on a Match, The Crowd Roars and Big City Blues, and, later, Gold Diggers of 1933, the love of a good man (Warren William, Eric Linden) would eventually redeem her. In Three on a Match, her mother is adamant: “She’s not a bad girl, she’s just not serious enough. She’s too full of fun.” Joan eventually learns, and tries to knock some sense into her married friend Ann Dvorak, who is sowing some wild oats. “You’re a fool, Vivian. Take it from someone who’s been one. How can you do this to a man who’s been on the square?”
Joan’s image-defining roles in ’32 included a loan-out to Samuel Goldwyn, The Greeks Had a Word For Them, a delectably crude comedy about three fun-lovin’, hard-drinkin’ gals (top-billed Ina Claire, J.B. and Madge Evans) who are “always together, thicker than thieves, out for no good.” Joan plays the somewhat dim Schatze, peacemaker between the always bickering Claire and Evans, who says flippantly of one man, “He’s my fiancé. Not that we’re engaged or anything like that.” It was later reissued, retitled Three Broadway Girls, with Blondell gaining top billing. More than anything, the film was notable for introducing Joan to its cameraman, George S. Barnes. The couple would marry on January 4, 1933.
A flip Joan Blondell (right) defies an angry James Cagney, as a concerned Ann Dvorak watches, in The Crowd Roars (WB, 1932).
The Depression was at its peak in 1933, and so was Blondell. She exemplified the average woman of that dismal period. Audiences could relate to her honesty, her drive, and her humor and strength in the face of adversity. She came across as one of them—a down-to-earth gift she never lost. “I related to the shopgirls and chorus girls, just ordinary gals who were hoping. I would get endless fan mail from girls saying, ‘That is exactly what I would have done, if I’d been in your shoes, you did exactly the right thing.’ So I figured that was my popularity, relating to the girls.”
A futile trip to welfare and her mother’s needless death at the start of Blondie Johnson prompts a fed-up Joan to no longer stick by the rules, telling racketeer Chester Morris, “I know all the answers and I know what it’s all about. I found out that the only thing worthwhile is dough, and I’m gonna get it, see? This city is gonna pay me a living, a good living, and it’s gonna get back from me just as little as I have to give.” She eventually elevates herself to head of the rackets. Blondell gave a smart, honest, sympathetic portrayal of a woman whose hard life urges her on.
Blondie Johnson was the second of three movies pitting Claire Dodd, Warners’ resourceful temptress, as nemesis to Blondell for the affections of the leading man. Introduced to Dodd in Johnson, an unimpressed Joan dryly remarks, “Yeah, I think we’ve been introduced four or five hundred times. How do you do.” More catty is their intro in Footlight Parade (1933): “I know Miss Bi…Fitch,” Joan quickly states. When Cagney finally wakes up to Dodd’s insincerity, it’s Blondell who triumphantly gives her the heave-ho (and a kick on the rear):
DODD: But where do I go?
BLONDELL: Outside, Countess. As long as they have sidewalks, you have a job.
Many of Blondell’s characters always felt the need to give short histories of themselves, often to the men they loved and felt unworthy of. In Gold Diggers of 1933 she lays it on the line to Warren William: “Carol, that’s my name. Cheap and vulgar Carol. Daughter of a Brooklyn saloon keeper and a woman who took in washing. Carol, the torch singer at Coney Island. Cheap and vulgar.”
Gold Diggers is best known today for Busby Berkeley’s seven-minute, dramatically staged anthem for war veterans hit by the Depression. The poignancy Blondell brought to the song didn’t surprise Berkeley one bit: “I knew Joan couldn’t sing when I decided to use her in the ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ number. But I knew she could act the song, talk it, and put over its drama for me.” Author Cha
rles Higham wrote: “She symbolizes, in that sequence, the thirties, just as Crawford in broad-shouldered mink on a fog-cloaked wharf in Mildred Pierce moodily symbolizes the forties.”
As 1933 was coming to a close, Warners hit comic pay dirt with Havana Widows, the first teaming of Blondell with Glenda Farrell. It was an inspired idea—two golddiggers, one devious (Glenda), the other more favorable to love (Joan)—tearin’ up the screen and demonstrating some lively chemistry. It was so good it’s a shame Warners didn’t do even more.
Joan and Glenda, formerly with “Iwanna Shakitoff—Direct from Russia with her 40 Beautiful Hip Hip Hooray Girls” in burlesque, seek wealthy husbands in Havana: “A couple of smart dames like us can take over the joint,” boasts Glenda. When they arrive, Joan falls for Lyle Talbot (not bad), but Glenda, always the schemer, wants her to go after Guy Kibbee instead. Farrell devises a slick blackmail ploy in an abandoned building:
FARRELL: If he’s cold at first, don’t get discouraged. Remember, Nero played a fiddle while Rome burned.
BLONDELL: Well, you better act fast because I’m not going to burn long enough for him to do much fiddlin’.
Farrell was always getting Blondell into trouble. Her advice to Joan in the frisky Kansas City Princess (1934) says it all: “A girl’s gotta have three things nowadays: money, jack and dough. About time you learned it.” Princess had a brief, but priceless, scene where the girls, manicurists hiding from Robert Armstrong, disguise themselves as Girl Scouts.
Joan gave a pithy summation of their characters in We’re in the Money (1935), where they were lady process-servers: “I’ve got the nobleness, she’s got the ambition.” They were ex-chorus girls working in a carnival in Miss Pacific Fleet (1935), which was filled with the usual deadpan deliveries and merriment, as well as gorgeous Warren Hull (“I know my weakness,” Joan sighs).
Warners seemed to lose interest in the duo, which is puzzling. Joan and Glenda would have only minimal contact in I’ve Got Your Number (1934), Traveling Saleslady (1935) and Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936). The ads for Saleslady were deceptive: “The gimme girls are at it again! They get their biggest orders after office hours! They make business a pleasure … and how they love their work!” They were not a team in the picture, a fact that greatly diminished its entertainment value. When Warners did put them together, they were the snappiest gals on screen.
They were also, not surprisingly, the best of friends off-screen. Glenda’s son Tommy Farrell told Dan Van Neste in 1998, “Joan and my mother were ‘bosom buddies.’ When they were at Warners together, during their lunch hours, they would go out shopping, and the director would say, ‘Where are the girls?’ They’d have to go chasing them.”
Joan became pregnant in the beginning of 1934, giving birth to a son, Norman, on November 2. But Warners was unrelenting; she made five films that year.
It was an exhausting schedule, but she showed the usual spunk in Dames, as a former member of the Jolly Widows burlesque troupe (“I’ve got 17-cents and the clothes I stand in, but there’s life in the old girl yet”). She blackmails Guy Kibbee (again) to help Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler put on a show. The top-billed Blondell gets to talk-sing one of her best known numbers, “The Girl at the Ironing Board,” as well as “Try to See It My Way, Baby.”
Warner Brothers’ snappy golddiggers Glenda Farrell and Joan Blondell, seven-time co-stars and best friends off-camera, share a laugh on the set of Traveling Saleslady (WB, 1935).
She was untypically out-of-control, as well as “spoiled, selfish, and headstrong” in Smarty. “Wounds are nicely healed,” her husband Warren William tells her, “and you gotta take out the stitches and see if everything is bleeding nicely inside.” Antagonizing him unceasingly, her ambiguous reference to “dice carrots,” possibly a sexual reference, finally freaks him out and he slugs her. Before this odd, but very funny, comedy is through, it’s quite naively clear: women should be slapped regularly to keep them in line. The seductive ending probably caused censors at the time some headaches. Making up with William, Blondell lies on the coach with open arms. As he moves down on her, Joan coos, “Tony dear, hit me again.”
The fun on-camera didn’t transfer to real-life. She sued George Barnes for divorce on August 12, 1935, claiming “he went hours without speaking to her, drove his car while intoxicated, and ignored guests at their home.” It was also revealed later that he made Joan submit to abortions because he didn’t want children.
Almost immediately Joan was seen around town with singer Dick Powell, her co-star in five previous films. During their much publicized romance in ’36 they would be seen together in three more. They married on September 19, 1936; Powell would eventually adopt her son.
It was around this time that Blondell started to get a little antsy about what she felt was the heavy reliance on comedy and the sameness of her roles. She wanted dramatic parts. She was given a nice, non-comic role in Bullets or Ballots (1936), but it was strictly an Edward G. Robinson picture. She admitted to the L.A. Evening Herald Express that she didn’t “want to do heavy things, to die or be stabbed or starve to death,” but, added bitterly, “I’ll probably be a comic until the day I walk out of Warner Brothers.”
Which was essentially true. Yet who could resist Blondell, more madcap than usual, in Stage Struck (1936)? It was a part, played to the hilt by a zany and willing Blondell, of a hammy, temperamental socialite-actress who runs around with three dogs on a leash—and a loaded gun:
BLONDELL: I’m Peggy Revere.
POWELL: The girl who shot her husband?
BLONDELL: Nothing. A mere flesh wound.
The problem with Blondell’s character, besides her attitude, is, according to all, “she can’t sing, she can’t dance and she can’t act—and she’ll murder this show!” To get her out, Dick Powell and the show’s producer Warren William try to make her believe she’s seriously ill. In a hilarious scene, a right-on-target, over-dramatic Blondell relishes the seriousness of her “illness”: “Gentlemen, no x-rays. I don’t look well enough for pictures.” When it seems Jeanne Madden will go on in Joan’s place, Blondell shows up backstage shouting valiantly, “Once a trouper, always a trouper!” All ends “happily” when she is detained backstage shooting her equally hammy boyfriend (Craig Reynolds) and being led away in handcuffs.
She was Sam Levene’s Brooklynese girlfriend, whose mama “was a strip goil in burlesque,” in Three Men on a Horse (1936), based on the stage hit. Even though her part was not the best, Joan projected a sweet quality in Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936), especially in her scenes with Dick Powell, who sang to her “With Plenty of Money and You.” Not good was Back in Circulation (1937), her second of four with Pat O’Brien. As with the upcoming, even more dismal Off the Record (1939), also with O’Brien, Joan plays a reporter out for the big scoop. The funniest bit in the whole picture had Blondell laying two right hooks on a guy trying to rough up O’Brien.
Two of her best during her waning days at Warners were, not surprisingly, loan-outs: Stand-In (UA, 1937) with Leslie Howard, and her first Columbia comedy with Melvyn Douglas, There’s Always a Woman (1938). The latter in particular showed off Joan, the spry, delightful comedienne, in a tailor-made vehicle. If Warners was sticking her into the same routine, as good as that routine was in her capable hands, Columbia wrote above the norm for her. And she excels. With a smooth, very compatible Douglas, they do a bickering take-off on Powell and Loy from the Thin Man series; Blondell, playing detective, and hubby Douglas, working for the D.A., aid and abet each other on a murder case. One scene stands out because of its sheer absurdity: the interrogating of Blondell, who won’t give up a clue, by the police. After hours of the “third degree,” it is the cops, not Joan, who crack; she remains bright and cheery throughout it all. A weary detective finally admits defeat. “Unless I can use a hose on her—I give up.” The film was so popular, a follow-up, There’s That Woman Again, was set in motion, but Warners refused to loan her; Virginia Bruce subbed.
When Joan b
ecame pregnant again, giving birth to daughter Ellen on July 1, 1938, Warners simply “squashed” her into a girdle, she told John Kobal later, and “I thought I was gonna die. I passed out a couple of times from it.” They kept her working non-stop and she was hospitalized at one point with extreme exhaustion. She claimed she didn’t feel mistreated, but all this had to get some ideas moving around.
Especially since her roles were getting more generic. She was seeing important roles easily played by herself go to others, both contract and non-contract players. Warners was also building up Ann Sheridan, who was the same type. The pickings, if they were slim before, would get even slimmer.
Dick Powell was likewise sick of his musical parts, wanting roles with more substance to them. It was he who made the decision for the both of them to leave Warners in the beginning of 1939. Joan never fought for better roles or more money. She would have stayed contentedly at Warners if Powell didn’t move, simply because of the atmosphere. “We were all brothers and sisters, Pat O’Brien and I told each other everything, one experience and one joke after another. We’d work together and help each other. There was a camaraderie and professional way of working that’s lost now, it seems to me… We were family, so in front of that camera it was really teamwork.”
Joan’s last under contract, The Kid from Kokomo, was made in December of ’38. It was, luckily, a very funny movie, with Joan as a wisecracking ex–bubble dancer engaged to fight manager Pat O’Brien, but the ace part was handled by an untamed May Robson. It did nothing for Blondell’s rep, but it was a nice exit from the studio.
Director David Butler requested her for Bing Crosby’s East Side of Heaven (1939), her first freelancer, but one wonders why. You get Blondell, you anticipate spunk, wisecracks and the like, but the part wasn’t written in that direction; it was simply flat, a typical Crosby leading lady, not the kind of role she had hoped for. But this was followed by two lively Columbia Melvyn Douglas comedies, Good Girls Go to Paris and The Amazing Mr. Williams (both 1939).