Blondie Johnson

My latest movie viewing was the pre-code Blondie Johnson.

Joan Blondell plays the title role, a woman who at the beginning of the movie is suffering from the effects of the Depression having hit her in just about every way possible. She's at a relief agency looking for help because she hasn't worked in four months; her sister died tragically; and her mom is deathly ill with the owner of the building possibly about to evict them because Mom might be contagious. But because she wasn't fired, instead having quit her job because her boss was trying to use her for sexual favors, the guy at the relief agency says no help for you.

When Mom dies, Blondie realizes she has to make money in a different way. With the help of very small-time grifter Red (Sterling Holloway), a cabbie when he's making money honestly. The two combine in a scam that has richer guys paying for an emergency taxi ride across town; he only takes her around the block and pocket the difference. They shouldn't keep trying it in the same area, because when she's in a diner at the end of the meeting, one of the guys she scammed runs into her.

That man is Danny (Chester Morris), a middle-level gangster, and he tries to convince her to go in with him. She wants to take down the bigger bosses, and do it on her own terms, so although she likes Danny, she has no intentions of being subordinate to him. Eventually she does make it to something resembling the top, but her group has some indiscretions in the past that threaten to bring her down.

Blondie Johnson feels likes a slew of the other pre-Code Joan Blondell and gangster movies that Warner Bros. was churning out like an assembly line in the early 1930s. In many regards, it's not bad at all. But it also feels as though something is missing, as you might have inferred from my perfunctory synopsis.

It didn't take me too long to realize that the something that was missing is James Cagney. Morris is adequate as a guy who is really a second banana, but in all those Cagney/Blondell movies, the two had a zest that just jumped off the screen. There's very little of that in Blondie Johnson, which is why the whole thing feels routine and just not quite right.

Blondie Johnson is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, but it's really one of those movies that should have been put on those old four-film TCM-branded box sets that Warner Home Video was putting out. As a standalone, I'd look for a lot of other things first.