Blonde Crazy (1931)

There are only a few things that would distract me from fondling my Ford at Fox box set - one of them being a Joan Blondell retrospective. And MoMA has to go and foist one upon me at a most inopportune time. But go I must. So I did. Tonight was the 1931 Warner cheapie Blonde Crazy, directed by Roy Del Ruth. A lean 80 minutes of slapping-as-flirtation, weird welcomes ("Come in, rest your face and hands"), and lecherous industrialists. The unstoppable Cagney-Blondell duo hook up as con artists and travel the great country of ours swindling other swindlers out of dough from the largest hotel in the midwest to the largest hotel in the largest city. Blondell's a little reluctant, but Cagney pops his eyebrows up, bats his eyelashes, spouts some nasal nonsense, and she's charmed.

Anyway, forget the plot. This movie is about eyes - Blondell's glinty saucers and Cagney's squinty daggers. There's also some eyebrow action, as mentioned - but it's mainly in the eyes as Cagney flirts his way into double-crosses and disaster. But Joan B., with her acid putdowns and loving eyes, always plucks him back from the precipice - and one expects them to slap and insult each other all the way to their deathbead.

And what a dastardly villain Joe Reynolds (Ray Milland) is - he has the gall to buy our moll a volume of Robert Browning's poetry - and then send Cagney into the hoosegow! That sonuvabitch is dead to me. Screw you Joe Reynolds!

Have A Chew On Me: Other Men's Women (1931)

The things you find on TCM at 8 in the morning. Today it was a William Wellman pre-code wonder called Other Men's Women (1931), starring Grant Withers, Regis Toomey, Mary Astor, James Cagney (!), and Joan Blondell (!!). Withers is a drunken cad of a fellow and Toomey is his sober wedded pal. Great scene! Withers runs into a cafe, slaps the waitress on the ass, and orders up breakfast. He keeps counting the train cars as they go by, for no apparent reason. He needles the waitress at her interest in him. And before he takes a bite, he flips her a coin and starts running after the train as it passes, because, as we soon discover, he works on it as an engineer! And of course he was counting the cars to determine when to start chasing. Ah, a perfectly contructed scene. He also short-changes the waitress, and after she complains, throws her a pack of gum and says "Have a chew on me." This is his catch phrase - and seems to foreshadow those Mentos commercials that follow 60 years later.

Did I mention that Joan Blondell was in it? Anyway, she's a quick-mouthed waitress working in a cafe, and an ungentlemenly rogue asks her to go out for a night on the town. She responds with, "I'm an A.P.O". When asked what that means she replies, insouciantly, "Ain't Puttin' Out." I love Joan Blondell.

There are also scenes where a man pokes holes in the soil to place seeds in with his peg leg, and a number of delectable tracking shots that were completely unexpected considering how early in the sound period this was. It also explodes into a full-blown melodrama because of a meek little kiss, and peaks with a blinded Toomey driving a train over a flooded bridge to his inevitable doom. Quality miniature work there.

Oh, and I'm completely in love with Joan Blondell.