Torchy Gets Her Man (Warner Bros., 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After my husband Charles and I got home from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion last night for the opening concert of the Monday night summer series, which I’ve already posted about to my music blog at https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2022/06/spreckels-organ-society-monday-night.html, I ran him a movie on YouTube: a rather crudely colorized version of the 1938 Warner Bros. “B” film Torchy Gets Her Man. In all, Warners made nine films in this series, three each year between 1937 and 1939, and in seven of the nine Torchy Blane, adventurous woman reporter who’s engaged to police lieutenant Steve McBride, was played by Glenda Farrell. Farrell had broken through to stardom in the 1930 gangster drama Little Caesar, which starred Edward G. Robinson (in his star-making role), and three years later played a wisecracking reporter in the 1933 Warners horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum, the very last feature shot in Technicolor’s original two-strip process. I’ve long been a fan of two-strip Technicolor; for all its limitations (notably an inability to photograph blue, though they could approximate blue closely enough by making things turquoise or teal), it had a warm, painterly elegance the often shrieking hues of the three-strip process which replaced it (and which the iconic color movies of the late 1930’s, like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, were shot in) lacked.

Alas, the colorization job on Torchy Gets Her Man made the whole thing look like a badly faded two-strip print with elements in each scene (notably items the colorizers wanted to be grey) remaining obstinately black-and-white. It was directed more or less acceptably by William Beaudine (a man with a checkered career; his first credit was something called Diana of the Farm, a 1915 short, and his last was a 1968 TV special celebrating the 40th anniversary of Mickey Mouse. He’s probably best remembered, ironically enough, for one of the worst movies ever made – a Monogram knockoff called The Ape Man (1943) starring Bela Lugosi in what’s probably his most dementedly awful movie until he and Ed Wood hooked up – and screenwriter Albert DeMond was no great shakes either. The two of then came up with a serviceable vehicle for Glenda Farrell, who was Torchy Blane in all but two of the films (this was the sixth and marked her return to the role after the comparatively droopy Lola Lane replaced her in number five, Torchy Blane in Panama; the only other Blane in which Farrell didn’t star was the last one, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite, in which the young Jane Wyman tried the part) with Barton MacLane in the thankless role of Lt. Steve McBride, her police-officer boyfriend. In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson questioned MacLane’s casting and noted, “MacLane’s one concession to playing a cop was he shouted a shade less belligerently than he did when playing a hoodlum.”

Torchy Gets Her Man deals with a mysterious counterfeiter nicknamed “One Hundred Dollar-Bill” Bailey whom the U.S. Secret Service has been trailing and trying to catch for 15 years, without success. (Few people realize that the Secret Service was originally formed as a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department and its initial job was to bust counterfeiters. The business of protecting the President came later, after Willlam McKinley’s assassination in 1901.) A Secret Service agent named Charles Gilbert (Willard Robertson) shows up and asks McBride for help tracking down and arresting Bailey, but swears hilton secrecy. It doesn’t take long for a reasonably acute viewer (even if you haven’t seen the imdb.com page for this film, which gives it away) to figure out that the supposed “Agent Gilbert” really is Bailey, and he’s fooled McBride witn an elaborate series of forged letters made up by the gang member who also made the plates for Bailey’s fake $100 bills. “Gilbert” tells McBride to stake out the local horse-race track where he says “Bailey” will be passing the bills at the track’s $100 window. The oppressively dumb cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy, the only actor in all nine of the Blane films) is also at the track, trying to make money off a system he’s invented, but he lets slip to Torchy at least enough of what the plot is about so she can deduce the rest.

Only even she isn’t smart enough to realize that “Gilbert” is actually Bailey, and to trace the mysterious “Bailey” she pours creosote on the tires of his car, only to trace him she needs a dog who can follow the scent. Unfortunately, the dog Gahagan gets her s from a German pet-store owner and therefore understands only German, so Torchy has to get a German-English phrase book to communicate with the dog. In the end Torchy gets captured by the gang but works her way out of it by getting the crooks to let her take the dog for a walk, and the dog eventually runs away, goes to the police station and leads the cops to where Torchy and Gahagan are being held. In 1969 Glenda Farrell gave an interview with Time magazine in which she talked about how hard she worked to play Torchy Blane: "[B]efore I undertook to do the first Torchy, I determined to create a real human being — and not an exaggerated comedy type. I met those [newswomen] who visited Hollywood and watched them work on visits to New York City. They were generally young, intelligent, refined and attractive. By making Torchy true to life, I tried to create a character practically unique in movies." This no doubt explains why the seven Torchy Blane films with Farrell are so good, and why her performance dominates no matter how silly the stories or slovenly the direction; as she did in Mystery of the Wax Museum, essentially a warm-up for the Blane films, she dominates the screen and enables them to hold up as quality entertainment no matter their cheapness and other failings.