Torchy Blane in Panama (Warner Bros., 1938)

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

Last night my husband Charles came home from work at around 10:45 p.m. and at 11 I ran him another YouTube video: Torchy Blane in Panama, fifth in Warner Bros.’ series of nine and one of the two that regrettably did not feature Glenda Farrell as Torchy Blane. The Torchy Blane movies were based on a series of detective novels by author Frederick Nebel called McBride and Kennedy, which featured Lieutenant Steve McBride of the New York Police Department and a male reporter named Kennedy. For the films, however, the “suits” at Warners decided to change the character of Kennedy into a woman, Theresa “Torchy” Blane, and for seven of the nine series entries cast Glenda Farrell as Torchy and Barton MacLane as McBride. The writers of the Blane films set up a romance between Torchy and McBride, but as William K. Everson noted in his 1972 book The Detective in Film, “Like the Bulldog Drummond films, their delayed marriage was used as a plot gimmick, but fortunately the idea was not stressed and they were such an ill-matched couple that audiences were hardly holding their breath awaiting the union.” This was also the book in which Everson wrote – in a line I quoted from memory the last time I wrote about a Torchy Blane movie (the very next in the series,Torchy Gets Her Man, in which Glenda Farrell blessedly returned to the role) but now I have the book in front of me – “Barton MacLane’s main concession to his playing of the cop was that he shouted a shade less belligerently than when playing the hoodlum.”

The Wikipedia page on the Torchy Blane series says that Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster based the character of Lois Lane on Torchy Blane, and while the page claims that they modeled her on Glenda Farrell’s portrayal, I suspect that it was actually Lola Lane’s performance here that was their model, not only because of the similarity in names between the real Lola Lane and the fictional Lois Lane, but because Lois in the Superman comics is dark-haired, like Lola Lane and unlike the famously blonde Glenda Farrell. It’s a pity Farrell wasn’t in Torchy Blane in Panama, because in all other respects it’s one of the better entries in the series, a mystery that doesn’t take itself too seriously and a comedy with one of the great camp openings in movie history. Dumb-cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy, the only actor who was in all nine Torchy Blane films) is marching in a big New York street parade, in a contingent representing a lodge-type organization called the Leopards (an obvious takeoff of the real-life Elks or Moose). Just as his contingent is walking past the Hayward National Bank (which seems like an odd name for a bank in New York City), he hears two shots from inside.

Still wearing his leopard-skin costume from the parade, he breaks ranks and summons his fellow Leopards to come in and back him up. When he gets inside the bank – in a nice touch, he is wearing his (genuine) police badge pinned inside his Leopard suit – he finds that the bank has been robbed of $90,000 in cash and one of the tellers was shot and killed. Gahagan immediately takes charge of the investigation until Steve McBride (played in this film by Paul Kelly, a far less obnoxious character actor than Barton MacLane; a pity he didn’t get to do the role with Farrell!) shows up – with a male reporter, Bill Canby (Larry Williams), in tow. McBride decides to give Canby the story just because he’s tired of being accused of favoring Torchy because they’re lovers. Only Torchy arrives on the scene and, furious about being scooped on the robbery itself, finds a Leopard lodge pin from someone in the Los Angeles branch. It turns out that the L.A. Leopard lodge brother actually died three years before, but Torchy deduces that someone stole his pin and is using it to impersonate a Leopard. She’s also convinced that this person is the bank robber.

Midway through the movie – there isn’t much of a whodunit angle, just as there wasn't in Torchy Gets Her Man – we learn that the robber and killer is Stanley Crafton (Anthony Averill), and he’s on his way to Panama to fence the loot. McBride, Gahagan and Canby end up on an ocean liner to Los Angeles via Panama (and of course we get some nice stock shots of the Panama Canal in operation) and deliberately don’t extend the invitation to Torchy Blane. No problem: though Torchy has never sky-dived in her life before, she charters a plane (an ordinary land aircraft because a seaplane would be too conspicuous and make it too obvious what she was doing) and bails out. Torchy doesn’t land on the actual deck of the ship – I was rather hoping she would, but that might have been too big a special effect for Warner Bros. to pull off with the budget of an hour-long “B” – but she’s picked up by a rescue crew from the ship. Fortunately her cash stash has survived intact and dry, and she uses it to pay her passage for the voyage and also to buy herself some clothes at the ship’s onboard store, including a surprisingly sexy pair of lounge pajamas that Torchy, much to Steve’s discomfiture, insists on wearing outdoors.

Meanwhile, Stanley has decided to hide the stolen $90,000 inside the mock leopard the Leopards carry around as their trademark, and there’s a nice bit in which Torchy, stuck with the dreary burden of carrying the stuffed leopard around, wants to throw it overboard but Stanley panics and stops her. One would have thought this would arouse her suspicions sooner than it does – ironically, it’s Gahagan who first figures out that Stanley isn’t who he says he hs because when they shook hands, Stanley did so normally instead of using the secret Leopards’ handshake. McBride and his fellow cops are searching for the NN-series of bills that represent the stolen money, but they can’;t find any on board because Stanley is paying for his tabs with out-of-sequence cash and saving the loot for Gomez, his fence (George Regas), who demands 50 percent of the take for laundering it. Ultimately, after the ship passes Havana, it docks at Panama and Torchy tries to shadow the crooks. In fact, she succeeds too well – she ends up captured – but she successfully outwits the bad guys by demanding to be allowed to change out of her wet clothes. She hangs the pajamas over a balcony and the cops see them and know where she is. Stanley tries to take Torchy as a hostage, but the cops are able to get behind him and overpower him.

Torchy Blane in Panama, written by George Bricker from a story by Anthony Coldewey and directed by the serviceable William Clemens (who for decades was stuck in the Warner Bros. “B” unit doing titles like Missing Witnesses, Talent Scout, King of the Lumberjacks and Down the Stretch), is actually a quite fun movie, relatively sophisticated for its time and its budget, and though one aches for what Glenda Farrell would have done with the female lead, in all other respects Torchy Blane in Panama is a quite capable entry in the series.