Blondie (King Features Syndicate, Columbia, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next movie I watched was Blondie, first of a series of 28 movies made over 13 years by Columbia Pictures under license by King Features Syndicate, a branch of the Hearst Corporation that owned the rights to Chic Young’s Blondie comic strip that originated the characters. Columbia launched the series in 1938 and got two actors to play the leads that stuck with the series throughout its run: Penny Singleton as the ditzy wife Blondie Miller Bumstead (her maiden name is revealed in passing in this first episode) and Arthur Lake as her hapless husband Dagwood Bumstead. They also got the obligatory cute kid, Larry Simms, to play their son, referred to only as “Baby Dumpling,” and an even cuter dog, Daisy, to play the family pet. In the 1950’s King Features Syndicate reclaimed the rights to these films from Columbia and repackaged them for television, adding prologues extracted from the films as “teaser” sequences and reshooting the opening credits, adding a pop-rock song about the Bumsteads to give the films a more contemporary feel (though the cars we see still mark this as a product of the late 1930’s). Columbia also made an unusual choice for director: Frank R. Strayer, who until this foray into situation comedy had been primarily known as a horror filmmaker. His best-known horror films were The Vampire Bat (1933), a fascinating mash-up of the Dracula and Frankenstein tropes (Lionel Atwill plays a mad scientist who’s developed a formless protoplasm that can only be kept alive via human blood), and Condemned to Live (1935).

Strayer ended up directing the first 12 Blondie movies – he took a break from the series only for one film, Go West, Young Lady, a vehicle for tap-dancing star Ann Miller that also carried over Penny Singleton and writer Richard Fluornoy from the Blondie series – and the first Blondie emerged as a predictable but still charming film. Thanks to the King Features Syndicate’s prologue, we knew in advance that it was going to end in a ludicrous confrontation in jail, and the confrontation is between Dagwood, Blondie, C.P. Hazlip (Gene Lockhart) – a developer whose new project needs a contractor to build it, and Dagwood has been assigned to sell Hazlip the services of his boss’s company – and Hazlip’s daughter Elsie (Ann Doran). By coincidence (or screenwriter fiat on the part of Fluornoy), Dagwood had co-signed a note for over $560 to a woman also called Elsie, a previous secretary of his boss, J. C. Dithers (Jonathan Hale), only he fired her, she used the money to get out of town and now Dagwood is on the hook to repay the note. C. P. Hazlip has been inundated with salespeople, including Dithers (who has called him multiple times at his hotel), but Dagwood inadvertently gets in to see him and the two bond over their mutual attraction to tinkering with mechanical gadgets. When a Black porter at the hotel (played in the usual sickeningly stereotyped way by Willie Best) gives up on the vacuum cleaner because it’s stopped working for him, Hazlip and Dagwood descend on it and try to fix it themselves. In order to carry it up to Hazlip’s room the two pull it by its extension cord and essentially walk it like a dog. There’s a funny running gag when an elderly woman who’s just been to the optometry shop in the hotel lobby sees the vacuum cleaner being walked like a dog, or other things happen to it (including its mysterious disappearance altogether), and pops right back into the optometry shop.

Dithers gets so exasperated with Dagwood that he fires him, but once Hazlip offers Dagwood the contract to build his new development (which would earn Dagwood the bonus and raise Blondie was counting on to pay for the new furniture she’s just bought for their home) Blondie becomes Dagwood’s business manager and negotiates him a new contract with Dithers. Back in the 1960’s a local San Francisco Bay Area TV station had regularly aired the Blondie movies, but I’d avoided watching them; now that I’ve finally caught up with one I can report that they were charming, unpretentious pieces of entertainment, secure in their utter predictability (it was obvious Dagwood would get the Hazlip contract and it would resolve all his financial problems) but very much along the lines of the similar sitcoms that would clog up TV schedules in the early days of the medium.