The pecking order for movie adaptation sources is as follows:
– Book
– Play
– Comic book
– TV show
– Toy line
– Video game
– Theme park ride
– Board game
– Trading card
– Comic strip
– Cereal box (this hasn’t been done yet, but give them time)
Ah yes, comic strips, that most nebulous of reasons to make a movie. We are living in exciting times now, as all cinema can easily be divided into the pre-Marmaduke and post-Marmaduke eras. The new Marmaduke, with its talking animals and groin injuries, joins an illustrious modern trend of comic strip movies that includes Garfield, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties, and...Oh yeah, there was that “Dennis the Menace” movie too, huh?...And Robert Altman did a Popeye. And on and on and on... But if this investigation of film franchises has taught us anything so far, it’s that no stupid idea is new. The cinematic comic strip adaptation trend dates back to at least 1938, though I’d imagine more than one adventure strip film serial occurred before even then.
The “Blondie” strip has been running for a 80 years at this point, making it one of the longer running comic strips. It started in 1930, chronicling then-star Blondie’s sexual escapades as a Prohibition era flapper. Imagine if that had persisted to the modern day; we’d have yet another ridiculously anachronistic strip, much like...well, pretty much all of them. But in 1933 Blondie married her ridiculous paramour Dagwood Bumstead, heir to an industrial fortune. Dagwood’s father soon disinherited him over the shame of marrying a flapper (I mean, come on, a flapper!), leading to the creation of a marriage strip. Shortly enough Blondie and Dagwood had children. Those two children would eventually grow into miniature, teenaged versions of their parents, at which the strip would freeze in time like so many others. From then to today, “Blondie” has been effectively a zombie strip, like 95% of those in the newspaper. Nowadays, “Blondie” can engender controversy in its static, elderly readership simply by having the Bumsteads switch from a landline to a mobile phone. So yeah, at this stage it would seem “Blondie” is simply another stagnant, artless, uninspired product promoting its medium’s extinction. And it’s one of the better strips out there, even.
But in the 1930s, “Blondie” was popular and artistically viable. And for the B-picture producers at Columbia, this was enough reason to base a series of movies around the strip. Now, the Blondie pictures are a true B-series. Andy Hardy, though conceived on a B-level, soon attained enough popularity to be something of an A series. Blondie remained a true programmer throughout its 12-year run. As such, only a modicum of popularity was needed to warrant continued film production; hence a franchise comes into being. And as with Andy Hardy, Blondie is in the family sitcom genre. Both its content and its regularized production schedule are simply a macro version of later television series production. Indeed, Blondie is possibly most interesting as a nascent trend that would soon dominate television rather than the silver screen.
(There was also a “Blondie” radio series that existed parallel to the film franchise, done by the same cast and crew. This is a unique phenomenon of the era, as we also see in other comics-inspired film/radio serials such as "The Shadow" and "Dick Tracy." All I can say about this is that it accustomed both makers and audiences to the idea of a series over multiple formats. I’d guess the characters themselves were the important things, with continuity across formats a distant second.)
Blondie’s production schedule generally allowed for over two movies a year! The only pause in production from 1938 to 1950 was in 1944, because, you know, Hitler. Twenty-eight movies in all would make up the series, which is more than what the highly successful James Bond films have managed in almost 50 years. Truly the 30s and 40s were the Golden Age of the Sequel.
And those Blondie movies are as follows:
Blondie (1938)
Blondie Meets the Boss (1939)
Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939)
Blondie Brings Up Baby (1939)
Blondie on a Budget (1940)
Blondie Has Servant Trouble (1940)
Blondie Plays Cupid (1940)
Blondie Goes Latin (1941)
Blondie in Society (1941)
Blondie Goes to College (1942)
Blondie's Blessed Event (1942)
Blondie for Victory (1942)
It's a Great Life (1943)
Footlight Glamour (1943)
Leave It to Blondie (1945)
Life with Blondie (1945)
Blondie's Lucky Day (1946)
Blondie Knows Best (1946)
Blondie's Big Moment (1947)
Blondie's Holiday (1947)
Blondie in the Dough (1947)
Blondie's Anniversary (1947)
Blondie's Reward (1948)
Blondie's Secret (1948)
Blondie's Big Deal (1949)
Blondie Hits the Jackpot (1949)
Blondie's Hero (1950)
Beware of Blondie (1950)
Of these movies, the first 10 are actually available to view on DVD, so I’ll be spending some time with this franchise.
As for the stars, we are graced with full series regulars Penny Singleton as the eponymous Blondie, and Arthur Lake as Dagwood. It is always a strange thing moving from highly stylized cartoon characters to live actors, and so we’ve gone from this --
– to this --
Blondie herself suffers greatly, for she is possibly the most attractive female in all newspaper comics, challenged only by Miss Buxley from “Beetle Bailey.” Hell, even Angelina Jolie would seem a disappointment on the attractiveness scale here. As for Dagwood, well, the film franchise is the one and only time he looks like a normal human being, and is the only time his marriage to the knockout Blondie makes any kind of sense. As for their performances, I shall let the films decide, and opt to ignore Leonard Maltin’s intrusive quote on the “Blondie” Wikipedia page...
So with all of that essential business behind us, all we have to do now is consider the actual content of 1938's Blondie. The movie opens en media res, that is, in the middle of the story as an intentional ploy to confuse the audience. Confuse us it certainly does, as over the course of three minutes we see as many locations and four times as many major characters, all discussing unfamiliar plot threads. The short of it is that Dagwood has been arrested for reckless driving. In the police station he goes ahead and beats up a guy, and soon enough Blondie is rarin’ to punch a lady in the face herself, for extraordinary violence equals slapstick here. And just as I’m about ready to give up recapping these things altogether –
They bless us with the opening titles. Dagwood races from his home and collides with the mailman (effectively implied through off screen details), echoing a running gag from the comic strip that was already firmly entrenched by 1938 – it continues, with zero joke variation, to this very day. Titles appear over postal envelopes as Lake and Singleton sing the series’ theme song – I suspect this same opening will introduce every Blondie picture. Here are some lyrics, as best as I can figure them out:
“Pretty faces swanny (?) hat.
That’s what my Blondie is.”
“Lovable feet both flat,
That’s what my Dagwood is.”
“Blondie’s not always right.
I never think she is.”
“All of my thoughts are bright.
Dagwood thinks they’re his.”
Much like the later TV shows this so clearly resembles, these bizarre lyrics are meant to fill us in on the premise. Despite the earlier confusion, the premise is as simple as they come: Married couple. That’s it!
Thankfully the next set of scenes is merely a simple collection of domestic scenes to accustom us to life with the Bumsteads. They live in the suburbs, which seem to have actually been a nice place at one time before Levitt went and ruined them. Living with the Bumsteads is their son, Baby Dumpling, who exists now in the strips as a teenaged Dagwood clone. Larry Simms, who plays Dumpling, is your typical precocious movie brat, parroting his lines and getting upstaged at all turns by the family dog Daisy. Dagwood’s morning is rushed, but he has time for some genial interplay with Blondie (mostly concerning money, that most standard of family sitcom plot devices), before racing outside to – collide with the postman. Again. Merely a couple of minutes following their violent encounter in the opening credits. Poor mailman.
And with Dagwood gone, Blondie can let in the secretive man who’s been puttering about in the yard. No, Blondie’s not having an affair, you cynical 21st century denizen, you! She’s simply arranging for a new household full of furniture as a surprise gift for the couple’s 5th wedding anniversary tomorrow. Duh! This means the old furniture will be taken away first. We are also privy to baby-on-dog violence between Dumpling and Daisy, made worse since it’s clear both dog and child endure real abuse here. Poor dog, poor mailman...
Dagwood works at the J.C. Dithers Construction Company, a genuine similarity to the comics. It’s kind of amazing, this was clearly made in a time when an adaptation meant something, where you were expected to have some fidelity to your source material. Dagwood’s coworkers gamble on whether Dagwood will be on time, a nice little gag. Meeting with Mr. Dithers (Jonathan Hale) in his office, Dagwood learns that...em...erm...uh...I don’t know! It’s remarkably confused, actually, as all the exposition in this movie seems to be, but it seems that Dagwood, moron that he is, has wrongly given company cash to a girl named Elsie, and will have to give his furniture up as collateral lest he lose his job. Yes, they’re setting up a later joke about confusion between Blondie’s furniture men and Dagwood’s repo men, but it’s all rather telegraphed here, and there’s no more variation to the gag than what I’ve already explained. Again, clockwork French farces these old Hollywood comedies typically aren’t.
To alleviate this audience aggravation, Dithers gets a comic routine where he discovers one of Dagwood’s trademark enormous sandwiches and confuses it for his own. A deathless joke in the comics concerns Dagwood unhinging his jaw like an anaconda to devour sandwiches the size of his young son (they’ve never to my knowledge attempted a cannibalism joke from all this). The movies attempt a similar joke, but also see the need to present the humorous sandwiches at a normal scale that actor Arthur Lake could actually eat. The effect here is that a potentially good joke is killed in its infancy due to realism. This doesn’t mean they won’t go back to the sandwich well again and again, even in this film. Oh, and Dagwood is to work for Dithers as a salesman, and his coworkers actually suggest Dagwood should kill himself. Ah, suicide humor!
Back at the Bumstead homestead, Baby Dumpling expresses his philosophy of hatred to Blondie, then proceeds to ignore her advice and give all her money to a traveling pie salesman...A pie salesman?! I don’t know if this is something from the comics, or if the thirties were just weird.
Later in the backyard, the vicious, violence-prone Baby Dumpling is playing with his young neighbor Alvin, if by “playing” you mean “about to violently assault Alvin with a massive brick for no good damn reason.” Blondie meanwhile gossips ignorantly with Alvin’s homely mother when we hear Alvin get brained with the brick off screen. We never see Alvin again, so I can only assume that Baby Dumpling has murdered him! Now why do the Looney Tunes get criticized for violence when this stuff from the same era gets away with a literally homicidal baby?
Moving on to a happier plot line –Dagwood the salesman reports to the Hotel Brinkley. Following a decent gag involving a fortune telling machine in the restroom (trust me), Dagwood asks the desk clerk about his contact, to be rebuffed. Soon enough, both Dagwood and another man (Gene Lockhart) get distracted watching a stereotypically racist portrayal of a black porter try to fix a vacuum cleaner. This is actually the chief plot development in the whole movie! The porter leaves to get a screwdriver, at which point Dagwood and the other man steal the vacuum to take it upstairs to the man’s room and fix it themselves – as white men, surely it is their right and duty to repair Negroes’ vacuums at their leisure. So taken with randomly fixing this vacuum cleaner Dagwood is that he doesn’t even realize the man he has blindly followed home is Chester Percival “C.P.” Hazlip, the man Dagwood came to do business with. Fixing this vacuum shall apparently be a lengthy, multi-day process, so Dagwood inexplicably vows to put his pressing money matters on hold to return tomorrow and aid C.P. further with the vacuum. Also, Dagwood meets C.P.’s daughter Elsie (Ann Doran), who is decidedly not the Elsie that Dithers mentioned. See how these movies become confusing for no good reason whatsoever?
Meanwhile downstairs, some obsolete humor takes place between the era-specific porter stereotype and an era-specific dowager stereotype. For his part, the porter seems convinced that ghosts have taken his vacuum, because that was an acceptable joke about black people back then that doesn’t even make sense now.
Dagwood returns home for some more calm and nonessential domestic scenes. This simply serves to paint a picture of home life, with Blondie doing the cooking, cleaning, and laborious, day-long housework that is a wife’s one and only purpose in life – 1930s, remember. Dagwood, meanwhile – get this – eats a gigantic sandwich! Oh my sides!...Actually, there is one interesting bit in here where it turns out that one of the sandwich ingredients is a...something. At any rate it’s not organic, and inedible even by Dagwood’s standards. So instead Daisy the dog eats the...something. She hiccups, but doesn’t die slowly and painfully, since this is a live action cartoon.
The next day, Dagwood returns to the hotel to resume the epic vacuum repair process. He must leave a truly snail-like trail, for soon enough Blondie is interrupted from her daily drudgery to learn Dagwood is at said hotel, and has taken up in a room with Elsie. Naturally she suspects this Elsie to be an adulteress of some sort, though to satisfy the moral prudes at the Hays Office, the movie never spells this out.
Later on, Dagwood actually reports to his office! Mr. Dithers chews him out over being more concerned with this one Elsie than this other Elsie and jeepers but it makes no sense. Whatever, Dithers fires Dagwood. I sense a plot twist this series will resort to often.
Dagwood returns home so we can have that gag where he mistakes Blondie’s movers for his repo men. That doesn’t last long, for Dagwood’s in-laws are here to celebrate the Bumsteads’ wedding anniversary, and in-law humor was just the same then as it is now. As a surprise to Dagwood, Blondie reveals the new furniture set in the living room – Dagwood instantly faints, knowing this new furniture shall soon be repossessed. And, in an act designed solely to confuse me, a man named Chester, but not that Chester, arrives to actively romance Blondie in Dagwood’s face. What the?! Two Elsies, two Chesters, a guy treating Blondie like his wife as her husband watches?! None of this serves any purpose! My best guess here is that this particular Chester (Gordon Oliver) was a comic character from the early flapper years, a rival of Dagwood’s in those times. Comic callbacks don’t work nearly so well 72 years later.
And then compounding matters, Elsie (that is, the daughter of Chester, but not that Chester, and not that Elsie) calls Dagwood to ask where he put some of the vacuum cleaner parts. My goodness! Dagwood stupidly spells out “B-E-D-R-O-O-M” in front of all the in-laws, which psychopath Dumpling confidently renders as “Bedroom.” Soon enough Dagwood is ineptly speeding his mother-in-law’s car away, while the whole family suspects him of the least competent extramarital affair of all time. And then the repo men arrive.
(Also, at some point during all of this, Dagwood commits blatant domestic violence against Dumpling in full sight of everyone. Ah, the good old days...)
This is where the narrative catches up with itself, reaching the point of our en media res. Whole scenes from the film’s start play out in their entirety, surely a sign of stretching this movie out to a 72 minute runtime. (All the Blondie pictures are exactly 72 minutes long, probably a B-movie standard to satisfy a certain number of reels.) Now these scenes make sense, so here they go: Dagwood ineptly drives C.P. and Elsie back to home, vacuum with them as evidence. The cops quickly pull them over, grow extra suspicious due to the viciously mangled vacuum cleaner and Dagwood’s increasingly erratic attempts to explain whatever the hell is going on right now, and – Okay, so it’s still kind of confusing to recap. Suffice to say, Dagwood wants to prove he’s faithful, and the cops arrest him.
Now for the epilogue, where all the plot threads are resolved. The judge is about to sentence Dagwood and C.P., just as he did to Dom at the end of Fast & Furious, when Blondie rises to do her wifely duty – take the blame for her husband’s many, many crimes. As the movie presents it, this is actually a wife’s duty, and, well, we’re led to believe none of this plot would have happened if it weren’t for Blondie’s incessant nagging. Right.
Leaving the courthouse, randomly the Bumsteads realize they have abandoned Baby Dumpling – good riddance, I say. But phew! They find him alongside C.P. “fixing” a lawn mower (surely stolen from a gardener after Dumpling murdered him with a brick). And Mr. Dithers just up and appears, and only now does Dagwood realize C.P. is that C.P. Geez! So Dagwood gets a contract of some sort from the good C.P., and therefore Dithers hires him back, because this is how plots work in contrived comedies. And because of Dagwood’s natural spinelessness, Blondie negotiates far better monetary terms with Dithers, resolving whatever other plot strands might not have been accounted for. But remember, all this was somehow her fault, because she’s a “nag.” And all laugh genially, a comedy’s way of telling you it’s over.
Man, I hope the plotting becomes clearer in later episodes, er, features, because this is incomprehensible. If it’s really just an excuse for jokes about in-laws, giant sandwiches and period racism, there’s a lot of extra stuff in here. Actually, convoluted, coincidental plotting was par for the course with the generally superior Andy Hardy movies, so I shouldn’t complain. I did laugh a few times, which is more than I can say for Andy Hardy. But it’s so disposable, the sort of thing TCM wouldn’t show at 2 A.M. I’m actually struggling to come up with something definitive to say about this, knowing I have at least nine more copycats to go. Well...um...uhhh...
Related posts:
• No. 2 Blondie Meets the Boss (1939)
• No. 3 Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939)
• No. 4 Blondie Brings Up Baby (1939)
• No. 5 Blondie on a Budget (1940)
• No. 6 Blondie Has Servant Trouble (1940)
• No. 7 Blondie Plays Cupid (1940)
• No. 8 Blondie Goes Latin (1941)
• No. 9 Blondie in Society (1941)
• No. 10 Blondie Goes to College (1942)
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