Blonde Dynamite

Slip (Leo Gorcey) has a scheme. He wants to start his own escort service. However, no one will loan him the money and an opportunity arises when Louie goes on vacation....as he'll use the malt shop for his business. At the same time, a gang of thugs with their blonde bombshell (Adele Jergens) are going to rob a bank...and plan on tunneling in from the malt shop...much like the plot of "Larceny, Inc.". Will these knuckieheads figure out what is going on or will the robbery come off without a hitch?

This film is pretty much what you'd expect from a Bowery Boys movie...broad acting and not a lot of sophistication. This isn't so much a complaint....more like what you should expect. A few scenes are WAY overdone--such as the painful balcony scene. And yet, despite all its shortcomings, the film is reasonably entertaining because it never takes itself seriously. Overall, not one of the group's best--more just a very typical entry--with Sach being stupid and Slip being a mouthy know-it-all...as usual.

By the way, it's rather funny when throughout the film you hear people refer to the gang as 'kids'...considering they're mostly in their 30s!

Blonde Dynamite (1950)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

The boys are able to talk Louie (Bernard Gorcey) into taking a much needed vacation to Coney Island. Once gone Slip (Leo Gorcey) turns his ice cream parlor into an escort service and soon he gets himself mixed up with a couple gangsters wanting to use the place to tunnel underground to the bank next door. Number seventeen in the long-running series is another winner even though it doesn't contain nearly enough laughs to be called a good movie. The story is actually a pretty good one and the cast are certainly up for anything this time around. I thought the film benefited from once again giving Gabe (Gabriel Dell) a different role and him being mixed up with the icy blonde and the gangsters was a nice switch to get the story rolling instead of having the boys bringing the trouble on. I think the screenplay would have benefited had it spent some more time with Louis. The opening sequence with his breakdown was pretty funny as was the scene where he's leaving with his wife. This is the first time we've seen him wife and hopefully the last time. Bernard Gorcey is certainly very good in his few minutes on screen with son Leo and Huntz Hall delivering they usual fine performances. This entry seemed to be going for more Three Stooges-like humor as Slip is starting to enjoy slapping Sach around each time he can. Dell is in fine form as well as Adele Jergens as the backstabbing blonde and Harry Lewis gets a nice bit as a bad guy. The film doesn't have nearly enough laughs to make it a total success but fans of the series will find enough here to make it worth watching.

After wise-guy Leo Gorcey (as Terence Aloysius "Slip" Mahoney) and hair-brained Huntz Hall (as Horace De Bussy "Sach" Jones) spy a beautiful woman exiting an "escort service", they decide to answer the call for "Male Escorts Wanted - must be handsome, intelligent, cultured"; but, the business throws them out on the street. Undaunted, Mr. Gorcey decides "The Bowery Boys" should open their own male escort business. They turn to gainfully employed Gabriel Dell (as Gabe Moreno), for a helping hand-out. Alas, Mr. Dell, working at a bank two doors down from "Louie's Sweet Shop", can't provide the funding.

Back at the "Sweet Shop", Gorcey discovers real-life father Bernard Gorcey (as Louie Dumbrowski) is sick (he's dishing out free sundaes). So, Gorcey sends the proprietor off on a Coney Island vacation, and turns the "Sweet Shop" into an escort service - with "Bowery Boys" Hall, William "Billy" Benedict (as "Whitmore" Whitey), Buddy Gorman (as "Bartholomew" Butch), and David Gorcey (as "Sir Cedric" Chuck) providing male companionship.

Meanwhile, Dell has been taken for a ride, by girlfriend Adele Jergens (as Joan "Joanie" Marshall). Dell discovers the duplicitous "Blonde Dynamite" has stolen a $5,000 bankroll from him, and her gang plans to frame Dell for embezzlement if he doesn't obtain the combination to the "Bowery Trust" bank vault, for gang leader Harry Lewis (as Champ Fallon). Then, Mr. Lewis plans to dig an underground tunnel from the "Sweet Shop" (now escort service) to rob the bank...

"Blonde Dynamite" has its moments, and "The Bowery Boys as male escorts" is a funny situation. The characters are oddly scripted to refer to Gorcey and company as "juveniles" and "kids", a distinction most of these movies had (wisely) dropped, by now. Dell is given a welcome storyline; he was the original "Dead End Kid" who seemed to age most quickly; but, now he appears younger than Gorcey or Hall. And, don't miss the elder "Louie" in his swimsuit, singing what sounds like a medley of "Aloha Oe" and "Hello Goodbye"!

***** Blonde Dynamite (2/12/50) William Beaudine ~ Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell

You have to hand it to Leo Gorcey. When he dreams, he dreams big. Slip and Satch see an a male escort bureau and see no reason why he and the rest of the Bowery Boys couldn't do this job. With his savoir faire and command of the English language no telling how far they could rise.

When Gorcey and Huntz Hall are thrown out after they apply, are they discouraged? Not in the least, they persuade Bernard Gorcey he needs a vacation in Coney Island. Then they take over Louie's Sweet Shop and turn it into their own escort bureau.

But there's a gang headed by Harry Lewis with his moll Adele Jergens who have their own plans for the Sweet Shop. They've even got Slip and Satch's pal Gabriel Dell in a jackpot as part of said plans. Part of that plan consists of hiring the whole gang as escorts for her some of her pals. You have to see Jergens vamping Billy Benedict who when he was a Bowery Boy got in a bit of his own business involving his naiveté. Benedict played kids in other than the Bowery Boys well into his 30s. As for Jergens she had a specialty in trying to seduce man children types. See how she does in Abbott&Costello Meet The Invisible Man with Lou.

I won't get into what the gang wants the Sweet Shop for, but it's funny, in fact it gets downright silly and almost surreal. Suffice it to say the Sweet Shop becomes a Sweet Shop again for the next Bowery Boy film.

By1950 the Bowery Boys were already among moviedom's oldest "teens," but incredibily the series lasted for another 6 years and more than 20 movies, with the scripts getting increasingly sillier and the plots more far fetched. This is a pretty good entry in the series, and at times feels like it could've been almost a conventional B crime picture, instead of a Bowery Boys vehicle. In part that may be due to the prescence of leggy Adele Jergens, one of the great B movie bad girls. She's actually playing the title character, the only time in the series I can remember that happening.

Adele seemed to be one of those actresses who just wanted to keep working. "Blonde Dynamite" is one of her 10 movie credits on IMDB for 1950, including another Bowery Boys feature and the classic film noir "Side Street." (In 1949 she was in another B noir classic, "Armored Car Robbery.") She was also a comic foil (and the requisite eye candy) for Abbot and Costello in two of their films. Later in her career she was in a couple of super low budget teen crime exploitation movies, but she was always a solid pro who gave it her all. She's probably the biggest "name" of the many alluring females who populated the Bowery Boys movies, vamping Slip and/or Satch for devious purposes.

The idea of the boys as high class "escorts" is a hoot and well played for laughs. Though of course their ability to turn Louie's Sweet Shop into their escort agency office and then back again overnight takes a huge suspension of belief, typical of these plots. It should be noted that the plot device of digging from a office or store into an adjacent bank vault has been used in several films with the first one I'm aware of being "A Slight Case of Larceny" with Edward G. Robinson.

The rating of 7 stars is in the context of the Bowery Boys series. Sometimes you just have to grade on a curve.