Blondie

Singleton and Lake-- a marriage made in comedy heaven. Here they get the movie series off to a rollicking start. Poor Dagwood. He needs a raise from tight-fisted boss Dithers or the Bumstead livingroom will turn into an empty container. Worse, Blondie thinks he's having an affair when all the evidence conspires against innocent hubby. Good thing for Dagwood there's a broken down vacuum cleaner that cleans up the mess. Meanwhile, Baby Dumpling tries to stay out of punishment corner, while four-leg Daisy grabs all the food. Just another week in 1930's white-collar suburbia.

First-rate pacing from director Strayer. The threads never sag, while mild gags combine effortlessly with snappy dialog. It's a delightfully addled Dagwood and a humorously patient Blondie. Amazing how a studio cheapo like this so delightfully out-performs bigger budget comedies of then and now. I guess my only misgiving is with the rather dramatic upshot, but that's just a minor matter of taste. Anyway, kudos all around to a charming 70-minute Columbia production that you might think came out of the 1950's. Uh oh! I better stop now and take out the trash or the wife will have me joining Dumpling in the corner.

This is the first of the classic films of American comedies in the BLONDIE series, of which 28 were made between 1938 and 1950. The films are all wonderfully comic and delightfully whimsical, and frequently absolutely hilarious. The main characters are Dagwood Bumstead and his wife Blondie. They derived from Chic Young's famous comic strip "Blondie", which began publication in 1930. From the 1930s right through to the end of the 1950s, Dagwood and Blondie represented a side of Middle American life which resonated though the heartland from coast to coast, and the two characters and their child "Baby Dumpling" and dog Daisy were so familiar that most ordinary people throughout America almost thought they knew them personally, or wished they did. The "Blondie" stories, according to Chic Young, were set in Joplin, Missouri, and what could be more Middle American than that? Arthur Lake, who played Dagwood with such genius, was born in 1905 in Corbin, Kentucky, the same strange former roadside town with truck-stops (before interstate highways existed) which gave the world Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, so Lake knew how to play a comic Middle American dimwit as well as anyone. ("Blondie, some of my green socks are blue.") Lake had already made 123 films before he commenced the BLONDIE series, but he did little else after 1938 until his retirement in 1957 than play Dagwood, in films, on TV, and on radio. He became a national institution. As a child, everyone I knew read "Blondie" every Sunday in the Sunday paper, though everyone called it "Dagwood and Blondie". I remember that it was from reading it that I learned for the first time in my life that there was such a thing as a pie which was not sweet but which had cheese and tomatoes on it instead, called a pizza, and after reading that I went around asking all the grownups I could find if they had ever seen or heard of a pizza and they all said no. It was years before I tasted one of these strange pizzas. It was definitely Dagwood who introduced the pizza to Middle America in the 1950s, such was the educational potential of a mass comic strip in those days, and look at the effect it had on the whole country. Now can you imagine American or any other Western life without pizza? Even the Mainland Chinese have been addicted to pizzas since the 1990s. Much of this we certainly owe to Chic Young's comic strip and his character Dagwood. In this first film we have the only appearances in the BLONDIE series of the comic genius Gene Lockhart (as C. P. Hazlit, an eccentric millionaire), and his wife Kathleen, as Blondie's mother. It is a pity they never reappeared, as Gene Lockhart in particular largely steals the film with his brilliant performance. (Maybe the producer was worried for that very reason that Lockhart would prevent his main characters from establishing themselves.) But the shining star of the whole BLONDIE series was always the perfectly cast Penny Singleton. It is clear to me that, consciously or subconsciously, January Jones of the TV series MAD MEN has modelled her stance, her pout, her deportment, and her movements on Penny Singleton, for period authenticity. They look and dress like sisters. Penny Singleton was a true phenomenon, a whirlwind of a housewife who took husband, child, dog, neighbours, husband's boss and husband's job all in hand while multi-tasking with all the housework at the same time. It was she who got her husband a raise in salary, she who brought all chaotic situations under control, she who made wry and humorous remarks all day long, she who rebuked and disciplined and then softened the situations with her angelic smile and a flattering witticism. In short, she was the Middle American ideal woman of her period. She was what every woman from Oregon to Georgia, from Vermont to Arizona, wanted above all to be. And she was beautiful. So she became the greatest of the unsung female American icons. But no modern feminist would ever give her the time of day or admit she had ever even existed, because she stands for everything extremist feminists most fear and hate, female contentment and subliminal control, with no fuss. When Penny Singleton said to Dagwood in this first film: "I think bringing up a husband is more difficult than bringing up a baby," she said what every American woman outside the coastal metropolises knew all too well, and she said it with such an angelic and loving smile that everyone adored her just as much as Dagwood did. We must not forget the other great star of this and the following BLONDIE films, the amazing child actor Larry Simms, who plays "Baby Dumpling", the unbelievably cute and adorable son of the Bumsteads, and in this film he makes his acting debut at the age of four (the same debut age as Margaret O'Brien and Shirley Temple). Apart from appearing in Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) and a few others, Simms largely played this character, retiring from the screen in 1951 at the age of 18. Simms did appear in an uncredited role at the age of three in something else. I can understand something of what Simms must have gone through, since I myself was briefly a child actor at the age of three. At that age you are too young to notice or worry about the camera at all. What bothers you are the lights, which are so bright and dazzling and they have to keep telling you not to let the lights bother you and not to squint. The running subplot in the BLONDIE films of Baby Dumpling playing with the little boy Alvin next door provides some of the most hilarious episodes in the series, along with the little dog Daisy.

BLONDIE (Columbia, 1938), directed by Frank R. Strayer, introduces Chic Young's famous comic strip characters, the Bumsteads, to the silver screen in the persona of Penny Singleton as Blondie; Arthur Lake as Dagwood Bumstead; Larry Simms as Baby Dumpling; and Jonathan Hale as Mr. J.C. Dithers.

In this series opener, Blondie, Dagwood and their four-year-old son they call Baby Dumpling, along with their dog, Daisy, live in a simple community going through their daily routines. Though simple enough, a chain of unfortunate events soon come one after the other at the time of Blondie and Dagwood's fifth wedding anniversary. Blondie starts the show by planning a surprise anniversary party and presenting Dagwood with the house of brand new furniture. While Dagwood is trying to impress his boss, Mr. Dithers, in trying to contact a very important client for the firm by waiting for him in the hotel lobby where he is staying, Dagwood befriends a middle-aged gentleman (Gene Lockhart) in trying to fix a broken down vacuum cleaner. Coming up to this man's room, Dagwood is introduced to the man he calls C.P., and his daughter, Elsie (Ann Doran), unaware that this is the man Dagwood must contact for the firm. Problems ensue when Blondie suspects Dagwood is having a secret rendezvous with an Elsie Watson, and mistakes CP's daughter to be that girl, considering Dagwood was seen with Elsie at the hotel by Blondie's former sweetheart, Chester Franey (Gordon Oliver). Chester shows up at the Bumsteads anniversary party, telling Blondie of the situation to Blondie at the gathering of guests consisting of Blondie's mother (Kathleen Lockhart), and sister, Dot (Dorothy Moore), leading to a World War battle. Poor Dagwood must get CP and his daughter to come to his house to straighten out everything, but more complications ensue. And yes, Dagwood gets fired for the first of many times on screen by Dithers.

Setting the pattern in future film installments is Blondie getting jealous when she believes Dagwood is tangled with another woman; Dagwood running out of the house and running over the postman in order to catch his morning bus for work; and Alvin Fuddow (Danny Mummert), Baby Dumpling's "genius" friend, getting his chance to show off his smartness, etc. Supporting the cast are Irving Bacon as Mr. Beasley, the postman, the surname later changed to Crum in future installments); Fay Helm as Alvin's mother; Ian Wolfe as the courtroom judge, along with several other character actors. And let's not forget Daisy, the Bumstead dog, who is always the scene stealer. Fortunately, American Movie Classics, which premiered BLONDIE October 8, 1995, has restored its original theatrical opening and closing titles, starting with the Columbia logo, doing away with the tag-on opening and ending with the King Features logo and 1960s-style sing along theme by unknown vocalists that accompanied the movie and its sequels when distributed to local television in 1970. Interestingly, when shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM premiere: May 1, 2018), the cable channel that airs restored movie prints, reverted to the King Features opening from the 1970s instead. BLONDIE is an enjoyable entry that produced 27 more movie episodes, ending with 1950s BEWARE OF BLONDIE. One particular thing about the BLONDIE series is that the central characters are played by the same actors throughout the entire series. And no one can play Blondie and Dagwood better than Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake. Sequel: BLONDIE MEETS THE BOSS (1939) (***)

On the day of his fifth wedding anniversary, Dagwood is in trouble needing to raise $563 to pay back on an endorsement check that went sour to a woman named Elsie. Dithers (Dagwood's boss) says he will give Dagwood $600 as a bonus (plus a $10 raise that Blondie has been wanting Dagwood to get) if he can secure the contract from developer C.P. Hazlip. Hazlip, not wanting to see any salesmen such as Dagwood, becomes friends with Dagwood while indulging in one of their hobbies, tinkering (in this case a vacuum). Blondie becomes jealous when a man from the finance company comes to the house about "Elsie's note". Blondie suspects her husband is having an affair and confirms her suspicions when she finds Dagwood at Hazlip's hotel with his daughter Elsie. Dithers believes Dagwood is not getting any headway with the Hazlip deal so he fires him (not the first or last time this will happen) and Dagwood is further in Daisy's doghouse when Blondie, her mother and sister believe he is unfaithful. What is our lovable protagonist to do? I haven't seen any other films in the Blondie series, but it is easy to tell this is a standout film. Singleton and Lake are the perfect people to play the lead roles and Simms is adorable as Baby Dumpling. The script has numerous funny scenes, many of which are humorous touches to the film that don't develop the scenario further, but that is no big deal here. At the beginning of the film, the scenes alternating with Dagwood and Blondie didn't seem that smooth, but that may be the only flaw of the film. Rating, 9.

I have seen this and countless others in the series and always beat a path to the TV if I know any one them is on. AMC, in their less commercial era showed these every Sunday morning. Please watch these films if you have the opportunity. They are great, clean, non-violent family fun. And they work wonderfully well today.