Fly Away Baby

Its rather amazing that this series isn't more widely seen.

Superficially, they are B movies and at the cheapy end. They have incredibly uninteresting stories, stuff about the mob.

But they're really impressive in a way. I guess it doesn't register today, but these were either important in their day or if you wish reflected something important.

For non-US readers, you have to know that women couldn't vote until very late in the history of the US. Blacks first, then women. The time of this movie is five times further away from us than it is from the first national election where women voted.

A woman could be a wife, a nurse, teacher, secretary, whore.

Or, in movies if she was bright, a newspaper reporter. You have to understand also that the thirties was a period of great experimenting in narrative folding: stories that in some way included the making of stories. One common fold was the newspaper guy who "got the story" just as we are. He was our avatar, our representative in the thing.

These experiments from the thirties played with different notions of storygetter, some comic, some inverted.

So here you have a bright woman reporter. Feisty. Pretty. She's engaged to an "official" detective, a cop. But she keeps missing the wedding because she goes off chasing the story.

Together, they get the crook and solve the case, but always with her in the lead. He protects and she loves him, the "big lug." Though this is black and white, the audience would know (from posters, fan magazines and her name) that she is redheaded.

It was a long-lasting sequence of movies, as many as, say, the Charlie Chan ones and with far more than the celebrated "Thin Man." So I invite you to watch this — or any of the series. She's an icon that's all the more fascinating because it has ceased having power. Now that's interesting.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Fly Away Baby is the second in the Torchy Blane series about a smart girl newspaper reporter whose boyfriend is a police detective. I thought Glenda Ferrell was good in Smart Blonde. Both movies have the same director and the detective boyfriend is the same actor, but somehow Fly Away Baby just isn't a very interesting story. As another user points out, it includes the rather absurd situation of a "race" between three people who all fly together on the same planes. There is one especially interesting thing about this movie. It was based in part on Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a real female crime reporter and later became popular on the TV show "What's My Line?" Dorothy Kilgallen actually raced around the world against two other people, then wrote a book about it called Girl Around the World. She came in second, so evidently that race was real. I'm giving Fly Away Baby three stars for Glenda Farrell's performance as Torchy, but as a mystery it really falls flat. Note, if you like Glenda Farrell, I highly recommend the 1933 movie Mystery of the Wax Museum.

Second in this entertaining series sees Torchy taking to the air by plane and zeppelin in order to catch a murderer. One of the better Torchy Blane movies. Glenda Farrell as Torchy and Barton MacLane as her boyfriend Steve the cop are both pitch perfect. Fun support from Tom Kennedy and Hugh O'Connell. The cast is good and the runtime is brief so things move along pretty quickly. Perhaps there's not a lot of meat on the bone with movies like this but they sure are enjoyable.

A man is murdered in his apartment and thousands of dollars worth of diamonds are stolen. There is little evidence to trace the killer with, although Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell) does manage to find the murder weapon. She is convinced that Lucien Croy (Gordon Oliver) had something to do with it, although Lt. McBride (Barton MacLane) is not so sure. Croy seems to have an airtight alibi. On top of the investigation, Croy is going on a trip round the world as a publicity stunt for his newspaper. Torchy decides that tagging along is the perfect way to track him in spite of McBride's wishes.

A fun movie throughout, this second of the Torchy Blane films is entertaining but unimportant. There is a formula to these movies. Man is murdered, Torchy and McBride team up to solve it, it is solved, they announce their impending marriage. It isn't the story that makes these films rewatchable; it is the vibrant personality of Farrell. A beauty with brains, she is incredibly under-appreciated.

Some of the Torchy Blane films are better than others and Fly Away Baby falls in the middle. Now you have to approach these series films with a more charitable perspective. Except for The Thin Man series all the series films back in the studio days were B picture programmers.

Fly Away Baby has reporter Torchy Blane hot on the trail of a jewel thief and murderer. She's got one suspect in her sights, but another comes as a bit of a surprise to her. Of course she's once again treading on the toes of her homicide cop boyfriend Barton MacLane as Lieutenant Steve McBride. MacLane is the original alpha male, but Glenda Farrell gives as good as she gets.

In fact even when the plots are sub par as this one really is, the Torchy Blane series always has that marvelous chemistry between Farrell and MacLane. Farrell in this series gets a chance to shine in a way she never did mostly getting parts that Joan Blondell rejected at Warner Brothers. These two are like a working class Tracy and Hepburn.

And Barton MacLane I'm told was a whole lot like Steve McBride other than a lot of four letter words peppered his daily conversation. Usually he's a bad guy in his early film days, but it's a treat to see him on the side of the law. Folks always seem to be a step ahead of him though whether it's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or Torchy in this series.

Also there's Tom Kennedy who gives a droll performance as that thick as a brick assistant. Torchy and McBride are miles ahead of him.