Fly Away Baby

Torchy (Glenda Farrell) and her boyfriend, Steve (Barton MacLane) are once again preparing to get married. And, once again, a murder occurs and derails their plans. This is a perennial theme in this series as well as in the Falcon and Bulldog Drummond.

The police, naturally, arrest the wrong man and Torchy thinks that the real killer is going on a worldwide race--and she intends to chase him and prove his guilt. However, there are a lot of twists and turns and she isn't exactly right--but of course she saves the day by the end of the film. All of this is very, very ordinary...EXCEPT the location of the final portion of the film. During this worldwide jaunt, the trail leads to Germany...yes, NAZI Germany! And, with the help of the German police, the mystery is solved...ABOARD THE HINDENBURG!!!! For an ex-history teacher like me, it made the film worth seeing--even if the plot really is a bit pedestrian.

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.

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.

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.

Jeweler Milton Deveraux is murdered during a break in of his store. Lt. Steve MacBride is perplexed, but girlfriend Torchy Blane suspects Lucien Croy, reporter for the rival Star Telegram (who is only on the paper because his father, owner and publisher, wants him to earn a living ) because Croy has amassed large gambling debts, but Croy is alibied by Guy Allister (Deveraux's partner) and Ila Sayre (nightclub singer and Croy's girlfriend). Torchy still suspects Croy of being part of the jewel heist, so thanks to her editor and publisher, accompanies him on a promotional race-around-the-world flight, also joined by Hughie Sprague (reporter for the Daily Journal) and former police traffic driver, Gahagan, who is now a private detective watching Sprague for some reason. Ila later confesses to MacBride that Croy's alibi was not what it seemed, and MacBride races to Frankfurt to arrest Croy for the murder of Deveraux and the jewel theft, but is it as simple as all that? Excellent entry in the Torchy Blane series with plenty of mystery that left this viewer curious to the end, with plenty of twists and turns. The performances of Farrell and MacLane are the same fun as the last picture (also picking up where the last film left off with Torchy trying to get MacBride to the altar) and the comic relief between Kennedy (Gahagan) and O'Connell (Sprague) was played down to the point where it was enjoyable. Rating, based on B mysteries, 8.