The Strawberry Blonde

With film stars such as James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, Alan Hale, Jack Carson and George Tobias featured in this film you can expect a highly entertaining romance/drama. Yes, the storyline has been re-done more than a thousand times over and over where boy (James Cagney as Biff Grimes) meets stunning girl (Rita Hayworth as Virginia Brush) and falls blindly in love by the attractive but more cunning woman, and where the third string girl (Olivia de Havilland as Amy Lind) is ignored and insulted by Biff even though she outwardly shows how much she cares for Biff and does not want to see him get hurt by the vixen Virginia.

Biff's father old man Grimes (Alan Hale) is reluctant to find steady work and he would much rather foolishly try to win over a string of already married women that all live in Biff's neighborhood with his charm. Biff is a typical tough guy who is smitten with the out of his league Virginia who likes to play the field and take advantage of as many men as she possibly can date, dine then leave broken hearted at her front door step.

For Biff, there is always the registered nurse Amy Lind who seems to appear and interfere with Biff's attempts at wooing the beautiful Virginia, who was responsible in the first place for Biff and Amy's first few dates.

Yes this is a simple love triangle story seen many times before. the difference though is in the depth of star performances who signed on to make this particular film more than just a cut above its competitors. Although the film is now 77 years young at the time of my writing this review, and where horse and carriage was the preferred method of transportation, and gas lighting before electricity was more common, and the film is in black and white, it rates 4 **** out of 5***** stars in my review. I give the film a solid 8 out of 10 rating and I wish there were more films made like this today.

Hint: Look for a young 27 year old George Reeves as the neighbor's college tough guy Harold in his turtleneck lettered sweater, more than ten (10) years prior to taking on his most famous and popular role in the syndicated (1952-1958) TV series The Adventures of Superman.

Julius Epstein (the man who gave us Arsenic and Old Lace) excels with his adaptation of James Hagan's play One Sunday Afternoon. (For those who think the credit belongs with the playwright not the scriptwriter, I refer you to the 1948 remake One Sunday Afternoon.) The script is crisp and witty, one liners abound, and I found myself laughing out loud often.

The film gains its strength from the morals of a bygone era, as men and women struggle to find love without overstepping the bounds of decency. Yet it holds up well more than 60 years after it was made. The themes of love and happiness are timeless.

Cagney is excellent as jailbird-turned-dentist Biff Grimes. His famed tough guy persona bubbles not very far below the surface but we are reminded that this actor is much more multi-faceted than history sometimes remembers him.

The female cast members are outstanding. The beautiful Susan Hayworth plays the title character Virginia Brush superbly, showing every nuance of the shallow yet ultimately dissatisfied wannabe socialite. Her best friend, Ann Lind, provides a great showcase for Olivia de Havilland's talent, moving from the brash, forward suffragette to the devoted wife, showing her vulnerability as well as her strength along the way.

Some of Hollwood's fine character actors get a chance to impress too. The hard-working Jack Carson impresses as Hugo Barnstead, the charming womanizer turned sleazy tycoon. George Tobias has plenty of scene-stealing moments as Grimes' good friend, Nick the barber. (Look closely and you may recognize him as Bewitched's Abner Kravitz.) Alan Hale is at his best as Grimes' irrepressible Irish father. Keep your eye out for TV's Superman George Reeves as Harold, the Yale student neighbour.

This film provides an amusing reminder that beauty and wealth do not always bring happiness.

Enjoy Strawberry Blonde. I did.

Cagney departs from his tough, street smart persona to play the gullible, not so tough Biff Grimes. Notice how he loses fight after fight; in one scene he's a barroom bouncer tossing his drunken father out asking his father not to put up too much of a fight "I'm supposed to be a tough guy".

He gets suckered time after time by Hugo and Virginia. That wouldn't have happened to other Cagney characters! His best scenes are with Olivia DeHavilland. What chemistry. Sometimes no dialog, just glances.

The main characters play off each other phenomenally. Even the minor characters are superb. Who was that fat German who blew beer foam into Cagney's face? He was great! The period music is so woven into the story that the movie almost becomes a musical. The lovely theme that's played whenever Olivia DeHavilland come into the scene is "When You Were Sweet Sixteen". Unlike the title song "Strawberry Blonde", it's never sung in the movie but it was popular at the turn of the century. Perry Como made it one of his hits in the early 1940's.

The movie is such a nostalgic, funny, (sad at times) look back at the turn of the century that you wish you could go back there with them.

It's amazing that director Raoul Walsh also made the brilliant, violent, cynical "White Heat" with nary a sentimental, lovable character.

Almost all of Cagney's early roles were that of a gangster or a fast-talking con-man. Starting in the 40's as the major studios ramped up their production of patriotic films in anticipation of war, Cagney starred in some military roles such as "The Fighting 69th" and "Captains of the Clouds". However, it was still the same old wise-cracking gangster or con-man - he was just in uniform. Don't get me wrong, I never get tired watching Cagney play these kinds of parts, but I've read that the typecasting was a source of friction between himself and Warner Brothers.

This film is a real departure from the kind of role that Cagney had grown tired of by 1934. In it he plays Biff Grimes, a dentist at the beginning of the 20th century. Biff has had a series of misfortunes heaped upon him throughout his life. To begin with his Dad (Alan Hale) is a ne'er-do-well, and he has a "friend" Hugo F. Barnstead (Jack Carson) who is always managing to get the best of him and then some. Hugo works up from small slights such as not paying back money or leaving Biff with the tab to stealing and marrying Biff's ideal girl and finally setting Biff up to take the fall in some substandard work Hugo's company has done for the city. After Biff gets out of prison after serving time for a crime he didn't commit, he has a chance to get even with Hugo -as in killing him - and make it look like an accident. Since most of the movie is told in flashback, and Cagney is playing a likable if somewhat gullible fellow who has been deeply wronged, you don't know how it will end or what he will do. The supporting cast is great in this one. Jack Carson was always playing the slippery type in Warner films around this time, and he does the job of playing Hugo with believable gusto, always making excuses for his part in Biff's predicaments. Rita Hayworth is cast as "the strawberry blonde" that Biff loses to Hugo, and Olivia De Havilland plays the girl Biff ultimately marries. She turns out to the one piece of good luck that Biff has as she is tough and loyal in a crisis.

A bittersweet romantic comedy, this is one of my favorite post-code Cagney films.

I have a soft spot for this movie, it makes me cry and it challenges me. It hovers eagle-like over other pieces of quaint, nostalgic Americana in its brilliant mise-en-scène by overlooked film-maker Raoul Walsh, its crisp and very acute script, and its wonderful acting.

James Cagney is the small-town dentist, just out of jail, having been framed by his business partner and boyhood best friend, Jack Carson. Carson married the local beauty, Rita Hayworth of the film's title, and left Cagney with Hayworth's best friend, the free-thinking, no-nonsense Olivia De Havilland. And now, after all these years, Cagney learns that Carson is on his way to his dentist's practice with a bad tooth-ache. What to do ...?

There is such pain underlying all the ebullient humor of 'The Strawberry Blonde', and as usual Walsh gets away with superlative results from mixing genres. From the first frames of the bulldog chasing the cat and the two different social environments on each side of the garden wall, on one side throwing horse-shoes, on the other playing cricket, Walsh wastes no time and is always to the point, telling his story.

Everybody in this movie is perfect. Hayworth waltzes through it all by way of her radiant looks, but Cagney surpasses himself as this charming bigot, always with a black eye to show for the numerous scrapes he gets into.

Olivia De Havilland deserves a whole chapter to herself. I doubt if she was ever better than as the tough kooky, Amy, who never tires of preaching women's lib to Hayworth's Virginia ("I refuse to listen to advanced ideas!"). "What did we come for if not to be trifled with?", she asks, indignantly, of Virginia, seated as they are on the bench in the park, waiting for their beaus. She calls marriage "an institution started by the cavemen and endorsed by florists and jewelers" and insists on her right to pick up men by winking at them. De Havilland is hilarious, and you also notice the vulnerability beneath the feminist swagger.

Not everybody will care for 'The Strawberry Blonde'. If you only give it a superficial look, you will find it dated and cutesy, whereas it is everything but.