Classic Films in Focus: BLONDE CRAZY (1931)

Blonde Crazy (1931) is a Pre-Code cracker that really puts the slap in its slapstick, with Joan Blondell regularly smacking costar James Cagney as the pair make their way through a series of scams and double crosses. Cagney's conman deserves Blondell's tough love; his Bert is too smart for his own good and always on the make, especially when attractive women turn up, but Cagney works the flawed charm of the character for all he's worth, and he and Blondell have excellent chemistry. Director Roy Del Ruth skillfully handles the mix of comedy and drama in this Depression Era tale of likable schemers, which also features Louis Calhern, Ray Milland, and Guy Kibbee.

Cagney plays enterprising hotel bellhop Bert, who uses his job primarily as an opportunity to run crooked schemes. He helps Anne (Joan Blondell) get a position at the hotel in order to chat her up, but when she forcefully rejects his smooth talk he ends up making her his partner instead. The pair work their way up and out of the hotel, but in the city they become entangled with big time conman Dapper Dan (Louis Calhern) and his partner, Helen (Noel Francis). Anne eventually tires of Bert's relentless schemes and falls for the seemingly straight arrow Joe (Ray Milland), but Joe turns out to have a few crooked angles of his own.

There's plenty of tantalizing Pre-Code action in Blonde Crazy, with illicit booze, gambling, adultery, honey traps, robbery, and Joan Blondell's brassiere stuffed full of cash. It's a world of moral relativity that Blondell's character enters somewhat by accident; she's not naturally crooked but is tough enough to handle herself in spite of constant sexual harassment. Anne isn't much bothered by Bert's scams because he usually swindles other swindlers, but she draws the line at outright robbery. When she decides to get out of the game and marry Joe, Bert realizes that he's missed out on his opportunity for a better life with Anne by his side, and he quits, too. Bert's inclination to go straight is then ironically thwarted by Anne's distress when Joe is revealed as the worst crook of them all.

Cagney and Blondell carry the picture with their performances, with Cagney clearly relishing the wolfish energy of his character and Blondell striking just the right balance between cynicism and vulnerability. Bert's favorite endearment, a drawled "Hoooney!" that he often directs at Anne, rolls out of Cagney's mouth with a cocksure smirk that perfectly sums up his personality. Supporting the pair most notably are Louis Calhern and Noel Francis as con artists who make a mark of Bert and cheat him out of his own ill-gotten cash. Their ruthless efficiency makes our protagonists look like angels, but Anne figures out a way to get even with them. Guy Kibbee makes a memorable appearance as one of Bert and Anne's early marks, while Ray Milland pops up fairly late in the picture as the rival for Anne's affections. We don't really see enough of Milland's Joe to form opinions about him until the very end, and it's kind of a shame that Milland doesn't get to work that shifty glint in Joe's eye a little more before his final act of selfish betrayal.

Roy Del Ruth, who started in the silent era, directed a wide variety of pictures, including Born to Dance (1936), It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947), and The Alligator People (1959). For more of Cagney and Blondell together, see The Public Enemy (1931), The Crowd Roars (1932), Footlight Parade (1933), and He Was Her Man (1934). Ray Milland is just a young up-and-comer in Blonde Crazy; catch him in his prime in the 1940s in The Major and the Minor (1942), The Uninvited (1944), and The Lost Weekend (1945).


Blonde Crazy is currently streaming on FilmStruck.

Film, Fact & Fiction: Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
     -- e.e. cummings

Like many historical figures of the American West, William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, became a legend within his own lifetime. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Cody engineered the process himself, carefully crafting the persona of Buffalo Bill for his own ends. His flair for showmanship led him to create the Wild West show that entertained people all over the world and perpetuated many of the images of the Old West that we still see in films and other media today. At the center of that show was the man himself, larger than life, dressed in decorated buckskin and tall boots and crowned with flowing locks. Cody, who died in 1917, even appeared in some early film footage promoting his show; if he had lived to see the way cinema would continue his legacy he would no doubt have been pleased. Like other icons of the West, Cody has been depicted in numerous films, although most of them have succumbed to the lure of his public persona and few have looked into the facts of his actual life. An overview of Cody's appearances in classic movies reveals the extent to which Buffalo Bill looms over our imaginary Western landscape, but it also shows how much of Cody's real life has yet to be depicted on film.

Cody actually plays himself in the first entry for depictions of Buffalo Bill on IMDB, a 1915 three-reel silent known as The Circus Girl's Romance or Patsy of the Circus. (There is also a 1912 production called The Life of Buffalo Bill, in which he is credited as himself, and a host of other shorts and documentary shorts, mostly depicting the Wild West show. Look for these under William F. Cody as an actor rather than Buffalo Bill as a character.) This was not a new tactic for the showman, who had been playing himself in stage shows starting in 1872, when he alternated between having real adventures out West and then starring in fictionalized versions of them for the stage back in Chicago. He even took to wearing his stage costume on his frontier expeditions. The plays served as tie-ins to the huge number of dime novels that starred Buffalo Bill as their hero; in all, some 1,700 stories would be produced.

The novels were long on heroics but very short on facts. While the fictional Bill roamed the frontier and fought with Indians, the real William Cody struggled through a long-distance marriage and the deaths of three of his four children, including his five year old son, Kit Carson Cody, and his eleven year old daughter, Orra. Restless, extravagant, and always hatching a new plan for wealth and fame, Cody hit great heights as well as terrible depths over the course of his life. In 1904 he endured scandal when he unsuccessfully sued his wife, Louisa, for divorce, only to have his own affairs and alcoholism revealed to the public. The couple eventually reconciled, and Cody died on January 10, 1917, at the home of his sister in Denver, Colorado. His last living child, Irma Cody Garlow, died of the flu in 1918, and Louisa died in 1921, having outlived both her husband and all four of her children. (See the William F. Cody Archive for a longer biographical account.)

After his death, Cody continued to be popular in films and was played by a wide variety of actors. George Waggner played him in John Ford's silent, The Iron Horse (1924), and Duke R. Lee played him in both 1922 and 1927. The dawn of the talkie era brought more depictions, with lots of noisy excitement to bring both the frontier and the Wild West show to life. Moroni Olsen gets significant screen time as the showman in the 1935 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Annie Oakley, a very free-handed biographical account of the sharpshooter's rise to fame. Although it's not the place to look for historical accuracy, it's an excellent picture and a lively rendering of the height of the Wild West show's success. In 1940 Roy Rogers played a youthful version of Bill in the aptly named Young Buffalo Bill, which touched off a series of other productions depicting the icon's early adventures. George Reeves took up that vein with the serial, Pony Express Days, in 1940, followed by child actor Dickie Moore a decade later in Cody of the Pony Express. Other actors who took on the role in subsequent years included Charlton Heston and Clayton Moore, and even more performers played Buffalo Bill once television took hold.

A few films from the classic era provide the most memorable screen depictions of Cody. He was treated to a full biopic production with Buffalo Bill in 1944, in which Joel McCrea plays Cody and Maureen O'Hara plays Louisa. Ironically, Moroni Olsen, who had played Bill in Annie Oakley back in 1935, here appears as Louisa's father. The picture also features Linda Darnell, Thomas Mitchell, and Anthony Quinn. Cody is probably best remembered by movie fans as he appears in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), the musical account of Annie Oakley's life starring Betty Hutton. In this picture, Louis Calhern portrays the showman, while Howard Keel costars as Annie's love interest and eventual husband, Frank Butler. In 1976, after the heyday of the classic Western had ended, Robert Altman offered a satirical look at the legend in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, starring Paul Newman in the title role.

You can find Buffalo Bill in plenty of more recent films and television series. He's played by Keith Carradine in Wild Bill (1995) and by J.K. Simmons in Hidalgo (2004). New depictions are certainly still on the horizon; Buffalo Bill is a hard figure to resist, even if we always seem more interested in the legend instead of the man.

If you want to learn more about the real William F. Cody, add a visit to Cody, Wyoming, to your bucket list. Cody founded the town, which is named in his honor, and it's there that you'll find the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The museum includes a large wing devoted to the story of the man and his myths, where you'll find not only a talking hologram of Buffalo Bill but also countless artifacts and personal items from his family and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. While you're there, pop into the historic Irma Hotel for a buffet lunch. Cody built the hotel and named it for his daughter in 1902; the huge bar was a gift to Cody from Queen Victoria. The town will give you a palpable sense of Cody's legacy beyond his depictions on the silver screen.

Classic Films in Focus: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)

Although it’s often compared to The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933), which came out the same year, Diplomaniacs (1933) proves a far more difficult picture for a modern viewer to engage, and that difficulty helps to explain why The Marx Brothers are icons while Wheeler and Woolsey have been relegated to obscurity. This wild - and wildly inappropriate - satire of international politics certainly has its funny moments, but it’s probably best appreciated by serious classic film enthusiasts who are prepared to handle a manic 62 minute musical that packs in just about every racial “face” stereotype of 1930s Hollywood. Diplomaniacs is also rife with racy pre-Code sexual energy, so put the kids to bed before you attempt to fathom the appeal of this picture and its truly nutty stars.

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey star as Willy and Hercules, a couple of barbers who fruitlessly set up shop on an Indian reservation, where, supposedly, their services are never required. The locals hire the pair to be their representatives at a peace conference in Geneva, but a scheming ammunitions tycoon (Louis Calhern) tries to sink their efforts because his business depends on countries trying to kill each other. He unleashes a vamp, Dolores (Marjorie White), to seduce the boys, and later he also hires Fifi (Phyllis Barry) to thwart them, but the duo’s own ineptitude seems equally likely to undermine their mission.

We start the picture with white chorus girls dressed up in some very skimpy - and utterly fake - Native American costumes, along with Edward Cooper as the tribe’s Oxford-educated chief. After a series of “red man” shenanigans, the action moves to Europe, where the villain’s henchman is a Chinese pseudo-philosopher played by Hugh Herbert. He spouts plenty of fortune cookie nonsense before abandoning the plot and rowing back to China. Left in Europe, Willy and Hercules avoid the embraces of the two women but wind up part of a huge black face musical number when a bomb explodes in the peace conference. That gives us red face, yellow face, and black face all in about one hour, if you happen to be keeping count.

For casual modern viewers and youngsters, that much racial humor is probably a deal breaker already, but Diplomaniacs also revels in the kind of saucy comedy that only pre-Code pictures could get away with, at least until many decades later. The chorus girls show up again in some eye-popping French maid outfits, and the running gags involving both Dolores and Fifi reveal their one-note function as sex objects. More subversive is Wheeler’s frequent positioning as the “female” half of the comedy pair; the joke is most obvious when the two protagonists wake up in bed together and Willy promptly dons a lady’s dressing gown.

An academic viewer might well find it worthwhile to parse the meta, satiric, and even carnivalesque aspects of this picture, and experienced classic movie viewers might enjoy it for its parallels to Duck Soup and its instructive glimpse of the Wheeler and Woolsey style. For a quick tour of all the crazy things pre-Code movies could get away with, it’s certainly an effective example, but you have to be prepared for what you are going to get. Many viewers are likely to be too offended by the movie’s caricatures to enjoy its gags, and that’s a valid response, especially if you happen to belong to one of the groups being misrepresented.

Wheeler and Woolsey can also be found in Caught Plastered (1931), Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934), and Kentucky Kernels (1934). William A. Seiter, who directed Diplomaniacs, is best remembered today for Fred Astaire films like You Were Never Lovelier (1942) and Shirley Temple vehicles like Stowaway (1936). Look for Louis Calhern in Duck Soup (1933), Notorious (1946), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). You'll find Hugh Herbert in Dames (1934), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), and Hollywood Hotel (1937).

Diplomaniacs is one of a handful of Wheeler and Woolsey films currently available for streaming on Warner Archive Instant.