Blondie Knows Best

Chic Young's very popular comic strip has always been entertaining and was utilized by Columbia Pictures as foundation for the Blondie film series (this one is number 18 of 28!), yet it is puzzling to some as to the cause of the success of these movies as they are shot through with inanity, strongly the case here. In this chapter, Dagwood Bumstead's boss Mr. Dithers is involved in a verbal altercation over a parking space in front of his office, not realizing that the man with whom he is arguing is a person that he hopes to persuade into signing a lucrative contract, and when he discovers the fact, he cajoles Dagwood, whom he has just fired, to masquerade as him in order to complete the business deal. The impersonation entails Dagwood's entertaining the prospective client (with "borrowed" women) at a night club where circumstances prescribe that he be discovered by Blondie and after the expected commotion has simmered down, Dagwood serves as a subject for a team of odd scientists who are testing a truth serum and have offered him $500. The feeblest element within the Blondie films is Dagwood, interpreted by Arthur Lake as an individual who ranks barely above an imbecile with his grating one-note mannerisms quite far removed from Young's original so that chirpy Penny Singleton, as Blondie, seems far more substantive, in comparison, than she should. Some talented actors are wasted in this slapstick episode, including Steven Geray, Jerome Cowan, and Jean Willes, all defeated by their puerile dialogue with only little Marjorie Kent, as Cookie Bumstead, being effective (one of the few appealing elements of the series is the chronologic aging of the children); her winning performance is fitting as the targeted audience apparently is from three to four years of age, and torpid.