The Adventurous Blonde

When we last left them, Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell) and Steve MacBride (Barton MacLane were still about to get married,. In this one, what keeps them apart is that her fellow reporters decide the way to keep her on the paper is to have her report a fake murder. So they set it up with Leyland Howard, only to discover that he is, indeed dead. So MacLane and Miss Farrell investigate at cross purposes.

The nine Torchy Blane movies produced by Warner's B unit from 1937 through 1939 are a lot of silly fun, mostly because Miss Farrell was Warner's champion motormouth, and MacLane was tops at playing a solid guy; together they are surprisingly charming. Tom Kennedy, Charley Foy, and Jimmy Conlin appear for their own brands of comic action, and while these were never intended as great movies, they were always solidly entertaining.

For what was considered a Warner Brothers B series, the Torchy Blane series was fantastic. Torchy (Glenda Farrell) is a reporter and spitfire engaged to police detective Steve McBride (Barton McLane) who is equally tough. They don't have traditionally romantic moments, but they are a great team for solving murders and have great chemistry. You can see them probably acting the same to each other the day before they are married, the day after, ten years later, twenty years later. They are tough people in tough jobs and they get one another. Should everybody be that lucky.

In this installment of the series, the reporters of the other papers are talking about how Torchy always scoops them because of her close association to McBride. So they decide to set up a fake murder, let Torchy report on it and have it go to press, and then reveal that the whole thing was a fake just to embarrass her. They get a ham actor (Harvey Hammond) to play the part of the corpse. They get an assistant at the coroner's office to pronounce death and probably cause of death - strangling, and then have other actors that they have hired to play the servants. Well the whole thing blows up in their face when it turns out Hammond actually HAS been strangled! So Torchy scoops the other reporters again because their hoax is a real murder.

Now to find out who did it. It turns out that there are any multitude of suspects, and that strangely enough that Hammond was a lady's man, although he had been married for twenty years and honestly he came across like a stuffed shirt and was not good looking at all. What was the attraction? Torchy solves this one, but she makes one leap of logic that you have to rewind to the beginning of the film to figure out HOW she figured it out. Several people persuade various suspects to falsely confess, and one of these false confessions outs the murderer.

You know, watching this fast paced entertaining film brings up a few questions. For one thing, why does Torchy think of doing standard investigative techniques that the cops should have thought of? Does Torchy REALLY want to get married? You can tell she loves McBride, but it is he that seems to be the sentimental one, and she always seems to be coming up with excuses as to why they need to wait. As she drives off at one point McBride is frantically waving at her, and when several other detectives think he is hailing them he seems suddenly embarrassed by this display of affection by "a tough guy" like himself.

Highly recommended if you like the B crime movies of the 30's and 40's. Oh, and Barton McLane and Glenda Farrell were so good together that outside of the Torchy Blane series they did "Prison Break" together for Universal in 1938.

Glenda farrell is torchy blane, on a train, heading east to get married. Co-stars the usual barton maclane and tom kennedy. It's a battle of newspapers, and the other reporters want to put torchy in her place. So they stage a fake murder. Which turns out not to be fake. Will she ever get married? Some funny lines. Fast action. Well done who-dunnit, wrapped up in sixty one minutes. We were still pretty happy go lucky, between the two wars. I really liked the energy of this one... not a minute wasted. It really moved along. Fun stuff. Directed by frank mcdonald; he made six films with farrell. Torchy blane character by writer fred nebel.

This is the 3rd film of the Torchy Blane series and once again Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane are in the leads once again. The film begins with the Lieutenant (MacLane) getting a slight dressing down by his boss. It seems that since Torchy is the lieutenant's fiancée, she gets an inside scoop of crimes that other newspaper people are now complaining about--after all, should the Lieutenant's girl get stories that no other reporter has access to? In addition, the reporters decide to play a trick on the couple to get revenge--they'll stage a fake murder and make them look like idiots when they investigate. The problem is that this fake murder turns out to be a real one--and once again, Torchy gets the scoop.

Throughout the film, Torchy takes the law into her own hands--making guesses and playing hunches again and again. And, since this IS a Torchy Blane film, you know that all of it will work out in the end. Unfortunately, compared to the earlier Torchy Blane films, this one more contrived and less believable. Enjoyable, sure--just not particularly outstanding in its execution.

Barton MacLane, William Hopper and George E. Stone all appeared in TV's Perry Mason. Hopper as a main character PI Paul Drake, Stone as the court reporter in many episodes and MacLane as a guest star.