Blonde Dynamite

BLONDE DYNAMITE (1950) ***/****

"I'll sue them for some salt and batteries".

The Bowery Boys' later films worked best when they were well written with something of a plot, and BLONDE DYNAMITE is one of these cases. It's quite good for one of their films from this period.

Slip Mahoney gets a brainstorm to send Louie Dumbrowski off on a vacation to Coney Island so he and the rest of the gang can transform Louie's sweet shop into an escort service. It isn't long before the boys get tangled up with unscrupulous crooks again in the bargain, but the laughs are pretty steady and the story stays tight.

"A brilliant seduction".

Male Escorts Wanted. That's the sign outside D'Amour Escort Bureau. Slip and Sach walk in and get promptly thrown out. Slip decides to start his own escort service with all the guys. No bank is willing to finance them. Meanwhile, respectable bank delivery boy Gabe Moreno gets enticed by blonde bombshell Joan Marshall. He loses $5k of the bank's money to Joan and her gangster friends. They blackmail him into a scheme to steal from the bank by digging through the Sweet Shop.

This is a fun Bowery Boys film. The story makes sense. There actually is a story. The characters are who they are. Sach is hilariously dumb. It's a fun duo with Slip. It all works. It's good whether you're a fan or not.

By1950 the Bowery Boys were already among moviedom's oldest "teens," but incredibily the series lasted for another 6 years and more than 20 movies, with the scripts getting increasingly sillier and the plots more far fetched. This is a pretty good entry in the series, and at times feels like it could've been almost a conventional B crime picture, instead of a Bowery Boys vehicle. In part that may be due to the prescence of leggy Adele Jergens, one of the great B movie bad girls. She's actually playing the title character, the only time in the series I can remember that happening.

Adele seemed to be one of those actresses who just wanted to keep working. "Blonde Dynamite" is one of her 10 movie credits on IMDB for 1950, including another Bowery Boys feature and the classic film noir "Side Street." (In 1949 she was in another B noir classic, "Armored Car Robbery.") She was also a comic foil (and the requisite eye candy) for Abbot and Costello in two of their films. Later in her career she was in a couple of super low budget teen crime exploitation movies, but she was always a solid pro who gave it her all. She's probably the biggest "name" of the many alluring females who populated the Bowery Boys movies, vamping Slip and/or Satch for devious purposes.

The idea of the boys as high class "escorts" is a hoot and well played for laughs. Though of course their ability to turn Louie's Sweet Shop into their escort agency office and then back again overnight takes a huge suspension of belief, typical of these plots. It should be noted that the plot device of digging from a office or store into an adjacent bank vault has been used in several films with the first one I'm aware of being "A Slight Case of Larceny" with Edward G. Robinson.

The rating of 7 stars is in the context of the Bowery Boys series. Sometimes you just have to grade on a curve.

Blonde Dynamite (1950)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

The boys are able to talk Louie (Bernard Gorcey) into taking a much needed vacation to Coney Island. Once gone Slip (Leo Gorcey) turns his ice cream parlor into an escort service and soon he gets himself mixed up with a couple gangsters wanting to use the place to tunnel underground to the bank next door. Number seventeen in the long-running series is another winner even though it doesn't contain nearly enough laughs to be called a good movie. The story is actually a pretty good one and the cast are certainly up for anything this time around. I thought the film benefited from once again giving Gabe (Gabriel Dell) a different role and him being mixed up with the icy blonde and the gangsters was a nice switch to get the story rolling instead of having the boys bringing the trouble on. I think the screenplay would have benefited had it spent some more time with Louis. The opening sequence with his breakdown was pretty funny as was the scene where he's leaving with his wife. This is the first time we've seen him wife and hopefully the last time. Bernard Gorcey is certainly very good in his few minutes on screen with son Leo and Huntz Hall delivering they usual fine performances. This entry seemed to be going for more Three Stooges-like humor as Slip is starting to enjoy slapping Sach around each time he can. Dell is in fine form as well as Adele Jergens as the backstabbing blonde and Harry Lewis gets a nice bit as a bad guy. The film doesn't have nearly enough laughs to make it a total success but fans of the series will find enough here to make it worth watching.

You have to hand it to Leo Gorcey. When he dreams, he dreams big. Slip and Satch see an a male escort bureau and see no reason why he and the rest of the Bowery Boys couldn't do this job. With his savoir faire and command of the English language no telling how far they could rise.

When Gorcey and Huntz Hall are thrown out after they apply, are they discouraged? Not in the least, they persuade Bernard Gorcey he needs a vacation in Coney Island. Then they take over Louie's Sweet Shop and turn it into their own escort bureau.

But there's a gang headed by Harry Lewis with his moll Adele Jergens who have their own plans for the Sweet Shop. They've even got Slip and Satch's pal Gabriel Dell in a jackpot as part of said plans. Part of that plan consists of hiring the whole gang as escorts for her some of her pals. You have to see Jergens vamping Billy Benedict who when he was a Bowery Boy got in a bit of his own business involving his naiveté. Benedict played kids in other than the Bowery Boys well into his 30s. As for Jergens she had a specialty in trying to seduce man children types. See how she does in Abbott&Costello Meet The Invisible Man with Lou.

I won't get into what the gang wants the Sweet Shop for, but it's funny, in fact it gets downright silly and almost surreal. Suffice it to say the Sweet Shop becomes a Sweet Shop again for the next Bowery Boy film.