BLONDIE JOHNSON

US, 1933, 68 minutes, Black and white.
Joan Blondell, Chester Morris, Allen Jenkins, Sterling Holloway.
Directed by Ray Enright.

Blondie Johnson is an above-average brief Depression-era program filler from the 1930s.

The film was directed by Ray Enright, a veteran of many of these brief films in the 1930s, continuing on in a whole range of genres, especially westerns, to the 1950s.

The film captures the atmosphere of the Depression, especially in the opening, where Blondie, effectively played by Joan Blondell, goes to seek assistance from an agency because of the family being ousted from their lodgings and her mother being sick. She offers a picture of pathos but the official reminds her that there are many others worse off than she – and the camera pans around the forlorn people in the office. When she returns home, her mother has died.

Blondie’s motivation is very strong now, to get money at all costs. She goes to the city, encounters a friendly taxi driver played by Sterling Holloway and sets up a scam whereby she looks forlorn on the street, and men offer her money and she repeats the process until she happens to be caught by a mini-gangster, gum-chewing Chester Morris. She teams up with him, no romantic connections, and helps him to humiliate the overall boss, especially by putting on a performance as a sobbing wife in a court case where Allen Jenkins, accused of killing someone, is freed.

Blondie continues with her exploits, targeting the boss, upset when Chester Morris seems to have another girlfriend, There is also a set-up where there is a shooting.

The audience will be expecting Blondie to get away, so sympathetic is Joan Blondell, but just as the strictness of the Production Code was being introduced, the two caught, admitting their guilt, and making resolutions for a better life after serving their sentence.