Under the Spell of Joan Blondell and Those Big Baby Blues

                       

                                     Joan Blondell--the whole package.

She was the brassy blonde who had been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.  A wise cracking working girl with the biggest blue eyes ever, an electric smile, and a plump figure that turned heads and got attention.  She could scheme and connive with good humor.  Underneath the veneer of urban cynicism, though, you just knew she was capable of undying loyalty to lovers and friends alike.  That was the persona Joan Blondell brought to Warner Bros. in 1930 and which sustained a career that spanned 40 years.

Rose Joan Blondell was born on August 30, 1906 in Brooklyn to a pair of vaudevillians, comedian Ed Blondell and Kathryn “Katie” Cain, an Irish-American hoofer.  Baby Joan was first thrust on stage at just four months old as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.  She would be given lines and bits of business in the family act by age four

The family toured relentlessly and Joan did not know a real home until her teenage years.  By then in addition to becoming familiar with hotel rooms in cities across the country, she and her family spent a year in Hawaii and toured Australia for six years.

                                        

                                                        Before blond--Miss Dallas, 1926 age 20.

The family finally settled in Dallas, Texas where she managed to finish school.  Under the name Rosebud Blondell, she won the 1926 Miss Dallas Pageant and placed fourth in the fifth outing of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey later that year. 

The next year, 1927, Blondell tried her hand at North Texas State College in Denton where her mother was working as an actress.  Education didn’t take.  Show Biz did.  She worked as a model and a circus show girl before heading for the Big Apple and a bit of fame.

Blondell joined a stock company and worked regularly in small parts, including stints on Broadway.  Her big break came in 1930 when she was paired with a charismatic young hoofer named James Cagney in the play Penny Arcade.  It only ran four weeks, but the show and its young stars wowed Al Jolson, Broadway’s biggest star and the man who had helped save Warner Bros. with his breakthrough talkie, The Jazz Singer. 

Jolson bought rights to the play and then turned around to sell it to Warners with the provision that Cagney and Blondell had to re-create their parts.  Jack Warner agreed but wanted to change her name to Inez Holmes.  Blondell flatly refused, endangering her big chance in the movies.  Rather than risk losing the property and perhaps Cagney as well, Warner relented.  But it would be far from the last time that Blondell clashed with the notoriously dictatorial studio boss.

                        Blondell and James Cagney made an impression in Warner Bros.' Sinner's Holiday in 1930.

Released as Sinners Holiday the movie was Cagney’s film debut.  The second film Blondell made for Warners, Office Wife had already been released.  In that one she had a supporting role as the sister of the female lead and stole the show handing out world weary advice while getting into or out of revealing underwear.

Sinners Holiday established the screen personas of both Cagney and Blondell.  Cagney shot to immediate stardom.  Blondell was along for the ride.  She would co-star with the actor six times, more than any other actress in his career.  The films included Public Enemy, Footlight Parade, and Blond Crazy.  Cagney later said the only woman he ever loved other than his wife was Joan Blondell.

If Cagney shot to top stardom, Blondell never quite reached that level despite her great popularity with audiences.  Men adored her and women felt like she could be their best friend.  But the studio already had one blond bombshell, Jean Harlow.  Another up-and-coming young actress with a street-wise persona, Barbara Stanwyck played working class girls in edgy and darker material.   Blondell’s close friend Betty Davis was a fast-rising star and would soon be dominating serious and prestige parts.  Ruby Keeler, Jolson’s wife, was the musical star.  And young Olivia de Havilland would soon sew up all of innocent sweetheart parts.  The studio even had extra sassy comic blonds like Glenda Ferrell.

In pre-Code flicks Blondell frequently dished out wise cracks and world weary advice in various states of undress, revealing lingerie, or even from the bath tub.  Seen here on loan to Fox in 1933 with a more modestly covered up Ginger Rogers in Broadway Bad.

So, the studio wasted Blondell’s time in shorts and relegated her to the sassy best friend in over 50 feature films.  She, her sex appeal, body, and sass were perfect for the pre-Production Code naughtiness for which Warners was famous.  She was cast in fallen women pictures—Illicit with Stanwyck in the lead, Big Business Girl with Loretta Young, Night Nurse again with Stanwyck, The Greeks Had a Word for Them in a rare first billed lead, and Thee on a Match with Ann Dvorak and pal Bette Davis.

The studio also put her in their down-on-their-luck Depression stories like Union Station with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as an improbable hobo and Central Park in which two down-and-outers forced to live in the title park fall in love, are separated, and exploited in a scheme to rob a charity ball.

                                    Blondell spent a lot of screen time answering the phone in her underwear or a peekaboo robe.

Blondell was making as many as six pictures a year plus shorts when she married cinematographer George Barnes in Phoenix, Arizona on January 4, 1933.

Musicals were another staple of Warners in the early 30’s.  The fact that Blondell was not a singer and only a so-so dancer did not prevent the studio from casting her as a chorine and pal of the leads.  Most famously she co-starred in Gold Diggers of 1933 in which she performed in a semi-spoken wail/moan Busby Berkley’s epic Forgotten Man number.  That one song may have been Blondell’s finest dramatic performance.  It was on the set of this movie that Blondell met boyish singer Dick Powell who would become her second husband.

The heart wrenching Forgotten Man number from Busby Berkley's Gold Diggers of 1933 was a highlight of Blonell's career.

Warners would pair her with that otherwise cracking blonde, Glenda Ferrell, in six films most notably Gold Diggers of 1937.  The characters were different in each film, and most were straight comedies.  By the mid-Thirties the Production Code office killed the fallen woman genre and limited the amount of time the well-endowed Blondell could spend in lingerie or taking baths.  And the public tired of musicals.  Warners turned to gritty gangster flicks, high flown women’s dramas, prestige historical bio-pics, and swashbucklers.  Davis had the women’s film sewed up, de Havilland’s bosom heaved for Errol Flynn, and Blondell was too urban for most costume dramas.  But she was perfect for gangster films.  She re-teamed with Cagney in He Was Her Man and with Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots.

Through the later ‘30s Warners used Blondell almost exclusively in comedies.  Scripts got lamer, budgets cheaper, co-stars second rung.  She was in danger of slipping into B movie unit films like her erstwhile partner Glenda Ferrell had with the Torchy Blaine girl reporter series.

Blondell and husband Dick Powell escaped Warner Bros. and made I Want a Divorce together at Paramount in 1940.  A harbinger of things to come?

When her contract with Warners expired in 1939, Blondell cheerfully left her long time home to become a free-lance actress.  Husband Dick Powell left the studio about the same time.  Parts were harder to come by and Blondell was nearing 40.  She teamed with her husband in a preachy comedy I Want a Divorce in 1940.

But now she was lucky to make one or two films a year.  The high points during the War years were Topper Returns, Lady for a Night at Republic Pictures with John Wayne, and Cry Havoc, a gritty war drama about Army nurses at Bataan  for MGM in 1943.

As disreputable Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 with her proper sister played by Dorothy McGuire.

Blondell would not appear on the big screen for nearly two years.  And when she did, she was a revelation.  As Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn she was the scandalous relative of the poor but respectable Nolan family who collects men who may or may not be other women’s husbands.  Blondell considered it her finest film work.

Blondell and Powell divorced in 1944.  In ’47 she married for the third, last, and most disastrous time to charming but profligate theatrical impresario Mike Todd.  She described her relationship with him as the great, passionate love of her life.  But Todd was a spendthrift, heavy gambler, and a cad by nature.  It did not take long for him to spend his way through Blondell’s money leaving her essentially broke.  The couple divorced in 1950 with Blondell alleging physical abuse including being dangled out of a hotel window by her ankle.  A few years later Todd swept Elizabeth Taylor off of her feet then died in a plane crash.

In 1951 Blondell reached the pinnacle of her post-war career in The Blue Veil starring Jane Wyman as a self-sacrificing nurse to young children.  Wyman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and Blondell was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

She appeared sporadically on the big screen after that, mostly in comedies most notably The Opposite Sex, a musical re-make of Clair Booth Luce’s The Women  with a cast headed by Dick Powell’s next wife, June Allison and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? starring Tony Randal in which she reprised her pal/companion persona to Jayne Mansfield.

After that Blondell worked mainly on television where she appeared as a guest star in programs like Playhouse 90, Lux Playhouse,  Adventures in Paradise, The Untouchables, Dick Powell Theater, Death Valley Days, The Virginian, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, Burke’s Law, Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, Slattery’s People, The Man From Uncle, Family Affair, Guns of Will Sonnet, Petticoat Junction, That Girl, The Name of the Game, McCloud, Love American Style, The Rookies, Medical Center, New Dick Van Dyke Show, The Snoop Sisters,  Police Story, and Fantasy Island.

She also was in more than a dozen made for TV movies and had reoccurring or regular series roles in.  The Real McCoys, Here Come the Brides, and Banyon.  

Blondel as the dealer in a high-stakes poker game in The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen, Karl Malden, and Edward G. Robinson.  Ann Margaret got the voluptuous girlfriend part she would have played thirty years earlier. 

Among Blondell’s later appearances on the big screen were a memorable turn in The Cincinnati Kid in 1965 as an experienced dealer in a high-stakes poker game, Support Your Local Gunfighter in ‘71, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood in ’76, Grease in’78, and the re-make of The Champ. She was featured in small parts in two more films released after her death.

Center Door Fancy was an autobiographical novel written by Blondell that was published by Delacorte Press in 1972.

Joan Blondell was diagnosed with leukemia and died in a Santa Monica hospital on Christmas Day 1979 at the age of 73.  She was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Those of us who love this stuff delight in stumbling on her old Warner Bros. films, no matter how slight the plot, on Turner Classic Movies and basking in that sensational smile. 

Raoul Walsh Was a Movie Maker With an Eye Patch and Attitude

 

                            Raoul Walsh behind the camera as young director.

Raoul Walsh, the director in an eye patch long before John Ford or Nicholas Ray, had a long career in films spanning the pioneering years of D. W. Griffith in the silents to wide screen Technicolor epics of the mid-‘60s. He specialized in action pictures—gritty crime dramas, westerns, war movies. Meaty parts for women—with a few notable exceptions—were rare and his friend Jack Pickford (elder brother of Mary) told him that “Your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse.” In the process he made some of the most memorable films in Hollywood history never to win Oscars. 

Walsh was born on March 11, 1887 in New York City to a comfortably middle class lace curtain Irish family with connections to show business. Young John Barrymore was a childhood friend. He got a good education in public high schools and at Seton Hall College before dropping out to join his brother George on the stage in 1909. Darkly handsome, he found work on the stage but was quickly drawn to the infant motion picture industry. 

As second unit director of The Life of General Villa shot on location in Mexico with Pancho Villa and his Army of Northern Mexico, Walsh filmed actual battle scenes.

In 1914 he signed on to be second unit director on The Life of General Villa, shot on location in revolutionary Mexico with Pancho Villa himself in the lead. The film contained actual battle scenes as well as realistic re-constructions. On Villa’s orders Walsh was even ordered to film the firing squad executions of prisoners—footage that was edited out of the finished film. Walsh also got time in front of the camera playing Villa as a young man.  The film was a sensation, but prints have been lost although unedited footage of some of the battle scenes have been preserved. The entire episode itself inspired a movie in 2003, And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself with Kyle Chandler playing the young Walsh. 

On his return from Mexico Walsh was hired as an assistant to Griffith and quickly put to work on his Birth of a Nation. Besides behind the camera duties, he appeared in the film as Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. It would be his last acting job for more than a decade as he developed as a film maker. Griffith became a mentor, role model, and father figure to Walsh. 

                                    Walsh as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation.
     

In addition to his continuing work with Griffith, in 1915 Walsh made 15 films, most of theme one or two real shorts. But he also made his first feature film as a director and screenwriter. Regeneration starring Anna Q. Nilsson as a social worker out to reform a young gang leader was shot on location in the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen featuring a cast made up largely of actual street toughs and prostitutes. It is famous for its street scenes and is considered by many the first gangster movie. 

                                     Walsh's first wife, actress Miriam Cooper. 

In 1916 Walsh married Miriam Cooper, a rising star and one of Griffith’s favorites. She often gave Walsh advice on his career and sometimes acted as an intermediary with producers. Their marriage was interrupted while Walsh served as an Army officer in World War I. When he returned he pressed her to continue her acting career and to work in his films including Evangeline in 1919 despite her desire to retire to family life. Together they adopted a boy who had been orphaned in the 1917 Halifax dock explosion. Walsh never showed much interest in the boy, or another son adopted later and the marriage was troubled by his philandering, gambling, and by his bouts of heavy drinking. The couple quarreled, separated, and reunited multiple times before Cooper filed for divorce in 1926 because Walsh had a suspected affair with Ethel Barrymore and a confirmed one with her close friend Lorraine Miller. 

In 1928 he married Miller and the stayed together until 1947. Walsh’s final wife was Mary Simpson with whom he was conducting an affair. They married immediately following the divorce and she remained his spouse until his death. All the marriages were tempestuous. 

In the post-war years and well into the 1920s Walsh was a busy director making sometimes a dozen films a year. Many have been lost. Most were programmers but by the mid ‘20s he was getting some plum A list assignments notably The Thief of Baghdad with Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and Sadie Tompson, a version of W. ’Somerset Maugham's Rain with Gloria Swanson in 1928. In that film Walsh returned to acting for the first time since Birth of a Nation as the young soldier who falls in love with the prostitute and offers her one last, tantalizing chance at redemption.

Later the same year Fox tagged him to direct In Old Arizona based on a story by O. Henry in which he was also supposed to play the Cisco Kid. In one of the strangest accidents in film history, while on location in Arizona a frightened jackrabbit jumped up and smashed through the window of the roadster Walsh was driving. Glass shards cost him the use of his right eye. He wore an eye patch ever after and never acted again. He continued as director of the film with Warner Baxter replacing him in the lead. Baxter won an Academy Award for his efforts. It was one of Walsh’s remarkably few brushes with Academy glory despite having been one of 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1927. 

The Big Trail in 1930 for Fox was an expensive epic that could not recoup its massive costs.  The failure was a set back for director Walsh and his star discovery, a very young ex-USC football player he renamed John Wayne.  Shown with Tyrone Power, Sr. as one of the villains.

In 1930 Fox handed Walsh his biggest assignment yet—an epic western with a literal cast of thousands about an early wagon train on the Oregon Trail. The Big Trail was shot simultaneously in a new, experimental 70 mm wide screen process and standard 35mm plus versions in French, Spanish, and German with alternative casts. When Paramount pictures would not release Gary Cooper to play the lead of the young guide, Walsh picked a USC football player named Marion Morrison who he spotted unloading prop trucks on the lot to star. Fox objected to Morrison’s name and Walsh, who happened to be reading a biography of Revolutionary War hero Mad Anthony Wayne, came up with a new moniker—John Wayne. 

 Despite stunning action sequences, the movie cost a fortune to make and could not re-coup its cost in Depression era theaters. And despite his photogenic good looks, Wayne’s wooden acting didn’t help either. The careers of both the star and director were set back. Wayne had to toil for years in cheap poverty row two-reelers before John Ford would make him a real star in 1939’s Stagecoach. 

1933’s The Bowery lovingly recreated the title neighborhood in the 1890’s and told the highly fictionalized tale of Steve Brodie, the guy who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The film starred George Raft as Brodie, Wallace Beery, and Fay Wray. 

Walsh made a few films at MGM and then was under contract to Paramount. Both studios misused him on B list pictures including musicals and comedies for which he was manifestly unsuited. He considered the nadir of his career an assignment to direct Klondike Annie, a late, post-Production Code Mae West vehicle. Mae notoriously was used to essentially directing herself and calling all of the shots on her films. The two of them clashed on the set and Mae, with studio backing, usually won unless it was a censorship issue. The film was a flop. 

When his Paramount contract expired, Walsh gleefully jumped to Warner Bros.—a studio perfectly tailored to his talents as a film maker. Beginning in 1939 working consistently with the studio’s three biggest male stars—James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn he made a slew of classic films that would cement his reputation as one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. 

His association with Warner started off with a bang, literally, in 1939. The Roaring Twenties with Cagney and Bogart as a rising bootlegger and his brutal right hand man is on everyone’s short list of essential gangster films. Walsh was then lent out to Republic for one of their few “A” pictures where he was re-united with John Wayne for Dark Command. Wayne uncovered the evil plot of schoolteacher William Cantrell played by Walter Pidgeon to turn Kansas bloody. Costarring Claire Trevor and a young Roy Rogers, the film was thrilling romp and box office smash. 

Back at Warner, Walsh helmed the truck driving melodrama They Drive By Night with Raft and Bogie, in his last film as a supporting player, as two brothers. Good girl Ann Sheridan and scheming temptress Ida Lupino rounded out the solid cast. The next year, 1940, Walsh was re-teamed with Bogart and Lupino.  Bogart, after making the Maltese Falcon with John Huston, was a name-above-the-title star. But in High Sierra he played a tired, aging gangster on the run who met and won the affection of an innocent small town girl. The taught final thirty minutes of the film as Bogart was trapped and tracked into the title mountains and the distraught Lupino watched in horror as he was brought down, in one of the greatest extended sequences in film. 

Walsh listening to a screen writer with Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland on the set of The Strawberry Blonde.

In his next film, he finally put Jack Pickford’s old jibe to rest. The Strawberry Blonde was a sweet, gentle, nostalgic comedy starring Cagney against type as the naïve cat’s paw of a conniving buddy. Cagney enjoyed himself immensely, as he did when he was able to convince Warner to let him stray from typecasting, and it showed. Jack Carter played the pal who was a rival for the neighborhood hottie, Rita Hayworth as the title redhead who used and betrays Cagney. Olivia de Havilland was the sweet girl who was right for Cagney all along. Hayworth was at her best, and a refutation of the idea that Walsh could not get great performances out of women. 

Next came a string of movies with Warner’s biggest male star, the swashbuckling Errol Flynn usually with de Havilland as his love interest. Flynn so admired Walsh’s work that he became his virtual personal director in film classics including the fanciful Custer bio-pic They Died With their Boots On; Dangerous Journey, the first of several World War II flicks; Gentleman Jim, a bio-pic of boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett that returned Walsh to one of his favorite periods, the Gay ‘90s, and was an Irish-American hymn with Ward Bond as John L. Sullivan; and Objective: Burma the last of five war themed films he made with Flynn.

Pal James Cagney visiting Errol Flynn and Walsh on the set of They Died With Their Boots On.

Flynn and Walsh became fast friends and with mutual friend the aging John Barrymore often caroused late into the night and on all-weekend benders. Hollywood legend has it that when Barrymore died in 1942 Walsh stole the corpse from the funeral home and propped it up with a drink in his hand in Flynn’s home. Already drinking heavily after the wake, Flynn returned home and was horrified and shaken. Later both retold the story, although some doubt it actually happened. 

The two had a falling out after the last of the war films and Walsh was relegated to a string of undistinguished films, mostly westerns, with second tier casts, but also including an astoundingly awful fantasy comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight with Jack Benny and even a musical re-make of The Strawberry Blonde, One Sunday Afternoon, with a lack-luster Dennis Morgan subbing for Cagney. Pictures like that were evidence that Walsh was being punished. 

In 1949 Walsh got the call to do Cagney’s long awaited return to the gangster film as the psychopathic momma’s boy in White Heat. He showed he had lost nothing. The movie is a terrifying classic best remembered for the climax on top of a blazing oil refinery. Walsh would finish his years at Warner with two more outstanding films, Captain Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck—a film that would open the door to more sea yarns—and a fine, taught western, Along the Great Divide with Kirk Douglas.

Pal James Cagney visiting Errol Flynn and Walsh on the set of They Died With Their Boots On.

After his contract with Warner’s lapsed, Walsh became a free agent and worked at all of the major studios. And he was in demand. The early ‘50s saw him directing more sea yarns—Blackbeard the Pirate with Robert Newton, The World in His Arms again with Peck, and Sea Devils with Rock Hudson. Cagney tapped Walsh for A Lion Is in the Streets from his own production company and distribution by Warner. Cagney played a scrappy Louisiana peddler who rises in the world as a populist politician in a film loosely based on Huey Long and often compared to Broderick Crawford’s Oscar winning turn In All the King’s Men. Less well remembered than the other film, it stands on its own as a gripping morality play about a man un-done by his own ambition. Then came a strong trio of films with Clark Gable. In one of his best westerns, Gable was paired with Robert Ryan for The Tall Men also starring Jane Russell. The King and Four Queens was a comedy western with Gable juggling the widows of four outlaws and the outlaw queen mother of the dead boys t

 But in A Band of Angels—a bitter and controversial portrait of a Louisiana slave trader turned plantation owner with the woman passing for white who he loved—Yvonne De Carlo—and Sydney Poitier as the boy orphaned in a slaving raid who Gabled raised as a virtual son and who went on to hunt him down as a Union soldier was the masterpiece of the trio. 

Walsh on the set of A Band of Angels with Yvonne De Carlo and Clark Gable.

Sandwiching the Gable films were two movies based on important novels about World War II. 1955’s Battle Cry was based on Leon Uris’s novel of young Marines and the women who loved them set against the war in the Pacific. Starring Aldo Rey, Van Heflin, James Whitmore, Tab Hunter, Anne Francis, Dorothy Malone, Raymond Massey, and Mona Freeman the film had epic sweep and outstanding on location cinematography. It was also a big hit and one of the most admired films of that year. 

Walsh brought Leon Uris's novel Battle Ground to the big screen with Aldo Rey. Tab Hunter, and James Whitmore and had a big hit.  His follow-up, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was not.

The second film, The Naked and the Dead, based on Norman Mailer’s much darker novel, did not fare so well. After the box office failure of the quirky Night of the Hunter directed by Charles Lawton and starring Robert Mitcham failing RKO Studios, pulled them from the project. Mailer personally sought out and recruited Walsh to take over. In his memoirs Mailer claimed that Walsh was “on his death bed but rallied to make the film. Not quite, now 70 years old Walsh was frail and not in good health but still an active filmmaker. The cast included Aldo Rey and Massey from Battle Cry, this time as a crusty, mission driven Sergeant and a vainglorious martinet General respectively. Cliff Robinson was cast as the idealistic young officer used and abused by both as his men were sacrificed. Despite high expectations, the film was a failure and marked the beginning of the end of Walsh’s career behind the camera. 

He had to go to England for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw a comedy western starring Kenneth Moore and Jayne Mansfield and largely filmed in Spain to find work. 1960’s A Private Affair was a low rent service comedy with then teen heart throbs Sal Mineo and Gary Crosby going through the motions. The same year he went to Italy and co-directed a minor sand and sandal Biblical epic, Esther and the King with Mario Brava. Sultry Joan Collins played the Jewish heroine and Richard Egan led with his cleft chin as the King. In a year of really big epics, it did not make much splash in the US, although it performed well in Europe, which was probably the intended audience anyway. 

1961 brought another service comedy, Marines, Let’s Go with then relatively unknowns Tom Tryon and David Hedison in the leads. This time Walsh also got screenwriting credit. It sank without leaving a ripple. It took three years to get behind the cameras for what turned out to be his swan song. 

Tough, crusty, and unapologetic--Walsh in old age.

A Distant Trumpet was just the kind of cavalry western that had been Walsh’s forte. But this time instead of Errol Flynn, the young officer sent on a dangerous mission into Mexico, was Troy Donahue. Despite trademark action scenes and location cinematography, no film could recover from that. Walsh hung up his spurs, or at least his director’s megaphone. 

He spent his final years in retirement in declining health but was often visited in his Simi Valley home by old friends from the business who affectionately called him Uncle. Peter Bogdonovich interviewed him for his book Who Made It: Conversations With…the Great Directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Film of those interviews can be seen in documentary footage shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) which frequently showcases many of his films. 

When he died on December 31, 1980 at the age of 93 Walsh was remembered for a long and legendary body of work.

Joan Blondell—Big Baby Blues, Wise Cracks, and a Smile

Joan Blondell--the whole package.

She was the brassy blonde who had been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.  A wise cracking working girl with the biggest blue eyes ever, an electric smile, and a plump figure that turned heads and got attention.  She could scheme and connive with good humor.  Underneath the veneer of urban cynicism, though, you just knew she was capable of undying loyalty to lovers and friends alike.  That was the persona Joan Blondell brought to Warner Bros. in 1930 and which sustained a career that spanned 40 years.

Rose Joan Blondell was born on August 30, 1906 in Brooklyn to a pair of vaudevillians, Ed Blondell, a comedian and Kathryn “Katie” Cain, an Irish-American hoofer.  Baby Joan was first thrust on stage a just four months old as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.  She would be given lines and bits of business in the family act by age four

The family toured relentlessly and Joan did not know a real home until her teenage years.  By then in addition to becoming familiar with hotel rooms in cities across the country, she and her family spent a year in Hawaii and toured Australia for six years.

Before blond--Miss Dallas, 1926 age 20/

The family finally settled in Dallas, Texas where she managed to finish school.  Under the name Rosebud Blondell, she won the 1926 Miss Dallas Pageant and placed fourth in the fifth outing of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey later that year. 

The next year, 1927, Blondell tried her hand at North Texas State College in Denton where her mother was working as an actress.  Education didn’t take.  Show Biz did.  She worked as a model and a circus show girl before heading for the Big Apple and a bite of fame.

Blondell joined a stock company and worked regularly in small parts, including stints on Broadway.  Her big break came in 1930 when she was paired with a charismatic young hoofer named James Cagney in the play Penny Arcade.  It only ran four weeks but the show and its young stars wowed Al Jolson, Broadway’s biggest star and the man who had helped save Warner Bros. with his breakthrough talkie, The Jazz Singer. 

Jolson bought rights to the play and then turned around to sell it to Warners with the provision that Cagney and Blondell had to re-create their parts.  Jack Warner agreed but wanted to change her name to Inez Holmes.  Blondell flatly refused, endangering her big chance in the movies.  Rather than risk losing the property and perhaps Cagney as well, Warner relented.  But it would be far from the last time that Blondell clashed with the notoriously dictatorial studio boss.

Blondell and James Cagney made an impression in Warner Bros.' Sinner's Holiday in 1930.

Released as Sinners Holiday the movie was Cagney’s film debut.  The second film Blondell had made for Warners, Office Wife had already been released.  In that one she had a supporting role as the sister of the female lead and stole the show handing out world weary advice while getting into or out of revealing underwear.

Sinners Holiday established the screen personas of both Cagney and Blondell.  Cagney shot to immediate stardom.  Blondell was along for the ride.  She would co-star with the actor six times, more than any other actress in his career.  The films included Public Enemy, Footlight Parade, and Blond Crazy.  Cagney later said the only woman he ever loved other than his wife was Joan Blondell.

If Cagney shot to top stardom, Blondell never quite reached that level despite her great popularity with audiences.  Men adored her and women felt like she could be their best friend.  But the studio already had one blond bombshell, Jean Harlow.  Another up-and-comer young actress with a street-wise persona, Barbara Stanwyck played working class girls in edgy and darker material.   Blondell’s close friend Betty Davis was a fast rising star and would soon be dominating serious and prestige parts.  Ruby Keeler, Jolson’s wife, was the musical star.  And young Olivia de Havilland would soon sew up all of innocent sweetheart parts.  The studio even had extra sassy comic blonds like Glenda Ferrell.

In pre-Code flicks Blondell frequently dished out wise cracks and world weary advice in various states of undress, revealing lingerie, or even from the bath tub.  Seen here on loan to Fox in 1933 with a more modestly covered up Ginger Rogers in Broadway Bad.

So the studio wasted Blondell’s time in shorts and  relegated her to the sassy best friend in over 50 feature films.  She, her sex appeal, body, and sass were perfect for the pre-Production Code naughtiness for which Warners was famous.  She was cast in fallen women pictures—Illicit with Stanwyck in the lead, Big Business Girl with Loretta Young, Night Nurse again with Stanwyck, The Greeks Had a Word for Them in a rare first billed lead, and Thee on a Match with Ann Dvorak and pal Bette Davis.

The studio also put her in their down-on-their-luck Depression stories like Union Station with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as an improbable hobo and Central Park in which two down-and-outers forced to live in the title park fall in love, are separated, and exploited in a scheme to rob a charity ball.

Blondell spent a lot of screen time answering the phone in her underwear or a peekaboo robe.

Blondell was making as many as six pictures a year plus shorts when she married cinematographer George Barnes in Phoenix, Arizona on January 4, 1933.

Musicals were another staple of Warners in the early 30’s.  The fact that Blondell was not a singer and only a so-so dancer did not prevent the studio from casting her as a chorine and pal of the leads.  Most famously she co-starred in Gold Diggers of 1933 in which she performed—mostly in a semi-spoken wail/moan Busby Berkley’s epic Forgotten Man number.  That one song may have been Blondell’s finest dramatic performance.  It was on the set of this movie that Blondell met boyish singer Dick Powell who would become her second husband.

The heart wrenching Forgotten Man number from Busby Berkley's Gold Diggers of 1933 was a highlight of Blonell's career.

Warners would pair her with another wise cracking blonde, Glenda Ferrell, in six films most notably Gold Diggers of 1937.  The characters were different in each film, and most were straight comedies.  By the mid Thirties the Production Code office had killed the fallen woman genre and limited the amount of time the well-endowed Blondell could spend in lingerie or taking baths.  And the public tired of musicals.  Warners turned to gritty gangster flicks, high flown women’s dramas, prestige historical bio-pics, and swashbucklers.  Davis had the women’s film sewed up, de Havilland’s bosom heaved for Errol Flynn, and Blondell was deemed unsuited for most costume dramas.  But she was perfect for gangster films.  She re-teamed with Cagney in He Was Her Man and with Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots.

Through the later thirties Warners used Blondell almost exclusively in comedies.  Scripts got lamer, budgets cheaper, co-stars second rung.  She was in danger of slipping into B movie unit films like her erstwhile partner Glenda Ferrell had with the Torchy Blaine girl reporter series.

Blondell and husband Dick Powell excaped Warner Bros. and made I Want a Divorce together at Paramount in 1940.  A harbinger of things to come?

When her contract with Warners expired in 1939, Blondell cheerfully left her long time home to become a free-lance actress.  Husband Dick Powell left the studio about the same time.  Parts were harder to come by and Blondell was nearing 40.  She teamed with her husband in a preachy comedy I Want a Divorce in 1940.

But now she was lucky to make one or two films a year.  The high points during the War years were Topper Returns, Lady for a Night at Republic Pictures with John Wayne, and Cry Havoc, a gritty war drama about Army nurses at Bataan  for MGM in 1943.

As disreputable Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 with her proper sister played by Dorothy McGuire.

Blondell would not appear on the big screen for nearly two years.  And when she did, she was a revelation.  As Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn she was the scandalous relative of the poor but respectable Nolan family who collects men who may or may not be other women’s husbands.  Blondell considered it her finest film work.

Blondell and Powell had divorced in 1944.  In ’47 she married for the third, last, and most disastrous time to charming but profligate theatrical impresario Mike Todd.  She described her relationship with him as the great passionate love of her life.  But Todd was a spendthrift, heavy gambler, and a cad by nature.  It did not take long for him to spend his way through Blondell’s money leaving her essentially broke.  The couple divorced in 1950 with Blondell alleging physical abuse including being dangled out of a hotel window by her ankle.  A few years later Todd swept Elizabeth Taylor off of her feet then died in a plane crash.

In 1951 Blondell reached the pinnacle of her post-war career in The Blue Veil starring Jane Wyman as a self-sacrificing nurse to young children.  Wyman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and Blondell was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

She appeared sporadically on the big screen after that, mostly in comedies most notably The Opposite Sex, a musical re-make of Clair Booth Luce’s The Women  with a cast headed by Dick Powell’s next wife, June Allison and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? starring Tony Randal in which she played a pal/companion to Jayne Mansfield.

After that Blondell worked mainly on television where she appeared as a guest star in programs like Playhouse 90, Lux Playhouse,  Adventures in Paradise, The Untouchables, Dick Powell Theater, Death Valley Days, The Virginian, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, Burke’s Law, Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, Slattery’s People, The Man From Uncle, Family Affair, Guns of Will Sonnet, Petticoat Junction, That Girl, The Name of the Game, McCloud, Love American Style, The Rookies, Medical Center, New Dick Van Dyke Show, The Snoop Sisters,  Police Story, and Fantasy Island.

She also was in more than a dozen made for TV movies and had reoccurring or regular series roles in.  The Real McCoys, Here Come the Brides, and Banyon. 

Blondel as the dealer in a high stakes poker game in The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen, Karl Malden, and Edward G. Robinson.  Ann Margaret got the voluptuous girl friend part she would have played thirty years earlier.

Among Blondell’s later appearances on the big screen were a memorable turn in The Cincinnati Kid in 1965 as an experienced dealer in a high stakes poker game, Support Your Local Gunfighter in ‘71, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood in ’76, Grease  in’78, and the re-make of The Champ. She was featured in small parts in two more films released after her death.

Center Door Fancy was an autobiographical novel written by Blondell that was published by Delacorte Press in 1972.

Joan Blondell was diagnosed with leukemia and died in a Santa Monica hospital on Christmas Day 1979 at the age of 73.  She was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Those of us who love this stuff delight in stumbling on her old Warner Bros. films, no matter how slight the plot, on Turner Classic Movies and basking in that sensational smile.