Turner Classic Movies is showing several B movie series this month, including Blondie and The Great Gildersleeve. For those who are too young to know: the B movie usually ran for around 60 minutes and it was part of the regular package at most movie houses, consisting of an A movie (longer, bigger budget, more expensive stars), B movie, cartoon and sometimes a brief travelogue, until the 50's, when television took over. Many B movies originated in radio shows and then later became TV shows.
Blondie (1938) was originally a movie starring Penny Singleton and, as Dagwood Bumstead, Arthur Lake. It was based on the comic strip by Chic Young that continues today, now drawn by Chic Young's son Sean Young. The film spawned a series of twenty-eight movies, the last one in 1950. There was a formula for each film -- Dagwood gets in trouble and Blondie gets him out of it --that also allowed a great deal of creativity before the relatively happy ending. Blondie has too many reaction shots (especially from the dog Daisy) but also is a comedy of misunderstandings not so different from some of Shakespeare's plays or one's own life. Dagwood is involved with two women named Elsie, one of whom scammed him by getting him to co-sign a loan, the other one is the daughter of a man he is helping to repair a vacuum cleaner who his boss, Mr. Dithers, is trying to get to sign a construction contract. Blondie, the strong head of the household, eventually gets it sorted out, because "after all, Dagwood is just like a big baby." Most of the motifs of the comic strip are in the films, including Dagwood's sandwiches and his morning collisions with the mailman. Some of all this is amusing but the pieces are entwined effectively by director Frank Strayer's view of the complexities of work and family life and their relationship to each other.
Blondie only became a radio show after it was a movie; The Great Gildersleeve was a radio show first, a spinoff of Fibber McGee and Molly, and the first of four movies came out in 1942. The Great Gildersleeve was made into only those four movies, perhaps because audiences found difficulty identifying with the lead character, a loud blowhard played by Harold Peary. All four films were directed by Gordon Douglas, a director I have written about several times who was just starting his career and found B movies a good place to begin and to learn. Summerfield, where the films take place, is dominated by corrupt men who have to fend off man-hungry spinsters; Throckmorton Gildersleeve fights off a judge's sister while trying to keep custody of his orphaned niece and nephew. There is some amusing slapstick, as a cat and dog fight in Gildersleeve's sleeping bag (he has given up his room to his sister, who is taking care of the kids while Gildersleeve holds off the spinster) and some of the town's leading men fall off a ladder while trying to peer at the governor of the state recovering from a cold in Gildersleeve's upstairs bedroom (it's a long story) but Gildersleeve manages to maintain his dignity throughout the film, triumphing over the judge and avoiding marriage.
I also want to mention that both of these films have significant roles for African-Americans, who find it difficult to understand how foolish some people can be: in Blondie a hotel porter, played effectively by Willie Best, looks for a missing vacuum cleaner, while in The Great Gildersleeve the family maid, played by Lillian Randolph, makes caustic comments about the family's foolishness.
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