Ray Enright's Blondie Johnson 1933

In 1933 the studios were getting ready for the Production Code to be enforced and were turning out racy pre-code films as fast as they could.  One of Warner Brothers' better films of 1933 was Blondie Johnson, starring Joan Blondell as a crime boss; after all, as Alozo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) said in The Asphalt Jungle, "crime is just a left-handed version of human endeavor."  The film starts promisingly, as Blondie goes to the welfare office in the pouring rain for help for herself and her mother, who are living in the back room of a drugstore.  Blondie had quit her job in a laundry because the boss has put his hands all over her.  The welfare clerk subtly suggests that maybe she shouldn't have quit and, besides, there are many who are worse off than she.  She walks "home" and finds that her mother has died and a lawyer and a priest both suggest that some people are rich and some are poor and there's not much one can do about it. Earl Baldwin wrote the screenplay and at that point I was hoping for something like William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road, which Baldwin wrote and which also came out in 1933.  But Warner Brothers and director Ray Enright took a different approach.

Blondie goes to New York and starts small-scale scams, playing a distressed woman who needs taxi fare,  She eventually hooks up with minor gangster Danny Jones (played by Chester Morris, one of the less appealing stars of the early sound era who gradually moved to B movies).  They gradually acquire more power and eventually kill Danny's boss and take over his protection racket. When Danny is rejected by Blondie -- she's seen too many male bosses slowed down by dames -- he marries someone else.  Blondie is convinced Danny "dropped a dime" on her and orders him killed; he survives and both of them go to prison for six years, promising to remain faithful to each other.

Joan Blondell is effectively assertive in her role as a crime boss; she usually has just a supporting role.  But Enright and Warner Brothers were apparently wary of going too far with a woman as a crime boss --perhaps they were concerned about the coming code enforcement -- and there are a few shaky detours into romantic comedy.  This was one of eight films in 1933 Blondell made, one of four Enright directed, one of nine cinematographer Tony Gaudio shot that year and one of thirteen for which Max Steiner did the music. The film is brisk and efficient at 67 minutes.