BLONDIE (1938) / BLONDIE ON A BUDGET (1940)

I imagine that any culturally literate American has some idea of who Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead are. Though they started out on the comics page in 1930 as examples of the era’s "flaming youth" stereotypes—she was a flapper, he was a playboy from a rich family—they eventually got married and became the archetypal middle-class suburban family with two kids and a dog. Blondie was a stay-at-home mom and Dagwood worked for the grumpy Mr. Dithers. In the strips, Dagwood is a bumbling but sweet guy and Blondie the voice of reason who has to set things right. The B-movie series (28 films between 1938 and 1950) keeps some of comic strip trappings—Dagwood's beloved sandwiches, his constant morning collisions with the mailman—but the personality of Blondie is a little different. In the movies, or at least the two I sampled recently when TCM showed an evening of them, she's presented as jealous and scheming and a bit of a nag.

BLONDIE begins with an impressive stunt scene showing how the dog Daisy responds to the early morning whistle of the paperboy: Daisy tears out of the house through the doggie door, takes the paper in his mouth, runs back in the house, races up the stairs, and gives it to 4-year-old Baby Dumpling who passes it on to Dagwood, shaving in the bathroom. We eventually meet Blondie, the hapless mailman, the little neighbor boy Alvin, and Dagwood's boss. The situation is slowly set up: First, Blonde, behind Dagwood's back, buys some new furniture to be delivered the next day. Then we find out that Dagwood signed a loan note (using his furniture as collateral) for a former employee named Elsie who reneged on it and now Dagwood owes $500 or his furniture. Next, Dithers sends Dagwood to make a sale to visiting businessman Mr. Hazlip, who is notorious for not seeing salesmen, but at Hazlip's hotel, Dagwood and Hazlip bond over tinkering with a broken vacuum cleaner. Hazlip has a daughter, also named Elsie. You can probably predict that these plot threads are leading to misunderstandings and chaos. BLONDIE ON A BUDGET begins with Blondie wanting a new fur coat and Dagwood wanting to spend $200 to join a fancy fishing club. But budget concerns are left behind in a plot which features Dagwood's former girl friend (guest star Rita Hayworth before becoming a star, pictured at left with an unidentified actor and Lake), Daisy getting drunk, and Blondie eventually heading to Reno for a divorce (before a kindly divorce lawyer counsels her to make one last try at the marriage).

For this viewer, this series hasn't aged well, not so much because the plot points aren't still relevant (money problems, jealousy, and job security will always be with us) but because these feel like modern-day situation comedy plots stretched out to over an hour. I'm used to seeing these kinds of stories wrapped up in 30 minutes on shows ranging over the years from Leave It to Beaver to Modern Family, so these films feel padded out. But their watchability is helped by the actors. Penny Singleton is a good Blondie, though a little more manic than the one I know from the comic strip; Arthur Lake is goofy-cute and charming as the hapless Dagwood. But the real treasures are the kids: Larry Simms, only four years old when he filmed the first movie, has Baby Dumpling down pat, and Danny Mummert as Alvin is just as good—in 1946, Mummert played George Bailey's younger brother as a kid (the one George saves from drowning in the ice) in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. They both seem like natural actors (though I do wonder how many takes were required to get their on-the-nose performances) and both stayed with the series for the next twelve years, right to the end. As a novelty, I enjoyed these, though I don't know that I could sit through a marathon of Blondie movies; I might like to see a later one where the kids are more grown up. [TCM]