Smart Blonde

Smart Blonde (1937)

Gently LIKE A SOCK IN THE JAW!...Torchy Blane will win your smiles!

Ambitious reporter Torchy Blane guides her policeman boyfriend to correctly pinpoint who shot the man she was interviewing.

Date of release
1937-01-02
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (13)
Runtime
59m
Genres
Mystery, Crime
Director
Frank McDonald
Collection
Torchy Blane Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

Smart Blonde is a 1937 American mystery film directed by Frank McDonald. Starring Glenda Farrell as Torchy Blane, a fast-talking wisecracking female reporter, teaming up with her boyfriend detective Steve McBride, to solve the killing of an investor who just bought a popular local nightclub.

Production

In 1936, Warner Bros. began to develop an adaptation of the MacBride and Kennedy stories by detective novelist Frederick Nebel. For the film version, Kennedy was changed to a woman named "Torchy" Blane and became the love interest of the cop. Torchy was also more compatible with the Hays Code than a faithful on-screen adaptation of Kennedy would have been.

Director Frank MacDonald immediately knew who he wanted for the role of Torchy Blane. Glenda Farrell had already played newspaper reporters in earlier Warner Bros. films Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and Hi, Nellie! (1934); she was quickly cast in the title role, with Barton MacLane as Steve McBride. Farrell and MacLane would star in seven of the nine Torchy Blane movies.

The film was based on Nebel's short story "No Hard Feelings" published in the Black Mask magazine. The story was later adapted again as the 1941 film A Shot in the Dark. The movie's working title during filming was No Hard Feelings. The music and lyrics for the song "Why Do I Have to Sing a Torch Song" was written by M. K. Jerome and Jack Scholl.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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