Blonde Crazy isn't the best of the seven pictures James Cagney and Joan Blondell made together but it does contain their best work as a team. He's Bert a hotel bellboy on the take and she's Anne an equally unscrupulous chambermaid. Cagney and Blondell were a perfect match in both looks and attitude, and one of the great movie teams of the Pre-Code era. Check out the racy scene where she's taking a bath while Cagney sits by the tub (see photo). They had begun their screen careers together in 1930's Sinners' Holiday and their final picture together, He Was Her Man came out in June of 1934 just as the Production Code was being put into effect.
Pretty much everyone in the movie is crooked. As Bert puts it to Anne, “Chivalry is dead. This is the age of chiselry.” This anything goes morality would never have gotten past censors just a few years later. Together Bert and Anne con guests of the hotel, until one day they themselves get taken by a big city grifter played by Louis Calhern. But revenge is soon in the offing and Bert and Anne wind up in New York with a plan to exact it. A young Ray Milland shows up as Cagney's rival for Blondell and he turns out to be rotten to the core. After a few turns, and one unexpected plot twist, the story comes to a somewhat disappointing ending, which I won't give away.
Roy Del Ruth keeps the story clipping along. This was the first of six movies he would direct in which Cagney acted. These included two of the next three pictures Cagney made, Taxi and Winner Take All (both 1932), and Lady Killer (1933). Star and director would reunite nearly two decades later for The West Point Story (1950) and Starlift (1951), although in the latter film Cagney made just a cameo appearance. Ruth has the distinction of directing Cagney in the two movies where he comes the closest to saying his often imitated line, “You dirty rat.” In Taxi Cagney snarls the line, “you dirty, yellow-bellied rat”, and in this movie he sneers, “Mmm, that dirty, double-crossin' rat!” How many young boys left the theater repeating those lines over and over while mimicking Cagney's distinctive voice?
The rest of the cast provides stellar support. Louis Calhern was one of the great villains of classic Hollywood. He played the shady con man better than just about anyone else. Ray Milland has a smaller role but he's also quite good as a man who is at first presented as noble but turns out to be less than law abiding. Noel Francis and Guy Kibbee have small but memorable roles, and Ward Bond and Charles Lane pop up in uncredited bit parts.
Blonde Crazy is early Cagney. This was just his seventh movie and it marked the first time he was cast to play the main character. Although he was the eventual star of The Public Enemy (which had come out earlier that same year), he had originally been hired to play the supporting character in that seminal gangster picture. Blonde Crazy was his first true leading man role. It also allowed him to play comedy for the first time. Throughout the film he calls Blondell, “Honey” in a funny southern accent in imitation of a ditzy character played by Polly Walters.
Joan Blondell was a great star with an original personality. She was down to earth and a good sport and she had a terrific figure, which Cagney wrote about in his autobiography Cagney By Cagney.
As I wrote before, Blonde Crazy isn't the best work either of its stars did in their long careers, but it does contain some of their most enjoyable work together.
