The comic strip about domestic life had a long life on the silver screen in the forties.
by Rich Watson
The comic strip Blondie, a comedy about a Jazz Age flapper turned housewife, her ne’er-do-well husband, and their family and friends, was created by Chic Young in 1930. While successors have continued the strip into the 21st century, including his son Dean, its heyday was the Depression and the WW2 era.
It was during this period that Hollywood made an ongoing series of Blondie movies.
About the Blondie strip
As a kid, I didn’t love Blondie like I loved, say, Peanuts. It was there in the papers, though, along with all the other strips, so I read it.
I doubt it ever tickled my funny bone. Maybe it was a generational thing—Blondie and her family not speaking to me the way the Simpsons did. Dunno.
Blondie was Chic Young’s fourth strip and his first big hit. The character began as a single flapper (that is, a twenties-era party girl), dating rich kid Dagwood. They married against his parents’ wishes. Dagwood was disinherited and had to get a nine-to-five gig like every other working joe, but he was happy with his new bride. Over the years, readers have seen them build a family of their own.
Some aspects of the strip have entered the wider consciousness. Perhaps the most notable example is the “Dagwood sandwich,” the name for a towering sandwich filled with the works. Dagwood is known for eating them.
Blondie: the movie
Columbia Pictures adapted the Blondie strip for the big screen in 1938. The studio began as a minor movie factory within Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” of B-movie-makers, but grew in time to house directing powerhouses Frank Capra, George Stevens and Leo McCarey. It was also where Cary Grant first became a star.
The Blondie movie starred Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake, who would play Blondie and Dagwood for the next twelve years. As in the strip, the movie included the characters’ first child, Alexander, AKA “Baby Dumpling” (daughter Cookie came later), as well as Dagwood’s irascible boss Mr. Dithers.
Blondie feels very much like a template for the TV sitcoms of the fifties and early sixties: the husband as the breadwinner who makes a mess of things despite his best intentions; the wife as the sensible problem-solver unwilling to let any obstacles get in her way; the too-cute child and family pet; the husband’s gruff boss who learns to see the value in his employee. Once upon a time, these weren’t cliches.
Singleton, as Blondie, is chirpy and devoted to her husband, as well as firm but loving to her child, all in that passive, domesticated way wives were expected to be in those days. Lake, as Dagwood, is meek and befuddled, yet willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy his wife.
The story is nothing fancy, but it didn’t need to be in order to win over audiences of the day. They knew these characters from the comic strip, and knew what to expect from them.
The Blondie series
The Blondie series was twenty-eight movies long. Let’s put that into perspective:
- There are twenty-five James Bond films so far.
- In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Thanos saga was twenty-three films long.
- The Star Wars theatrical films, including the Skywalker saga and the Disney-produced spin-offs, constitute twelve movies so far.
The series stopped briefly in 1943, but fan demand brought it back.
A few future stars appeared in them, including Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Lloyd Bridges and even Shemp Howard. In my previous blog I wrote about the Blondie movie with Hayworth.
These movies may not seem like much today, but in the forties they looked quite different. In I Do and I Don’t, the 2012 book about marriage in the movies, author Jeanine Basinger summarized the Blondie movies’ appeal:
The series cleverly maintained a cartoonish universe. Blondie and Dagwood became flesh and blood onscreen, but they remained the cartoon figures that Americans loved. Their physical world was lightly etched, never fully filled in, and never made heavily realistic…. Very little was needed onscreen because the definition of the married couple, Blondie and Dagwood, validated the marital storyline.
Blondie also appeared on radio, with Lake but without Singleton.
Both NBC and CBS tried to bring Blondie to TV, but each network’s series only lasted one season.
After the Blondie movies ended, Singleton briefly had her own TV show on NBC. Later, she voiced Jane Jetson on The Jetsons. Lake reprised his role of Dagwood for the NBC Blondie TV series.
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Have you watched the Blondie movies? Leave a comment and let me know!
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