Stop the Presses!

Torchy Blane
 Created by Frederick Nebel

"You always told me to play up the feminine angle in my stories. A woman doing anything is good copy. Here I'd be [a woman] against two men and I'll beat them too."
Torchy tells her editor what's what in Fly away, Baby.

Somewhere along the line, in the transition from the pulps to celluloid, Frederick Nebel's skinny, drunk-as-a-skunk Kennedy of The Free Press became a sassy, brassy, sexy wisecracking newswoman named TORCHY BLANE and Lieutenant Steve MacBride the object of her affections. Nine B-films were made in the thirties featuring The Herald's hotshot newshawk and the series turned out to be a quite profitable one for Warner Brothers. Nothing great, maybe, but they had "a certain speed and zip," according to Everson's The Detective in Film.

Zip? Hell, they were greased lightning at times. The plots move so fast -- and Torchy's lightspeed wisecracks flash by so quickly -- all you can do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

In the thirties, a world far, far away from Grafton, Paretsky et al, a female reporter was about the most independent and intelligent role model for young women the movies had to offer. And Torchy was by far the most famous female journalist of them all. As played by Glenda Farrell, Torchy more or less embodied everyone's notion of what a female reporter looked and sounded like for that era -- fast-talking and feisty, self-confident and even cocky -- and forced to contend constantly with the biases of her era. Particularly the cops, who were invariably meatheads. Farrell co-starred with Barton MacLane as MacBride in all but two of the films. Lola Lane and Paul Kelly took over in Torchy Blane in Panama (1938) and Jane Wyman and Allen Jenkins paired in the final film of the series, Torchy Plays with Dynamite (1939).

Too bad, then, that the screenwriters, mostly male, always seemed to make sure that no matter how cocky and independent Torchy was or even potentially subversive, that by the final scene she would once again find herself in the arms of MacBride, as if to underline the fact that no matter how self-sufficient they seemed, what every woman really wanted was a man -- even if he was a meathead -- and a family. As an article on journalist role models in popular culture on the Annenberg School for Communication web site put it, "The question wasn't how could Torchy Blane care about a numskull policeman like Steve McBride. The issue was that in the 1930s, she really had no choice."

Which, come to think of it, may be why Torchy was so driven and so gleefully determined to play second fiddle to no man.

But sexual politics or not, Nebel didn't seem to mind the wholesale changes in his characters. When pressed about it, Nebel would respond, "Hell, they always change the stuff around. But I don't mind--as long as I don't have to make the changes."

FURTHER EVIDENCE

FILMS

COLLECTIONS

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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