Simply A Masterpiece

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Blistering performances.

This is the one that ended the Torchy Blane series for me. It had already gotten ridiculous, but this one is awful. A man who is so stupid he would probably flunk kindergarten is kept on the payroll as a cop? A reporter who lies and cheats and subverts justice to get a scoop? A police detective who lets the reporter get away with it because he is stupid and because he wants to marry her? Give me a break. This is not comedy, it is just dumb. The only good part of this particular movie was the judge putting the reporter in jail. I will never watch another Torchy Blane movie.

Frank Shannon as Captain McTavish feels that Barton MacLane is giving too much information to gal pal Torchy Blane so he's issued orders cutting her off from scoops. Plus it doesn't look bad if he can't solve his own cases. So Torchy is cut off.If Shannon thinks that will stop Glenda Farrell, does he have another think coming. Farrell not only keeps scooping the cops without a bit of help from her boyfriend MacLane, she makes monkeys out of the whole police department. That includes thick as a brick Tom Geraghty and young rookie patrolman John Ridgely. And quite a few more.As it happens she and Ridgely are the last to see a department store owner alive as he gets into a taxi. Although Farrell is resourceful she comes mighty close to obstruction of justice in her quest for the ultimate scoop.Blondes At Work is a fair enough entry in the Torchy Blane series. The stories aren't much, but I just love the chemistry between Farrell and MacLane. Marry that girl quick Lt. McBride or pin a badge on her.

Reporter Torchy Blane is getting all the scoops, and Captain McTavish is mad. He thinks Torchy's fiancé, Lieutenant McBride, is giving her inside police information. The rival newspaper's editor "wants to know if we're running the police department for the taxpayers or for Torchy Blane." McBride ought to keep her in line!Glenda Farrell as Torchy is funnier than ever in this fast-moving farce with a bit of mystery tossed in. Torchy plays innocent when asked where she's getting her leads ("Oh, I don't know, those things just seem to come to me. I told you I was psychic") but has soon tracked a missing businessman to a hotel room where someone has been stabbed. Inside info or no, Torchy is consistently a step quicker than the cops. Barton McLane is a good sport as the generally bewildered Lieutenant McBride; the character is solid enough but essentially a straight man for Torchy and for police chauffeur Gahagan. Tom Kennedy is back as poetry-loving cop Gahagan and this time around he's keeping a diary—for "postererity," he says. He lets Torchy in on the secret diary; she asks if he has a good hiding place for it and encourages him to keep track of every little thing his boss McBride does….The plot has a few thin spots. Could you really trace a person that easily from a single smudge of lipstick on a handkerchief? The ending is rather abrupt as well, wrapping things up in an awful hurry. However, such issues hardly matter since plot here is always secondary to the goofy character interplay. The mystery, such as it is, involves a disappearance and murder but is little more than a backdrop for the comic story of Torchy and her sources.Not much suspense but lots of fun…. Farrell especially—hilarious and cute—appears to be having a ball.

This film begins with Torchy and her fiancé, Lt. McBride, having an argument. It seems he is once again getting a lot of pressure from his boss to stop giving Torchy inside information about the cases he's working on at the time. That's because she's a reporter and the reporters from other papers are complaining about this. This has been an ongoing complaint in this detective series. Tired of constantly hearing these complaints, McBride bans Torchy from coming on any more cases. This doesn't stop her, as she uses every trick she can to spy on him! When the murder of a department store owner occurs, she manages to find out before any of the other reporters. So it seems that even without McBride's help, she still gets the scoop again and again.This film starts off well. However, it sure ended poorly. After spending much of the film to convict a guy of murder, the trial is shown in depth. So far so good. However, after all this and the guy being found guilty, in the last three minutes, as Torchy is sitting in jail (it's a long story), McBride shows up and announces that the real killer just confessed! So, they didn't show the confession but just tacked it on at the end! How cheesy. This slapped on ending sure helped make this movie end with a whimper, not much of a bang--making it a rather poor addition to the series.By the way, in one scene, Lt. McBride showed a handkerchief to a lady at a cosmetics counter so she could identify the type and brand of lipstick. The blonde lady barely even looked at it and went on and on about the exact lipstick it was. This was hard to believe, but the director should have at least told her to spend more than .003 of a second examining it!