It really shouldn't be necessary to look at anything besides the title of this film in order to get an idea of how pre-Code era America might have considered it indecent. Having never heard of this movie, I expected Blonde Crazy to be merely ok, but because James Cagney is in it, there's many more well acted and exciting moments than I could have foreseen. The plot isn't that original, but since Prohibition was still going on at the time, a little glamorization of criminal activities seems standard. The movie is about a bellboy at a hotel named Bert (Cagney) who comes across a young woman named Anne (Joan Blondell) who has applied to be a chambermaid. It's not entirely clear if she will get the job until she meets Bert, who immediately likes her and sees that she gets it. Later on, a con artist named A. Rupert Johnson (Guy Kibbee) comes to the hotel and hits on Anne. Bert tries to persuade her to cheat him out of money. A staged date is set up between Johnson and Anne, during which Bert bribes one of his friends to impersonate a police officer and come across Johnson and his temporary girlfriend on a road late at night; apparently both of them are guilty of transporting liquor and attempting to bribe a cop. The cop accepts the bribe anyway (since this is nothing but a setup) and Johnson's cash is split between Anne and her real boyfriend, Bert. The two of them eventually move to New York and meet Dan Barker and his date, Helen (Noel Francis). Helen starts to take a liking to Bert, upsetting Anne. Dan also seems interested in Bert and wants him to be part of a counterfeit operation. To get initiated, he needs to pay 5000 dollars, which (conveniently enough) is the exact amount his "cop" friend was bribed with. This point in the film marks a downturn in Bert's luck, since not only have Dan and Helen basically scammed him, but Anne is getting sick of him always scamming people himself. She ends up dating a Brit named Joe Reynolds (Ray Milland) instead. Anne eventually marries Joe, and Bert is enraged when he discovers Dan duped him. About a year later, he travels around Europe, and by the time his trip is over, he's not interested in conning people anymore. However, the timing couldn't be worse as Anne somehow finds where he lives and wants 30 grand to make up for that amount of money Joe is embezzling from his boss. He visits Joe, gets him to surrender the keys to the building's vault, and tries to steal whatever bonds are still inside to cover up the crime. When Bert tries to leave via the fire escape, he finds out Joe has backstabbed him and cops are ready and waiting. Bert tries to escape in his car, but is shot at by Tommy guns, knocked unconscious and plows into a candy store. In jail, he is visited by Anne, who tells him she wants to tell the cops about what Joe did to him as revenge, but Bert says not to help him as it will open a can of worms and trace back to every sucker Bert has ever scammed. Anne promises to be waiting for Bert when he finishes his sentence. I think this movie ends a little too suddenly (with Anne suggesting she's going to sue Joe and having it not be shown), but this film is pretty mediocre for someone like Cagney so it's not that big a deal. It definitely does have a lot of pre-code moments, as it's surprisingly common even for movies made in this period to not be that suggestive. With this, we have a scene where Blondell washes her legs in a tub and Cagney walks in on her. Not even a minute later, she tells him to go search for the money she keeps in her bra. Can't say I'm surprised. The reason I wouldn't count this among Cagney's best features is due to how he acts in the movie. Blondell herself says he acts like a child constantly, and she is basically right. He smacks people with wads of dollar bills when he doesn't get his way, slams a chair into the ground and breaks various drinking glasses when he finds out about Dan's fraud, and only seems to care about being deceitful. Still, I mostly watched this for him since even the films portraying him as annoying have that signature high energy he always gave off. Overall, I didn't think Blonde Crazy was that amazing, but at least Cagney's witty and entertaining moments never really let up.
Review of Blonde Crazy
