The Museum of Modern Art presents an exhibition of 13 films starring Joan Blondell, one of Hollywood’s most versatile actresses, whose long and varied career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s.
Joan Blondell: The Bombshell from Ninety-first Street captures the metamorphosis of the Manhattan-born actress from a young “blonde bombshell” to more mature roles while illustrating her accomplished—yet largely underappreciated—talents, such as perfect timing and versatility in the roles she played.
Despite never landing the starring roles like contemporaries Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, Blondell (American, 1906–79) was illustrative of the strengths of the Hollywood studio system, carving out a memorable career over the course of half a century.
The exhibition is presented December 19, 2007–January 1, 2008, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, and includes Blondell’s films with directors Elia Kazan, Edmund Goulding, and John Cassavetes.
Screenings of six films will be introduced by Matthew Kennedy, author of the new biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 2007): A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Blonde Crazy (December 19), Blondie Johnson and Nightmare Alley (December 20), and Footlight Parade and The Blue Veil (December 21). Several of the prints shown in this exhibition are new and represent rare films that have long been unavailable on video or DVD. The exhibition is organized by Charles Silver, Associate Curator, Department of Film.
Born on West Ninety-first Street in New York to vaudevillian parents, Blondell went to Warner Bros. in 1930 with James Cagney after they appeared in the same Broadway production (Penny Arcade, which was adapted for the screen that same year as Sinner’s Holiday, also featuring Blondell and Cagney). She went on to make 45 films for the studio over the next decade.
She was a consistently solid performer, yet, as Kennedy notes, “she was rarely showcased and never won a major award.” Her Warners period includes seven films with Cagney between 1930 and 1934, among them Roy Del Ruth’s hard-boiled Blonde Crazy (1931) and Lloyd Bacon’s musical Footlight Parade (1933), and she earned a reputation as a tough-talking, wise-cracking, no-nonsense actress for her title role as the gangster Blondie Johnson (1933). After leaving Warners, she returned to stage work and continued a solid output of films—approximately one a year over the next 33 years—most of which were memorable character roles, such as in Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) and Goulding’s Nightmare Alley (1947).
Blondell had a remarkable “third act” to her career in a handful of films in the late 1970s, including Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977), in which she plays a playwright whose vulnerability and barely concealed anger are apparent when her play is loosely interpreted by a mentally unstable actress, played by Gena Rowlands. -- www.moma.org
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