If any actress best represents the snappy 1930s dame, it’s…

““If any actress best represents the snappy 1930s dame, it’s Joan Blondell. During that era she played a lively assortment of chorus girls, waitresses, golddiggers, reporters and secretaries in a total of 53 movies, 44 of them for Warner Bros. “Yet, for all that overwork,” Mick LaSalle writes in Complicated Women, “Blondell hardly ever had a false moment. Self-possessed, unimpressed, completely natural, always sane, without attitude or pretense … the greatest of the screen’s great broads. No one was better at playing someone both fun-loving yet grounded, ready for a great time, yet substantial, too.” She was fun-loving, but sometimes there were limits. As a flip waitress in Other Men’s Women (1931), Joan puts the breaks on a fresh customer: BLONDELL: Anything else you guys want? CUSTOMER (checking her out as she bends over): Yeah, give me a big slice of you—and some french fried potatoes on the side. BLONDELL: Listen, baby, I’m A.P.O. CUSTOMER (turning to friend): What does she mean, A.P.O.? BLONDELL: Ain’t Putting Out. “I was the fizz on the soda,” she once said. “I just showed my big boobs and tiny waist and acted glib and flirty.” While that’s a fair assessment of most of her early roles, it wasn’t the whole story.””

— Ray Hagen