At the end of Blonde Crazy (1931, directed by Roy Del Ruth), I started to wonder what Jim Thompson would have made of the movie. Thompson, that blackest beast of the hard boiled writers, wrote plenty of stories about con men and lowlifes, and as soon as the thought of him scripting this movie occurred to me, I realized that Thompson's version would be The Grifters, which was in the back of my head to start with. James Cagney's Bert Harris isn't that far removed from Thompson's Roy Dolly, after all, though Joan Blondell's Ann Roberts is a character type that Thompson never wrote about, the virtuous bad girl. These are the sorts of things I think about after I see movies, and it's mostly useless. Blonde Crazy is hard boiled, but it's not noir. Not really. For the first two thirds of the movie, it's a romantic comedy, and near the end, it veers into melodrama.
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