56 CINEASTE, Fall 2017isn’t unreasonable to say this is a .docx

56 CINEASTE, Fall 2017
isn’t unreasonable to say this is a film about
patriarchal law’s last gasp, especially since
the killing of an older man is at the center of
the narrative. Thomas shouts at his models,
at one point grabbing one physically to push
her into position. The image of James Stew-
art holding a camera with an outsized lens
(in Rear Window) became a much-used sym-
bol for film studies of the impotent,
voyeuristic male. Thomas takes this much
further, using the camera as a phallus as he
unconsciously mimes intercourse, complete
with shouts of “Yes!, Yes!” as he photographs
the leggy, then-trendy model Veruschka; as
usual, the male achieves “orgasm” (Thomas
collapses on a sofa) while the female is merely
a receptacle left on her own.
The moment, reproduced on virtually
every poster for the film, might be a bit ripe,
but the point is made. It is later repeated,
with emphasis on Thomas’s sadism, in the
famous nude romp with two giddy, aspiring
teenage models (Jane Birkin and Gillian
Hills), who end up as servants, dressing
David as he stares at his mysterious pho-
tographs. As in Red Desert, the sex act is
achieved, but it is poisoned, bringing no ful-
fillment to male or female.

The film opens with a car full of mimes,
the famous Rag Week troupe, barreling
around the drab urban citadel of The Econo-
mist magazine. At the film’s end, Thomas
spots them at a tennis court in Maryon Park,
about which he continues to obsess. Two of
the troupe’s members “play” tennis without
rackets or balls. When they hit a “ball” over
the fence, they beckon to Thomas, who joins
in the mimed game, picking up the invisible
ball, tossing it back. He enters the realm of
metaphysics as he watches the game with a
small smile—he even seems to hear the ball
being struck. This object is invisible, yet it
becomes the reason for unity—until
Thomas’s smile turns to a frown. The
mimes’ society is too marginal and bizarre
to offer consolation. Thomas actually fades
into the landscape as the camera pulls back,
consciousness shutting down.
When I first looked at the Criterion Blu-
ray of this film, I was startled, thinking I had
time-warped back to my initial viewing in
1966. Every print of the film since then has
been inferior, my measure being the deathly
greenness of Maryon Park. I find no fault
with this magnificent 4K edition, yet another
of Criterion’s sterling achievements. The
supplements are rich and plentiful, includ-
ing Garner’s substantial remarks as well as
those of photo and art historians Walter
Moser and David Alan Mellor. There is an
intelligent 2016 documentary on the making
of and legacy of Blow-Up, conversations
with Antonioni (pretty slim), David Hem-

mings, Jane Birkin, and a lengthy recent
interview with Vanessa Redgrave. The pack-
age also includes an essay by David Forgacs
and Stig Björkman and the famous—but
marginally relevant—short story by Julio
Cortázar.—Christopher Sharrett
His Girl Friday
Produced and directed by Howard Hawks;
written by Charles Lederer from The Front
Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur;
photographed by Joseph Walker; art direction
by Lionel Banks; edited by Gene Havlick;
starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph
Bellamy, and Billy Gilbert. Blu-ray and DVD,
B&W, 92 min, 1940.
The Front Page
Produced by Howard Hughes; directed by
Lewis Milestone; written by Bartlett Cormack,
from the play by Ben Hecht and Charles
MacArthur, with additional dialogue by
Charles Lederer; photographed by Glen
MacWilliams; production design by Richard
Day; edited by W. Duncan Mansfield; starring
Adolphe Menjou, Pat O’Brien, Mary Brian, and
Edward Everett Horton. Blu-ray and DVD,
B&W, 101 min, 1931. A Criterion Collection
release, www.criterion.com.
The first thing most moviegoers associate
with Howard Hawks’s classic 1940 comedy
His Girl Friday is speed—not just swift, effi-
cient storytelling, although that’s definitely
there, but dialogue, plot twists, and visual
gambits that flood the screen at a pace any

old-time newshound on a deadline would
envy. In a video extra accompanying the
Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray and
DVD edition, film scholar David Bordwell
notes that some sequences have characters
rattling off lines at the astonishing rate of
three hundred words per minute. It’s just as
astonishing that almost none of those words
are redundant, extraneous, or lost in the
shuffle, and that the stellar performers—
from stars Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and
Ralph Bellamy to outstanding character
actors like Roscoe Karns, Ernest Truex, and
Billy Gilbert—match the celerity of the
speech with gestures, movements, and
expressions no less fluid and precise. And all
the while Joseph Walker’s camera vigorously
tracks, pans, swivels, and frames multiple
actions in graceful deep-focus compositions.
Have you noticed this is a rave review?
Credit for the top-flight gestalt of His
Girl Friday goes also to playwrights Ben
Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose 1928
play The Front Page inspired the production.
Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer
brilliantly rewired the stage comedy by giv-
ing protagonist Hildy Johnson a gender
reassignment, turning a newsman named
Hildebrand into a newswoman named
Hildegard and making her the former
spouse of Walter Burns, her hard-boiled
editor. Apart from this grand transforma-
tion, the outline of the plot remains the
same: Walter wants Hildy to keep pounding

out copy for the Morning Post instead of
heading off to dullsville with her terminally
respectable fiancé, and Hildy can’t resist
grabbing her typewriter when a condemned
prisoner about to be hanged escapes right
under the pressroom’s collective nose,
thanks to a dull-witted sheriff and an inept
“alienist” who bungles a sanity examination.
Newspaper movies were a Hollywood
staple in the Thirties, reaching a high point
with His Girl Friday and then Citizen Kane,
which ushered in their baroque period in
1941. The genius of His Girl Friday was to
Newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and former wife
and star journalist Hildy Johnson
(Rosalind Russell) trade barbs in Howard Hawks’s His Girl
Friday. (photo courtesy of Photofest)
CINEASTE, Fall 2017 57
conjoin that popular genre with the screw-
ball comedy, which Hawks had previously
aced with the witty Bringing Up Baby (1938)
and the raucous Twentieth Century (1934),
adapted by Hecht and MacArthur from
another of their plays. The result may be the
greatest specimen of what film philosopher
Stanley Cavell famously calls the “comedy of
remarriage,” in which reconciliation and
forgiveness ultimately transcend lower val-
ues of desire and disdain.

Justified though they are, the lasting
accolades for His Girl Friday have tended to
obscure the 1931 screen version of The Front
Page, which retains the title of the
Hecht–MacArthur original. Directed by
Lewis Milestone, fresh from the very differ-
ent triumph of All Quiet on the Western
Front (1930), it was adapted by screenwriter
Bartlett Cormack after Hecht and
MacArthur proved too pricey for producer
Howard Hughes, and Lederer contributed
additional dialogue. Pat O’Brien and
Adolphe Menjou play Hildy and Walter,
both heavier on toughness and lighter on
charm than their 1940s counterparts, and
the gifted likes of Edward Everett Horton
and Slim Summerville spice up the support-
ing cast. (There’s also a mildly engaging
1974 version by Billy Wilder, with odd cou-
ple experts Jack Lemmon and Walter
Matthau in the leads.) By pairing His Girl
Friday with its 1931 predecessor, the two-
disc Criterion release allows for swift com-
parisons between the two. And according to
a “Hawks on Hawks” video included in the
package, Hawks himself once made that
comparison, alternating reels of his version
with reels of the 1931 film to confirm his
hope that as fast as the earlier film was, his
was faster.
Most important for cinephiles, the Crite-
rion release presents Milestone’s movie in a
version closer to Milestone’s intentions than
any that’s been circulated since the Forties.
And therein lies a tale worth stopping the

presses for, fascinatingly recounted in a
video extra detailing the restoration of the
1931 film. Briefly summarized, the Academy
Film Archive set out to restore The Front
Page from a 1970 print located in the Hughes
film collection. When they obtained a
Library of Congress print to fill in potentially
damaged portions, they discovered that the
contents of the two prints were significantly
different, and turning to Milestone’s papers
in the Academy library, they figured out
why.
In the early sound film era, directors
often shot and edited their films in three
simultaneous versions intended for Ameri-
can audiences, British audiences, and “gen-
eral foreign” audiences. Lo and behold, pretty
much all post-1940 film and video copies of
The Front Page derived from the “general
foreign” version, which the original film-
makers considered the least desirable of the
three, tweaked as it was for easy consump-
tion in far-off markets. The situation isn’t
quite that simple, since foreign versions
were sometimes less heavily censored—for
instance, a reporter’s dismissive hand wave
in the U.S. version becomes a conspicuously
hoisted middle finger for viewers in other
markets. Usually, though, the American ver-
sion wins for finely tuned rhythms and
niceties of performance and dialogue, as
Michael Sragow observes in a Criterion
leaflet essay citing examples from the third-
best version we’ve been stuck with until

now, where the sexual slur “lizzies” turns
into “use lipstick” and a reference to the
American icon Pocahontas morphs into the
more widely famed Lady Godiva.
All versions of The Front Page have a
touch of the exotic in the Internet age, when
traditional newspaper movies are a semi-
forgotten breed and the sardonic, case-hard-
ened characters memorialized in Hecht and
MacArthur’s play seem like relics from a
vanished realm. Reporters of that era rarely
had bylines; rewrite desks sculpted prose far
from the scene; and many journalists were
little more than scouts, snoops, and look-
outs. That was certainly so in the Chicago
where the play takes place and where Hecht
and MacArthur chased news until the mid-
Twenties, when both moved to New York,
started collaborating on theater scripts, and
eventually got into screenwriting, where
Hecht distinguished himself more than his
sometime colleague.
Looked at another way, the play and the
movie adaptations amount to a sort of jour-
nalism in themselves. They take place largely
in the bedraggled pressroom of Chicago’s
fabled Criminal Court Building, and the
dialogue is crammed with references to
actual persons, places, and things. Hildy
Johnson is the name of a real crime reporter,
the jailbreak is based on the more successful
escape of one Tommy O’Connor in 1921—
which Hecht had drawn on when writing

Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 Underworld—
and the practical joke that closes the story
was apparently played on MacArthur by a
Chicago editor. Hawks’s movie omits many
Twenties-specific references but compen-
sates with in-jokes about Bellamy’s bland
persona and Grant’s unfortunate real name,
Archie Leach.
And then there are the social and politi-
cal evils that rumble through all versions of
the comedy—a hefty catalogue of “iniqui-
ties, double dealings, chicaneries, and
immoralities,” as Hecht called them in his
epilogue to the play. The most obvious one
is the death penalty imposed on Earl
Williams, a mentally challenged loner who
fancies himself a radical; he shot a “colored
policeman” in a fit of confusion, and when a
reprieve from the governor arrives before
his scheduled execution, the corrupt Chicago
mayor (based on William Hale Thompson, a
corrupt Chicago mayor) suppresses it to
score African-American votes in an impend-
ing election.
Only in Hawks’s film does Hildy meet
with Earl in the death chamber, showing a
slippery sort of compassion as she speaks to
him with kindness and wrestles his jumbled
thoughts into a quasi-political notion that
doesn’t make sense but promises to make
good copy. This is the slowest, quietest scene
in His Girl Friday, acknowledging the seri-
ousness of the issues at stake and signaling a
fundamental decency beneath Hildy’s any-

thing-for-a-story pragmatism.
His Girl Friday benefits from the
thoughtfulness of this moment, but it’s
related to a less-appealing element in all ver-
sions of The Front Page—the treatment of
Mollie Malloy, a stereotypical hooker with a
From left, Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien), Walter Burns (Adolphe
Menjou), Mrs. Grant (Effie Ellsler), and
Diamond Louie (Maurice Black) in Lewis Milestone’s The Front
Page. (photo courtesy of Photofest)
58 CINEASTE, Fall 2017
heart of gold who met Earl the day before
his crime, offered him a bit of warmth and
sympathy, and was rewarded by a barrage of
phony stories slandering her as a brazen
mistress planning to marry Earl on the gal-
lows. Most of the reporters (except Hildy in
Hawks’s film) spew additional derision
when she arrives at the press room to berate
them, and neither the play nor the adapta-
tions go far enough in explicitly censuring
their sexist cruelty, although when Earl lies
hidden in a press room desk and Mollie
makes a near-fatal leap out a window to dis-
tract the reporters from finding him, Hildy
does seem genuinely upset about her fate.
Apart from the female Hildy of 1940, no
woman comes off very well in this story—
the pressroom is a male fortress, Hildy’s
prospective mother-in-law gets hauled off

the premises by Walter’s in-house thug—
and even if we laugh our asses off, as Bord-
well says he does each time he watches His
Girl Friday, these signs of unreconstructed
patriarchy may dampen the merriment.
The larger point is that gender politics,
electoral politics, and death penalty politics
are worth keeping in mind when revisiting
these films. Ditto for media and “fake news”
politics, which make the narrative as timely
as it’s ever been. Whatever your attitude
toward today’s allegations of journalistic
fakery, mostly but not exclusively leveled by
right-wing forces more comfortable with
“truthiness” than facts, you have to admit
that the old Chicago pros pulled vastly fewer
punches. Listen to what they holler into
their phones when Earl is discovered hiding
in the desk: “He put up a desperate strug-
gle…the police overpowered him…tried to
shoot it out…trying to break through the
cordon of police….” And all the while the
meek little man is wilting with exhaustion
and befuddlement, hardly able to stand,
much less make a break for it. That’s really
fake news, and it was everyday business not
so long ago.
In sum, The Front Page packs a serio-
comic wallop in all its iterations, and it’s
hard to imagine a better presentation than
Criterion’s generously stocked package,
which includes assorted video essays and
featurettes as well as three audio adaptations
from radio’s golden age. Nodding to the Earl

Williams reprieve that finally gets delivered,
Cavell speaks of comedy as offering a
“reprieve from the world on grounds of
insanity,” and adds that the remarriage
genre aims to transform the timeworn insti-
tution of marriage into a site of “romance”
and “adventure.” Those good things are
what Hildy and Walter find when they head
back (probably) to the altar at the end of
Hawks’s film, and, mutatis mutandis, it’s
what the male team has at the end of Mile-
stone’s picture. Romance and adventure are
gratifications we all need, and in today’s
parlous times, a reprieve from the world on
grounds of insanity is a mighty tempting
prospect.—David Sterritt
Death in
the Garden
Produced by David Mage and Óscar
Dancigers; directed by Luis Buñuel;
screenplay by Luis Buñuel, Raymond
Queneau, Luis Alcoriza, and Gabriel Arout,
based on the novel by José-André Lacour;
cinematography by Jorge Stahl Jr.; edited by
Marguerite Renoir; sets designed by Edward
Fitzgerald; music by Paul Misraki; starring
Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles
Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, and Michèle
Girardon. Blu-ray and DVD, color, French
dialog with English subtitles, 99 min., 1956.
A Eureka Entertainment/Masters of Cinema
release, www.mastersofcinema.org.
In an imaginary Latin American country,
a band of diamond miners revolts against

the government, which has declared that it
will nationalize the mines. The subsequent
crackdown by the army affects not only the
rebels but also certain peripheral figures:
Castin (Charles Vanel), a miner who has
amassed a fortune and is suspected, wrongly,
of complicity; and Chark (Georges Mar-
chal), imprisoned for bank robbery, but
now on the lam. These two bribe Chenko
(Tito Junco), a riverboat captain, to take
them to the border with Brazil. In their
flight, they are accompanied by Castin’s deaf
mute daughter María (Michèle Girardon);
the prostitute Djin (Simone Signoret), who
hopes to become a rich widow by marrying
old Castin; and Father Lizzardi (Michel Pic-
coli), who plans to disembark at a mission
on the way. When the army sends a patrol
boat in pursuit, the passengers abandon
ship, relying on Chenko to guide them
through the jungle. Chenko takes off, and
they are left to their own devices. The rest of
the film, which portrays their efforts to stay
alive and to find their way out, will center
on the fugitives’ varied reactions to their
perilous situation and on the question of
which ones will survive.
The film represents the intent of the
French producers to cash in on the huge
success of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953
The Wages of Fear, which also takes place in
Latin America. They even attempted to use
the same cast. The lead, Yves Montand, was
otherwise engaged, so they were forced to

settle for Charles Vanel, who had won Best
Actor at Cannes for his supporting role in
that film. They also cast Montand’s wife.
Simone Signoret had played no part in The
Wages of Fear, but she and Montand were
celebrated as a couple, and she was famous
in her own right. To produce another best-
seller, the producers opted to stick to the
successful formula and not challenge the
conventions of the genre. At loose ends,
Buñuel accepted the commission even
though he must have agreed with co-writer
Raymond Queneau’s judgment that the
book by José-André Lacour was “a piece of
shit.”
Writing problems would plague the cre-
ation of the script to an unusual degree. Que-
neau’s participation was not very helpful per-
haps because of his diffidence or—co-writer
Luis Alcoriza’s take—because the French
producers didn’t like Queneau’s dialogues,
“although they were brilliant.” Buñuel admits
to never having resolved the problems entirely.
During the shoot, he woke up routinely in
the middle of the night to rewrite what was
being filmed the next day and then hand it on
to Gabriel Arout to put into good French.
Queneau had, by that time, decamped.
Whether the difficulties were due to the
French producers’ interference (as Francisco
Aranda, Bunuel’s nephew and first biographer,
claims), to the nature of the project, or to the
book itself is not entirely clear.
“Film is a wonderful instrument of

expression, but at the same time, because it’s
The principal characters in Death in the Garden, pursued by
local authorities for their alleged
involvement in a miners’ strike, escape in a riverboat. (photo
courtesy of Masters of Cinema)
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© 2017 by the University of Texas Press50 THE VELVET
LIGHT TRAP NUMBER 79 SPRING 2017
GIRL REPORTERS AND
CYCLIC SERIALITY
BY ZOË WALLIN
What d’ye make of this? Darryl Zanuck, erstwhile Warner Bros.
production chieftain, now
functioning similarly for 20th Century, makes “Advice for the
Lovelorn,” with a Beatrice Fairfax
heart throb column as its big angle, and Warners come up with
“Hi, Nellie,” another newspaper

yarn incorporating the same feature. Warners preview “I Got
Your Number” and the next night
20th Century unveils “Looking for Trouble.” Both are telephone
stories.
—Victor Shapiro, “The Hollywood Scene,” Motion Picture
Herald, 3 February 1934, 14
Basically a newspaper yarn, this approaches the subject from
new tack, making romantic love
story the most important feature and surrounding that asset with
all the color, action and
excitement commonly associated with this type story.
—“The Hell Cat,” Motion Picture Herald, 12 May 1934, 42
Yarn one of those customary B contrivances about one the
pretty young thing who seeks a
newspaper job, only to be told by a flinty editor to go out and
get a front page scooperoo and
he’ll put her to work.
—“Emergency Squad,” Variety, 17 April 1940, 13
IN THE 1930S THE IMAGE OF THE GIRL REPORTER
PROLIFERATED ACROSS MOTION PICTURE FEATURES,
film series, comic strips, and radio shows in the United States.
Developed as an offshoot of the decade-long trend in newspaper
pictures, the girl reporter character became associated with
her own set of story tropes and motifs in the mid-1930s. The
centrality of the character to these

films is revealed in such titles as Front Page Woman (Warner
Bros., 1935), The Girl on the Front Page
(Universal, 1936), Love Is News (Fox, 1937), and A Girl with
Ideas (Universal, 1937). This sudden
surge in girl reporters represents a cross-media cycle that enacts
a number of significant Holly-
wood practices premised on the repetition of a successful
formula. If serialization is understood
A B S T R A C T
In this article, the cycle framework is applied to the 1930s girl
reporter pictures. The
films illuminate the operations of a programmer cycle, a form
yet to be explored in
cycle studies, opening the consideration of cycles to a wider
cross-media trend. The
formal and informal practices of repetition and seriality within
the cycle are shown
to possess limited life spans that, like cycles, were subject to
market determinants.
Studying cycles as historical, commercial processes contributes
a deeper under-
standing of how industrial strategies were developed, modified,
and adjusted in re-
sponse to a particular set of economic and cultural conditions.
DOI: 10.7560/ VLT7905
51NUMBER 79 SPRING 2017 THE VELVET LIGHT TRAP
as the process by which a narrative formula is extended and
repeated in structured intervals, film cycles are an organic
form of this process, the shape and longevity of which are
dependent on their surrounding market environment. The

framework of cycles is both temporal and commercial, their
lifespan dictated by the logic of supply and demand; the
production of girl reporter pictures declined once the market
reached the point of saturation and the variations on the
standard formula were no longer able to satiate audiences’
demands for originality and difference.
Seriality is generally defined on a textual basis as the
elaboration and extension of a particular narrative. With film
cycles consisting of a collection of different texts, considering
cycles as a form of serialization raises significant method-
ological questions for the definition of seriality. The heart
of cycles lies in the repetition of a formula, and within the
girl reporter cycle are examples of both formal and informal
practices of seriality. The formal repetitions, such as that of
the Torchy Blane film series (Warner Bros., 1937–39) and
remake His Girl Friday (Columbia, 1940), sit in contrast to the
organic, haphazard, cross-studio feature productions of the
cycle associated with exploitative imitation and commercial
opportunism. Formal practices are understood here to be
regulated forms of seriality whose repetition is based in the
legal narrative extension of a piece of intellectual property.
Informal forms of seriality, such as cycles and unofficial
remakes, are separate properties that are grouped together
discursively. Cycles may still have a textual basis, the films’
grouping being based on a particular narrative, theme,
stylistic approach, or character, but rather than imposing
our own boundary around the texts, a discursive approach
allows contemporary sources to delineate the cycle as it was
understood at the time.
The girl reporter case study explores an overlooked
form in cycle studies: the programmer cycle. In Classical
Hollywood, programmer pictures were shorter films, usu-
ally between seventy-two and ninety minutes, that were
designed for a fast playoff through the run-zone-clearance
system of distribution.1 Cycles were a key organizational tool
in this system, and the girl reporter blueprint provided one

of the basic formulas used to fill the extensive production
and distribution rosters. The majority of cycle studies to
date have centered on their topicality and the relationship
between cycles and contemporary social discourses or else
explored cyclic operations in the particular industrial envi-
ronment of post-Classical Hollywood.2 The girl reporter films
demonstrate one of the fundamental ways that programmer
cycles functioned for the producer-distributors under the
vertically integrated studio system.
Janet Staiger has described how the industry’s tension
between standardization and differentiation can create
product cycles.3 My approach to cycles draws on this un-
derstanding alongside Steve Neale’s identification of the
industrial function of genres as cost-effective product lines
enabling the studios to meet these fundamental obligations
(standardization and innovation) while also regulating
demand, minimizing risk, and maximizing audience appeal
and profit potential.4 Neale describes the way in which cycles
functioned as a unit of calculation under the studio system
alongside star-genre formulations, production trends, and
generic hybrids as studios sought to spread the risk by hedg-
ing their bets across a variety of product.5 Cycles work within
this approach to genre by studying film groupings on a local
level while utilizing a classificatory, industrial term that was
commonly employed by practitioners at the time.
The particular formula developed in the girl reporter cycle
was an amalgamation of different components: drawing on
the “newspaper yarn” setting and its associated themes, the
pictures incorporated mystery, suspense, and action through
the common narrative of a criminal investigation, as well as
a comic treatment of the romance between the girl reporter
figure and her professional rival. The pictures presented an
appealing, low-cost film type that could be readily replicated.
The girl reporter cycle was not unique but sat alongside other
mid-1930s low-budget cycles, such as the murder mysteries

and singing cowboy films that were staples of the smaller
studios, as well as the screwball comedies, backstage mu-
sicals, historical biopics, and G-men films developed across
the major studios. Contemporaries viewed such cycles as
part of a larger pattern of continual industrial fluctuation,
institutionalized negotiations of the ongoing supply-and-
demand relationship between the studios and audiences.
What follows is an overview of the process by which the
girl reporter pictures can be identified as a cycle and how
this contributes to current definitional issues. The shaping
of the girl reporter cycle by specific production practices and
distributor decisions for programmer pictures will then be
examined. This will uncover the extent to which the relation-
ship between the studios’ policies on low-budget production
and their pursuit of other forms of extended imitation, such
52 THE VELVET LIGHT TRAP NUMBER 79 SPRING 2017
as series and remakes, were related to commercial strategies
emanating from the structure and environment of the studio
system. The final section examines the critical, industrial,
and market reception of the girl reporter pictures in the
trade press, newspaper reviews, and exhibitor reports. This
includes discussions of His Girl Friday as both an A-picture
and a remake, the typical girl reporter programmer Back in
Circulation (Warner Bros., 1937), and the Torchy Blane series.
The way in which the different discursive understandings of
the cycle drew upon current perceptions of the industry and
audience groups indicates how the different forms of seriality
within the cycle enacted slightly separate functions for the
studios. These could be seen to benefit or harm the wider
industry, illuminating the concerns of different sectors of the
industry at this time and the complex hierarchies of taste in
the late 1930s. This establishes such cycles as a significant

site at which values and meanings are contested.
DEFINING THE CYCLE
My attempt to trace the basic shape of the cycle raised ques-
tions over the methods by which such outlines can be drawn.
The very fluidity of the girl reporter cycle, which constantly
spills over into other cycles, including screwball comedies,
murder mysteries, and gangster pictures, demonstrates a
strategy of conscious hybridity that ran throughout the cycle.
Such hybridity challenges the attempt to demarcate a precise
boundary around the cycle and highlights how intertextu-
ality was fundamental to the practices of production and
discursive identification. The cycle cannot be isolated from
the films that surround it. When conceiving of a film cycle
and attempting to establish its borders there are three points
to consider: the conscious construction of the film in rela-
tion to other pictures in production, the various similarities
and differences emphasized during the pictures’ discussion
in distribution and exhibition, and the way that the cycle is
defined and delineated as a retrospective practice by critics
and historians.6
As a relatively new area of study, the methodology for
cycle definition has been limited. Richard Nowell has ad-
vanced a loose model for the initiation, development, and
eventual decline of a typical film cycle, which is based on
its commercial, market orientations.7 Nowell’s case study
of the early 1980s slasher films’ independent production
and mainstream distribution, however, is particular to the
industrial landscape that emerged in the late 1970s as New
Hollywood receded. The attempt to outline a film cycle amid
the mass production of the studio system presents a sepa-
rate challenge. In attempting to demarcate the girl reporter
cycle, I take Rick Altman’s work on the discursive approach

to genre as a starting point, and the labeling of the pictures
and identification of their components in the contemporary
trade press provides the principal framework.8
The comparative study of trade reviews indicates the key
elements that became associated with a particular body of
films from the mid-1930s: a version of the “newspaper yarn”
that specifically centered on the girl reporter character. News-
paper pictures were a broad production trend that consisted
of a range of associated elements, including the city office
settings, the crusading editor and sob sister characters, and
narratives following investigations of political corruption
and crime rings. The girl reporter pictures joined the familiar
newspaper setting and associated storylines with a focus on
a young female reporter character. Often she is struggling
to prove her worth to her male colleagues, taking on tough
crime stories that place her in dangerous situations, and com-
peting romantically and professionally with rival reporters or
police investigators. At the height of its popularity in 1937,
this particular girl reporter branch of the newspaper trend
was described as an identifiable “angle,” “theme,” and “situ-
ation.”9 Of There Goes My Girl (RKO, 1937), Variety stated,
“Newspaper reporters who contrive to get themselves into
reportorial and romantic difficulties pending the inevitable
triumph of love and professional honor, apparently are the
current rage of the producers.”10 This temporal element, the
widespread adoption of the film type at a certain point in
time, presents the girl reporter pictures as a cycle.
Using this discursive identification, a loose model for the
girl reporter picture can be established, focused on films
where the girl reporter is a leading character, with one or
more elements associated with the newspaper picture also
present.11 The films particularly identified with the trade’s
“girl reporter” label clustered later in the decade. Examples
of the girl reporter character were evident in films and other
media long before the 1930s. The serial The Perils of Our Girl
Reporters (Mutual Films, 1916) was an early instance of the

girl reporter in serialized film form, and the popularity of
other silent serial queens demonstrated the widespread
appeal of serialized narratives centered on women protago-
nists.12 Although there were clear precedents in previous
years, it was the particular combination of the girl reporter
figure, newspaper background, crime investigation narrative,
and especially the comic treatment of the professional and
romantic rivalry that was specific to the girl reporter pictures
that made up the bulk of the 1930s cycle.
In the 1934–35 season, several films that developed
the typical girl reporter / newspaper yarn were released to
strong box-office returns. The Daring Young Man (Fox, 1935)
incorporated a plot element from the recent Welfare Island
prison scandal, while Variety noted the similarity of its rival
reporter plot to Front Page Woman (Warner Bros., 1935),
both in cinemas at the time of the review.13 Six girl reporter
newspaper pictures were made in the 1935–36 season, with
programmer entries from Columbia, RKO, MGM, Para-
mount, and Fox. In 1936–37 the Torchy Blane series was
introduced alongside nine girl reporter / newspaper features,
but the number dropped to seven in the 1937–38 season.
At this point market saturation had begun to take hold.
The screwball-inflected romantic comedy and rival reporter
aspect of That’s My Story (Universal, 1937) was reviewed
unfavorably: “[It] traverses the nut-route of newspapering,
already familiar and nauseating to the average audience.”14
Over the next couple of seasons, the number of girl
reporter / newspaper pictures subsided. The figure of the
female journalist who was not explicitly tied to a newspa-
per setting increased as the newspaper picture declined. In

Lady Scarface (RKO, 1941), a female magazine photographer
worked with a detective to track down a lady gangster, while
the girl reporter is reduced to a supporting role in Pardon
My Stripes (Republic, 1941) and Who Is Hope Shuyler? (Fox,
1942). While this character type of an active, professional
woman still held currency in the next decade, it was displaced
onto new forms and production trends.15 In 1939 Warner
Bros. experimented with the start of a new series, Private
TABLE 1. NEWSPAPER AND GIRL REPORTER PICTURES
FIGURE 1. Florence Rice as girl reporter in the fifty-eight-
minute MGM
programmer Women Are Trouble (1936).
Detective, replacing Torchy Blane’s girl reporter with a “girl
detective.” It was described as “a repaint job of the Torchy
series, the same formula beneath a new finish.”16 The “murder
mystery girl reporter mix up” was described as “wearisome”
by Variety in 1941, and, as a whole, the programmer pictures
increasingly infused the newspaper investigations with such
topical subjects as international espionage, the deportation
of aliens, and the black market.17
As John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny argue, films are
“experience goods” dependent on the expectation of audi-
ence pleasure and are usually consumed only once.18 As a
commercial product in a competitive marketplace, individual
films have a shelf life, and their value depreciates over time.
Consumers seek a mixture of familiarity and difference, and
the strategies used by the studios to minimize risk and secure
audience appeal, such as the imitation of a currently popu-
lar formula, are also subject to a restricted lifespan. Once a

formula becomes too familiar to retain viewers’ interest, the
studios turn to focus on a film type that promises elements
of novelty and holds greater room for the development of
variations. Programmer cycles such as the girl reporter fea-
tures are not isolated occurrences but are one manifestation
of the continual clustering of production trends that ebb and
flow under the studio system.
In the case of the girl reporter pictures, the initiation
of the cycle is not attributable to one single hit production
that spurred a series of imitations. Instead, the cycle was
built on antecedents, part of a cumulative process where an
already established film type became attractive to producers
at a specific moment, causing a rise in production levels.
This corresponds with Nowell’s idea of a cycle as a spike in
filmmaking above the base-level production of a film type,
whatever that base level might be.19 Cycles need not be pre-
ceded by complete inactivity or lack of production of the film
type, nor need they be dependent on a topical event to act as
a catalyst for production. The operations of the girl reporter
pictures and other such programmer cycles and the function
they enacted for the industry were specifically derived from
the studio system setup and market environment of the
mid- to late 1930s.
CYCLES AS INDUSTRY PRACTICE
According to Richard Maltby’s understanding of Hollywood’s
commercial aesthetic, films are composites of different ele-
ments that are variously combined in the production process
to form a particular object. In this continuous assembly of
interchangeable parts, particularly successful combinations
are repeated and imitated.20 These basic ingredients include
the general settings, plots, themes, and characters that ex-
ist in the public domain, as well as the resources available
at a particular studio for producers to draw upon, such as

purchased story properties and in-house script writers,
the sets, costumes, and props, and the stable of stars. The
combination of these basic ingredients could be adapted to
fit different trends and audience interests. When a particu-
lar combination proved a success, it could then be iterated
within the same production company or by another studio
that inflected it with the studio’s own house style and stars.
The girl reporter films represent one such group of textual
compounds that had an easily reproducible formula.
Low-budget, formula-driven cycles represented a wider
production and distribution strategy under the studio system.
With studios needing to fill their annual production schedules
and provide exhibitors with a variety of product, the repro-
duction of a successful formula was a commercially viable way
to organize and stimulate production. A programmer cycle
such as the girl reporter films was a manifestation of one such
form among the huge volume being circulated each season.
In the mid-1930s, the girl reporter’s commercial potential
was fully realized, and it remained a sustainable option for
producer-distributors for a number of seasons, after which
cinemagoers were perceived to have wearied of the formula,
and the focus was switched to other film types. Within the
studio system, the company sales team of distributors had a
significant role in advising the producers as to the shape of the
studio’s seasonal output. Drawing on exhibitor reports and
box-office figures, distributors would arrange the production
plans into classifications of story type, budget, production
team, and timetable.21 As part of this planning process, as well
as in the sales conventions and the pedaling of film blocks
to exhibitors, cycles provided practical shorthand descriptive
categories for lower-budget or “B” films that could not always
be distinguished by a star name.
The height of the girl reporter cycle coincided with the
industrial and economic crisis of 1938. Under numerous
external and internal pressures, Hollywood was forced to
confront the practices of its studios and the image they

projected of the industry while publicizing an attempt
to reconfigure and adapt their policies to the changing
marketplace. Between 1936 and 1939 the policies of the
production studios saw a continual wavering between strate-
gies of increased and reduced proportions of B production
and the raised and curtailed budgets allocated to individual
Bs, as well as the desire to avoid the label of “B” altogether.
At the same time, film series and remakes were on the rise.
This fraught industrial environment directly influenced the
attitudes held toward these different forms of seriality.
Block booking, inherent to the exhibition practice of
double billing and the studios’ mass output, was key to
programmer cycles’ operations while also informing their
reception. The debates surrounding B features and the prac-
tices of double billing and block booking, although constant
throughout the decade, increased in significance in the mid-
1930s as a result of their temporary codified status through
the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and the Na-
tional Recovery Administration’s Code of Fair Competition.22
Adding to the industry’s concerns were the ongoing attempts
to legislate against unfair trade practices on both local and
national levels, the threat of government probes, and the
continued possibility of federal intervention. To combat
the stigma surrounding the growing number of B films and
accompanying perceptions of low quality, the studios sought
to inject greater production values into the pictures through
increased budgets and running times, added signifiers associ-
ated with high quality, or simply relabeled the categories.23
Such strategies are evident in certain pictures in the girl
reporter cycle with the attempt of Warner Bros. to raise the
status of Front Page Woman by attaching Michael Curtiz as

a “class” director and the labeling of the Torchy Blane series
an “A” according to the studio’s new classificatory categories
“AA” and “A.”24
B features were used by the studios to lessen the aver-
age production cost of the seasonal budget as a whole and
bring the investment within the bounds of the financial
return achievable from block selling. With a large number
of programmers required under mass production both to
fill double bills and to offset the risk of big-budget features,
the mode of production shifted in the 1930s from a central
supervisor to individual production units within a studio,
some of which specialized in low-budget production.25 Bob
Moak’s 1939 account of these “keepers of the Bs” described
their production process and argued that while play dates
were important, “in order to garner [the] needed number
of bookings to cover nut and net, they’ve first got to find a
script—a good one, at that!”26 The search for plots was identi-
fied as the primary problem for all “program moguls.” Some B
unit directors worked with a strong writing team to produce
original ideas or purchased stories in the open market, while
Warner Bros.’ Bryan Foy weaved ideas around “basic threads
of materials previously filmed or scripts shelved throughout
the years by his company’s A producers.” Eric Hoyt’s work
on the Hollywood film libraries similarly identifies how a
principal use for old films in the 1930s was as a basis for such
“derivatives” or remakes, with properties traded between the
studios for this express purpose.27
This institutionalized practice of reproduction and recy-
cling was not restricted to the film industry. The girl reporter
was present in the mid-1930s across a number of different
media, many of which display different forms of seriality.
Ishbel Ross’s nonfiction account of girl reporter exploits, La-
dies of the Press, was published in 1936 to a warm reception,

and a primary source for the films were magazine stories such
as those of newspaper woman Adela Rogers St. John and Paul
Gallico in the Saturday Evening Post.28 At the same time, the
girl reporter character featured in radio dramas and comics.
The comic strip The Adventures of Jane Arden originated in
1927 and was adapted as a radio serial in 1938. In 1939,
when Warner Bros. released its film version, also called The
Adventures of Jane Arden, the comic ran in seventeen news-
papers with a total readership of twenty-two million, and
the radio show played on eighteen NBC network stations
to twelve million listeners.29 With this presold audience
FIGURE 2. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday
(Columbia,
1940), which was not primarily promoted as a newspaper or girl
reporter
picture, despite holding the familiar iconography.
in hand, the feature was trialed as a potential pilot for a
new girl reporter series in 1939. Following the cross-media
current in the other direction, the newspaper film Big Town
(Trojan, 1932) spawned a radio drama that ran from 1937
to 1952. A prominent girl reporter character absent from
the original film was injected into the radio show and was
voiced by Claire Trevor, who already had a history of playing
girl reporters in Fox films.30 Paramount also released four
Big Town features from 1947 to 1948, a television show of
the same name was initiated in 1950, and a comic strip ran
from 1951. The comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter also began
in 1940 and became the basis of a thirteen-chapter serial
produced by Sam Katzman at Columbia in 1945.
Within these different forms of feature film, film series,

radio shows, and comic strips are several types of seriality.
The motion picture features were composed of a narrative
whole, and while the characters and storylines followed
familiar prototypes, they were individual to each picture. A
series such as Torchy Blane, on the other hand, carried the
same characters and settings across its nine episodes. Each of
these episodes held a self-contained narrative, and the differ-
ent criminal investigations provided the basis for variation.
By creating a cohesive story world and repeating its charac-
ters, a series could generate and sustain viewer loyalty, with
a presold audience in place for subsequent episodes. The fans
of the Torchy series are repeatedly identified in accounts of
the films by reviewers, exhibitors, and viewers themselves.31
Actress Glenda Farrell was replaced for two of the episodes
after attempting to renegotiate her salary with the studio,
but when the rentals dipped and the studio was inundated
with letters from protesting fans, she was reinstated with
greater remuneration.32 With the ready recycling of sets
and props, such series were relatively cheap to produce and
were identified as a commercial strategy being increasingly
employed by the major studios in the late 1930s.33
In contrast to the self-contained episodes of series, the
narrative of serials spanned multiple chapters. Although film
serials were often associated with children’s entertainment,
there were repeated calls for adult serials in the mid-1930s.34
As Guy Barefoot argues, serials were seen as a means to
attract children to the cinemas but not to the exclusion of
other audience groups, being promoted as wholesome en-
tertainment with broader appeal.35 The girl reporter was not
the subject of her own serial until Columbia’s Brenda Starr
in 1945, but the character type was used in Universal’s The
Phantom Creeps in 1939 as part of the ensemble fighting to
prevent Bela Lugosi’s mad scientist from taking over the
world.36 The girl reporter radio shows employed both forms
of seriality: The Adventures of Jane Arden ran in fifteen-minute

segments at 10:15 on weekday mornings, suggesting the
targeting of a middle-class female market, while Big Town
followed a series format, airing in the evenings for thirty-
minute self-contained episodes with names such as “The
Dance Hall Hostess Racket,” “Parole Racket Exposé,” and
“Counterfeiting Exposé.”37
Despite the structural difference between the episodic
series and ongoing serial narrative, both types of seriality for-
malize the pattern of repetition as a market strategy to retain
a viewing group, participating in a process of world building.
This displays an affinity to modern-day franchises, which
have been defined by Derek Johnson as the commercial
and creative extension of an intellectual property through
ongoing, multiplied production.38 Cycles, in contrast, are a
collection of different properties that are grouped together
discursively usually according to a similarity of textual ele-
ments. This can be traced to the competitive market and
structure of Hollywood, which saw the studios engage in a
process of legally sanctioned imitation.
The copyright laws that protected intellectual property
from plagiarism could be circumvented through a measure
of variation and differentiation, and in the first half of the
decade, Hollywood fought to establish a legal protection for
such practices. Peter Decherney’s Hollywood’s Copyright Wars
describes how the tradition of repetition, imitation, and
borrowing that was part of the industry’s vaudeville inheri-
tance became increasingly contested as modes of production
were rationalized under the studio system.39 In dealing with
charges of plagiarism from writers, the courts sought to de-
termine the dichotomy between idea and expression, where
an idea could not be protected under copyright law, but its
original expression could. It was accepted and expected,
Decherney argues, that filmmakers would take up familiar
stories and themes, giving visual expression to time-worn
cultural building blocks. It was not until Cain v. Universal in
1946 that a measure to separate the idea or formula from the

original means of expression was established. This was done
through the doctrine of scène à faire, the idea that storytelling
logic dictated that certain genres inevitably contained the
same plots, characters, circumstances, and themes, which
could play out in expected ways.40 In this way, a newspaper
picture could be reasonably expected to contain scenes of a
girl reporter pulling a prank on a rival reporter in order to
outscoop him on a story without being liable to charges of
infringement. In the production context of the 1930s, where
all the studios participated in programmer cycles, it was not
in their interest to publicly contest the imitative practice with
charges of plagiarism against one another, particularly over
low-budget product.41
This understanding of derivative practices is aligned, in
some respects, with Rick Altman’s observations regarding
proprietorial elements, series, and cycles. Altman states that
the studios’ major goal in producing film series such as those
of the late 1930s was to assure a continuous influx of profit
without offering any assistance to competitors.42 Altman
argues that the brand associations formed by a character
such as Torchy Blane with her production studio, Warner
Bros., could be more valuable than the broad identification
with a genre or production trend because of the exclusivity
of such associations with individual companies. He suggests,
however, that cycles are also based on proprietorial elements,
with studios concerned to create cycles that are identified
specifically with themselves, in contrast to the wide, public
categories of genre. Here Altman views cycles as being based
on studio-specific property resources, such as contract ac-
tors, characters, and recognizable styles, but also containing
common elements that other studios could replicate, such

as subject matter, character types, and plot patterns.43
The trade press’s commentary on cycles, however, posits
their shareability as one of their foundational qualities.
Cycles are repeatedly identified in these publications as
inclusive, multistudio occurrences created by a rush of
different producers to the same topic.44 Given the studios’
ultimate interest in self-promotion, the exclusive association
of a popular cycle with a single studio is evident when the
company is speaking about the cycle in its own advertising
discourse. Warner Bros., for example, asserted itself as a
“cycle starter” and “the acknowledged [pioneer] of produc-
tion cycles” in promoting its 1935 season.45 Yet even this was
not always the case. Motion Picture Herald’s “In the Cutting
Room” report on Exclusive (Paramount, 1937) records the
studio publicist’s obligatory attempt to sell the picture to the
media: “It’s got laughs like you had in Front Page, romantic
love interest like what was in Gentlemen of the Press, dynamic
action like what was in Front Page Woman and real low down
authenticity like only fellows who were in on the real low
down knew.”46 The picture is described alongside successful
newspaper films from rival studio Warner Bros., as well as
from Paramount. Many programmer cycles are, like genres,
founded on formulaic repetition and shareable ideas and
possess the same legal conception. Cycles are a framework
that fits within genre studies, a means to understand the
undulating production of film types that grounds them
in their historical-industrial context and locates them as a
specifically commercial, market-oriented phenomenon with
a restricted life expectancy.
Frank Kelleter has argued that the pervasiveness of media
forms premised on repetition is tied to the specific nature of
American popular culture. Contending that modern commer-
cial organization fosters homogenized reproduction and also
requires goods that can appeal to a hugely diverse audience
group, it naturally encourages both the standardization of

and an open-ended flexibility found in the serial-narrative
form.47 A closer study of the studios’ particular policies for
the seasons surrounding the cycle reveals how their produc-
tion was also tied to specific strategies responding to the
contemporary economic situation and to the complaints
regarding the effect of B features on the industry.
The run-zone-clearance system reinforced the increas-
ing stratification of theaters and cemented their status in
the distribution and exhibition hierarchy in the 1930s.
Martin Quigley, editor of Motion Picture Herald, had long
campaigned for the industry to recognize the diversity of
audience tastes.48 The idea of a differentiated audience, when
acknowledged, was inevitably tied to the production of B
films and the different tastes held by the mass audiences
of the small-town and rural “sticks” market. Although such
segmentation often led to a focus on the first-run markets,
where the majority of profits were located for the majors,
the subsequent-run audience became a subject of concern
when their attendance started to decline. While B films
represented a stable, less risky investment for the industry,
junk for the moviegoing habit of the masses, low-quality Bs
could elicit exhibitor complaints. This was undesirable at a
time when internal conflicts and unfair trade practices were
being monitored by Washington.49
The economic downturn of late 1937 led to a dip in ad-
missions. This had less to do with the quality of productions
than with a wider industrial recession linked to Wall Street
reverses and overall unrest, yet the theories that circulated
centered on the growing discrimination of audiences and
the number of big features “killing each other off” at the
box office.50 Alarmingly, attendance was recorded to have

dropped in rural areas, where the primary consumers of pro-
grammer product were located and the habitual practice of
moviegoing was strongest. This growing anxiety found voice
in blaming the quality of the product, with Sam Goldwyn’s
assertion that customers were “on strike against inferior
pictures.”51 Some of the suggestions to combat this specifi-
cally targeted B pictures and the production practices built
around standardization and sameness, such as cycles.52 The
start of 1939 was seen as a time for the industry to “buckle
down” and “put their house in order” following a year of cost
troubles, economic difficulties, legislative nervousness, box-
office unease, and administrative alarm.53 Despite one of the
aims of the 1938 “Motion Picture’s Greatest Year” campaign
being an improvement of the public image of the industry
through mending relations with the press, it was observed
that the rush of newspaper pictures in 1938 “portrayed the
business in a light that is calculated to do the industry no
good with the average editor.”54 Such concerns played out
in the discourses surrounding films positioned to appeal to
the mass audience, such as the girl reporter programmers,
which were subjected to a complex system of commercial
and cultural evaluation.
CYCLES AS DISCURSIVE PRACTICE
Cycles are constructed not only through the production and
circulation methods that were informed by prior successes
and distributors’ calculations but in the act of articulation
that identifies the individual pictures as part of a larger body
of films. The discursive understanding of the girl reporter
cycle was not, however, necessarily consistent with the prag-
matic function of the pictures. Their perceived value varied
among the different classifications of films within the cycle
while also being constituted according to the position of
the speaker. There were evident degrees of difference in the
identification of A and B pictures with the wider cycle, for

example. At first glance, this implies that the cyclic produc-
tion practice was viewed pejoratively, through a spectrum
of values stretching from the base commercialism of B pro-
ductions and double bills to a cultural legitimacy associated
with higher-class productions and first-run audiences. The
discourses surrounding the girl reporter pictures suggest a
greater complexity, however, created by the varying attitudes
held toward different types of serialization and formulaic
repetition. Although a stigma was attached to the commercial
motivations behind cycles and remakes, the equally economi-
cally minded series productions were legitimated in the late
1930s by a different conception of their market function. The
distinct valuing of the girl reporter films is closely tied to the
surrounding context; policies were defended or maligned by
the industry according to the business environment and the
need to project a particular image of Hollywood in the face
of external criticism and economic pressures.
The standard by which the quality of pictures was mea-
sured was adjusted according to attitude shifts over the role
of motion pictures in American society. Will Hays’s annual
industry reports offer insight into this process through the
changing discursive strategy adopted by the MPPDA. In
1931 Hays’s argument centered on the fallacy of the idea
of a common denominator, or universal entertainment,
but he still advocated a utilitarian attempt to provide “the
greatest service to the greatest number.”55 Hays pointed to
the Production Code as having precipitated the production
of better pictures, which, in achieving widespread popular
success, consequently raised audience’s standards of taste,
therefore lessening the division between audience groups
and reiterating the idea of a universal public.56 While qual-
ity could be tied to pictures of culture, education, and class,
the discourse on series production reveals an idea of pure,
democratic, quality entertainment associated with pleasing
this universal audience. Although cycles and remakes were

excluded from this rhetoric, low-budget series productions
were celebrated for securing honest, reliable box-office
returns.
The pictures most consistently identified in relation to
the wider group of girl reporter / newspaper pictures were
programmers. Typical of this is Variety’s review of Woman
Are Trouble (MGM, 1936): “As one of those inexpensively
produced trivia that keep the screen bright until the main
part of the double bill goes on, Women Are Trouble adequately
fulfils its destiny.”57 There was a connection in such reviews
between the status of the picture as a programmer and the
degree to which it was deemed formulaic, with this thought
to be of greater concern to some sectors of the audience than
others. The primary market for a programmer cycle was lo-
cated in subsequent-run theaters in suburban neighborhoods
and small towns, characterized as a mass of undiscerning,
unsophisticated viewers. The Independent Exhibitors’ Film
Bulletin review of Woman in Distress (Columbia, 1937) named
the story of rival reporters constantly striving to outscoop
each other as one of several standard formulae that “usually
please the mass trade.”58
Within this “mass audience” designation, only occasional
mention was made of smaller audience groups.59 Despite
not being explicitly referred to in the reviews, the pictures’
focus on a working woman likely represented an underlying
appeal to the female market, regarded by the industry as the
primary group of moviegoers in the 1930s.60 While particular
audience groups were seen to favor certain film types, Susan
Ohmer identifies how the findings of audience research
organizations, such as George Gallup’s ARI, emphasized
the incorporation of numerous elements of appeal into a

single film rather than productions targeting one particular
market.61 The publicity campaigns were instead adjusted on
a local level to target particular audience groups. “Exploitips”
advised exhibitors to emphasize certain elements, such as the
film’s action sequences, the romantic angle, or a particular
star, where they have previously proved popular with their
local viewers. For instance, the Independent Exhibitor’s Film
Bulletin’s tips for The Girl on the Front Page (Universal, 1936)
suggest that “where they like comedy,” declare it “the gay
romantic comedy battle of the century,” while action spots
should plug the “blackmailing servants” angle.62
The reception of the cycle by newspaper critics adds an-
other dimension to the discourse surrounding the pictures.
In reviewing films, critics occupied a particular position
as tastemakers and cultural gatekeepers. Mark Jancovich
has described how newspaper reviewers such as Bosely
Crowther were situated in a position of cultural legitimacy,
tasked with policing the established aesthetic, middle-brow
preferences associated with the New York Times.63 This po-
sitioning informs critics’ standards of quality, concern with
aesthetic form, and subsequent conception of motion pic-
tures’ function, against which different films are approved or
dismissed. The attitudes of critics toward the different forms
of serialization within the girl reporter cycle often appear
contradictory. While little tolerance was displayed for girl
reporter pictures that attempted to transgress into a higher
class of production, those that remained in the realm of the
popular and fulfilled their basic entertainment function were
met with praise.64 On the other hand, those that too obvi-
ously betrayed the evidence of their formulaic production
origins were condemned. This complex system of evaluation
complicates a clear hierarchical, top-down structure of taste
and quality judgments, suggesting the fluidity, inconsistency,
and contradictory nature of the process of evaluation across

newspapers and the trade press.
BACK IN CIRCULATION AND THE RECEPTION
OF PROGRAMMERS
Scripted from an Adela Rogers St. John story exploring
themes of sensationalism and yellow journalism, Back in
Circulation (1937) centered on a performance from Joan
Blondell and featured perennial newshound Pat O’Brien as
her rival reporter. The constellation of discourses surround-
ing the feature illustrates how attitudes toward repetition
and the adherence to formula became an area where aesthetic
value was contrasted with commercial value. In the trade
press, the film is described as different from the routine
newspaper yarns, reviving the themes of sensationalism
explored in the early 1930s cycle of yellow journalism pic-
tures but adding some fresh twists and turns.65 The trade
reviewers rate the successful tempering of the newspaper
background’s dynamism with character and situation com-
edy, retaining appeal for action fans while still engrossing
the average moviegoer.66 The exhibitors writing to Motion
Picture Herald’s “What the Picture Did for Me” section were
often divided in their reception, reiterating the significance
of local factors and often challenging the assumptions held
by the trade reviewers. The four exhibitor reports on Back in
Circulation, printed in a single edition of Motion Picture Herald
FIGURE 3. Glenda Farrell in Smart Blonde (Warner Bros.,
1937); Farrell
played girl reporter Torchy Blane in seven of the series’ nine
episodes
and developed a strong fan following.

nearly three months after the picture was first released in
New York, illustrate the degrees of difference in reception.
An exhibitor from Waterboro, Maine, with general patronage
described it as a hackneyed newspaper story of little merit,
while a theater owner in Frankfort, Kansas, with small-town
patronage described it as exactly the type of film that small
towns liked. The film was rated well in other theaters with
general patronage in Maine and New Hampshire, particularly
for the performance of Blondell, who was identified as an
audience favorite.67
The picture’s critical reception, on the other hand, viewed
its efforts at originality with disdain. In the New York Times,
Frank Nugent wrote that Back in Circulation was sometimes
mildly funny and sometimes mildly tedious, “as though
by scrupulous examination of motives, the producers had
honestly tried to convert an intrinsically Class B picture
into something which might be described, even with a
stifled yawn, as in the neighbourhood of Class A-minus.”
S. Howard Bohell’s New York World Telegram review added,
“Director and author seem undecided whether this should
be a murder mystery or another variation of the Captain
Flagg–Sergeant Quirt feud, but in either case the results
aren’t very good.”68
The attitude of the critics toward such films reveals the
ongoing concern that the pervasiveness of low-quality,
low-budget pictures could have a larger effect on the habit
of moviegoing. The New York Times’ review of The Girl on the
Front Page, for instance, held a tongue-in-cheek suggestion
for the creation of a “Cinema Adjustment Administration
. . . to plow under some of our motion picture production
before it weakens a strong entertainment market.” The Girl
on the Front Page is described as a misdemeanor, “a perfect
specimen of the sort of thing the CAA would do well to pre-
vent.”69 Its mediocrity is attributed to the overrepetition of
the central situation, an interfering heiress who inherits a

newspaper and spats with the managing editor constantly
on the verge of quitting. Low-quality films, associated here
with repetition, imitation, and formulaic production, are
identified as having the potential to undermine the film
industry as a whole, a view that coincides with the con-
cerns voiced by Goldwyn and others in 1938. Despite their
dismissal by newspaper critics and offhand consignment to
bottom-dualer status in the trades, programmer cycles such
as the girl reporter pictures carried out a specific role in the
industry both for exhibitors requiring affordable product
and the distribution-production studios needing to fill their
schedules with lower-budget fare.
HIS GIRL FRIDAY AND THE AVOIDANCE
OF SERIAL ASSOCIATION
Pictures that were more highly valued in terms of quality and
cultural legitimacy were less often linked to the larger cycle or
to strategies of imitation. The films that contained stars, for
instance, which functioned to differentiate pictures for con-
sumers, were often advertised and discussed using different
terms. Despite holding a setting and storylines that featured
the familiar rival reporter relationship or newsroom setting,
higher-budget films were frequently linked to other produc-
tion trends, such as romantic comedy, and an emphasis
was placed on the stars’ performance. Such pictures include
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia, 1935), Four’s a Crowd
(Warner Bros., 1938), Five of a Kind (Fox, 1938), His Girl Fri-
day (Columbia, 1940), and Woman of the Year (MGM, 1942).
Jennifer Forrest, in her exploration of the studios’ series
and sequel practices in the same period, identifies how the re-
cycling strategies of the industry were part of risk-minimizing
marketing that was present across all types of film clas-
sifications. Forrest argues that the studios’ more expensive
properties were reused less often, while a greater degree of

differentiation was enforced through script and production
values.70 Distributed on a percentage basis, these A pictures
were designed to play as long as possible in the first-run the-
aters owned or affiliated with the majors in order to recoup
the returns of their bigger budgets and earn a sizable profit.
While the girl reporter formula was a foundation for several
A features, such cycle-based preproduction designations as
“girl reporter” would be subsumed in their production and
distribution handling in favor of more marketable elements,
such as a marquee name.
Despite clearly fitting the model of the girl reporter pic-
ture, His Girl Friday was not directly discussed as such by con-
temporaries. The press book for His Girl Friday emphasized
the romantic comedy aspects and avoided obvious signifiers
of the newspaper yarn. One of the main publicity feature
articles described the film as “a thrilling romantic comedy set
against the vibrant background of metropolitan life.”71 While
the newspaper and girl reporter angles were not consciously
cultivated in the most prominent national advertising of the
film, such as the posters and the radio-advertising scripts, the
press book does encourage local exploitation that highlighted
them. It suggested newspaper contests based around famous
women reporters, for instance, as well as the invitation of
local women journalists to the premiere. This was optional for
exhibitors on a local level, however, and the majority of the
publicity avoided identifying His Girl Friday as a girl reporter /
newspaper yarn. The conscious downplaying of this factor to
avoid the criticism associated with imitation was suggested
by Variety: “No doubt having to dodge the stigma of having
His Girl Friday termed a remake, Columbia blithely skips a
pertinent point in the credits by merely stating, ‘From a play

by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.’”72
As an official remake of the prototypical newspaper film
The Front Page (United Artists, 1931), His Girl Friday (Colum-
bia, 1940) had the legal rights to use Ben Hecht and Charles
MacArthur’s dialogue, story, and characters. The gender of
a leading character was switched in the later film to create a
girl reporter and enhance the romantic-comedy elements.
Yet prior to the production of His Girl Friday were a number
of lower-budget girl reporter films, including Wedding Present
(Paramount, 1936) and There Goes My Girl (RKO, 1937), that
employed the same gender switch strategy and were clearly
noted by reviewers as stemming from The Front Page. The
Variety review of Wedding Present argued, “Paul Gallico must
have founded the yarn on the fabled antics of Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur; only in this case he’s mixed the sexes,”
while that of There Goes My Girl stated, “Picture opens up
practically where The Front Page left off, plus a slight twist.
There’s the tough managing editor (Richard Lane) trying to
present his star sob-sister (Ann Southern) from marrying
one of the muggs of another sheet (Gene Raymond).”73
According to Constantine Verevis’s outline of remakes,
His Girl Friday represents a direct, industrial, property-based
remake of The Front Page. It could also be perceived as an
indirect textual remake of Wedding Present and There Goes
My Girl, and the fact that these pictures were both linked to
The Front Page by reviewers ties them to Verevis’s conception
of critical or discursive remakes.74 The case of His Girl Friday
demonstrates an attempt at differentiation in the avoidance
of direct association with the cycle of similar low-budget
product that preceded it. Other A features commonly at-
tempted to hide traces of their participation in practices
of recycling and imitation. The fact that the cycle was not
directly alluded to in the discourse issued by the studios
does not necessarily preclude the pictures from being a
part of the cycle. A discursive approach to cyclic definition

includes a consideration of the calculated silences, denials,
and dismissals of otherwise obvious connections.
In 1937 the practice of remakes, for both A and B features,
was observed to be on the rise, and in early 1939 twenty-five
remakes had been announced for the season.75 Like cycles,
the practice was viewed disparagingly. Citing The Hunchback
of Notre Dame (Warner Bros., 1939), The Cat and the Canary
(Paramount, 1939), and A Bill of Divorcement (RKO, 1940),
among others, Harrison’s Reports noted that the majority
failed at the box office because they usually lacked the big
names of the originals, had stories are already familiar to
audiences, or held inferior production values. P. S. Harrison
actively encouraged exhibitors to bring them to the attention
of congressmen as part of the campaign against block book-
ing and blind selling. According to Harrison, this was part
of independent exhibitors’ wider position of powerlessness
in preventing pictures that could weaken their box office.76
This equates the low entertainment quality associated with
remakes with other calls for the regulation of content and
the belief that the production of licentious pictures could
hurt exhibitors economically by alienating customers.
Several months later, Variety ran a front-page story on
the resentment caused by the influx of remakes. Exhibitors
bore the brunt of an increase in customer complaints related
to the failure of a film to be clearly advertised as a remake.77
Variety attributed the surge of remakes to the efforts of
producers to keep down story costs by availing themselves
of previously used properties and adding twists such as
switching the characters’ gender, an account that resembles
Bryan Foy’s description of his practice in developing mate-
rial for his B unit. Variety identified a chief concern in that
the remakes often went unadvertised and unacknowledged,
representing a disappointment to customers who expected
originality. Like cycles, the remake practice was criticized for
the poor value associated with repetitive forms lacking suffi-
cient variation and employed as a cost-cutting procedure that

benefited the studios while short-changing audiences. Eric
Hoyt’s discussion of surreptitiously retitled reissues, which
elicited similar complaints to unacknowledged remakes,
identifies how the trade press carried out a self-regulating
function in its discourse over such matters.78 In these infor-
mal practices of repetition and seriality where the law was
unclear, the trades could establish the limits of what was and
was not acceptable practice.
TORCHY BLANE AND THE SURGE IN
SERIES PRODUCTION
The discourses around series production, which peaked as
a practice slightly before that of remakes, took a different
route. In 1937 the series was identified as the new backbone
of the majors’ production schedules.79 Amid the industry
downturn the following year, the practice was described as
a reaction against the steadily mounting costs of the decade:
“Hollywood bigwigs, their production appetites sated by an
overdose of caviar-type films, are turning envious thoughts
to their silent-day predecessors who thrived on a diet of
bread-and-butter pictures.”80 Evident in this discourse is a
condemnation of the producers’ greed and a celebration of
the return to the wholesome, unpretentious fare of series.
Although the motivation for series production is always
commercial, the “bread-and-butter” label gave the practice a
respectability that could be deemed sensible, even necessary,
in a move away from the excesses that had contributed to
the industry’s current state of crisis.
Articles taking this position made note of the Torchy
Blane series’ success as a substantial earner for Warner
Bros.81 The Torchy pictures had a specific form of repetition

across a number of episodes and are based on several pieces
of intellectual property purchased by Warner Bros. The series
carried out some similar commercial functions to the cycle,
forming part of the annual production slate for the studios
and being programmed on double bills. Torchy, however, was
developed at a time when low-budget series were viewed as
a smart business strategy. This contributed to their more
positive reception, while the form of cycles was viewed more
negatively.
When the series was initiated with Smart Blonde (Warner
Bros., 1937), trade reviews were unenthusiastic, making
unfavorable comparisons to other girl reporter offerings
and concluding that “Warners must improve on the next
to hope for success in a market already glutted with this
type of product.”82 The newspaper critics were even more
damning. William Boebnel stated in the New York World
Telegram, “Not only does the film lack the zip and dash that
one can reasonably expect of a first-rate murder mystery,
but its story is hackneyed, adolescent, extremely dull and
completely wastes the talents of some really first-rate play-
ers.”83 Despite these lackluster first impressions, Smart Blonde
performed well at the box office.84 The second in the series,
Fly Away Baby (Warner Bros., 1937), improved on the first,
having cost $110,000 and earning a total of $282,000.85
Boebnel commented, “A new adventure in the career of the
gal reporter who has a good nose for news and better one
for crime, packing plenty of thrills and excitement, even if it
is only a Class B production.”86 Yet the series was still identi-
fied with the popular audience and earmarked for younger
viewers, with the association between children, action fans,
and subsequent-run audiences suggesting a shared lack
of discrimination. Variety, reviewing Torchy Blane Runs for
Mayor (Warner Bros., 1939), speaks of Torchy as a juvenile
conception of a star reporter: “Like a newspaper comic strip,
it’s without a pretence of intellectual maturity or plausibility

but will divert peanut munchers.”87
The discourse surrounding series production, like that
of remakes and cycles, was premised on series’ financial
asset to producers as a way to repeat a particular formula at
a low cost. A series such as Torchy was also a stable money-
maker for exhibitors and was popular with customers while
enhancing the reputation of Warner Bros. and its contract
players. In the context of the 1938 recession, the particular
economic viability of series production was acclaimed by way
of contrast to bloated prestige productions. By the end of
the year, however, series and family pictures were feared to
be overdone, and increased competition in the marketplace
had lessened their value for producers.88 When the box-office
performance of series began to falter, the discourse shifted. A
1939 New York Times article by Douglas Churchill described
series production as a trend that was losing traction at the
close of the decade:
Producers are discovering that the pay dirt on their gold
strike on series pictures is petering out. Seized upon as a
cumulative factor to increase theatre attendance because of
the interest of the public in characters, for a time all studios
announced series films. The producers have run into trouble.
They have found it difficult to hold name players in roles in
the minor budget films because of pay demands and, more
importantly, they have learned that the mere perpetuation
of characters in film after film is not enough to capture the
customer’s fancy.89
Churchill argued that, fundamentally, series required
the appeal of attractive characters and good stories but that
“sordid money influences the studio’s regard for the series
idea,” and all but MGM’s series were made as cheaply as

possible. Series production did not completely subside at the
end of the decade, but the practice became less attractive to
the major studios for a variety of reasons in the early 1940s,
not least the introduction of wartime rationing, the loss of
foreign markets, and the signing of the consent decrees.90
With the trend for series production itself described as a tem-
poral cycle, the saturation of the series form led to a familiar
backlash and a questioning of the commercial motivation
behind their production.91 The cycle model illustrates the
ways in which specific practices of seriality have their own
limited life spans, which, like cycles, were equally subject to
market forces. This reveals how cycles are not simply objects,
the collected body of films and other media products, but
are also historical, commercial processes.
The girl reporter pictures present the case of a cycle as-
sociated with formulaic programmer production, a form
resulting from distribution decisions and production prac-
tices that utilized cycles to organize their output. Such cycles
often remain uncommented upon for the very ubiquitous-
ness of this purpose. Cycles widen our understanding of
serialization by shifting the focus from narrative form onto
industrial practices not only in production but also in dis-
tribution and exhibition. As an informal, unstructured form
of serialization, cycles reveal the way in which seriality can
be constructed discursively, defined in the grouping of the
films by the trade press, distributors, critics, and exhibitors.
The study of the girl reporter pictures’ surrounding dis-
course reveals the complexity of their reception and suggests
that these low-budget cycles held a significant role within
the industry. The tracing of discursive identifications also
reiterates the conception of cycles as multifaceted, lacking
unified boundaries and singular understandings. The various
forms that could be encompassed in a cycle, such as series

and remakes, enacted separate strategies of repetition that
held different positions in production and reception, compli-
cating any idea of cycles as homogeneous, stable forms. The
tentative identification of different feature types, such as A
pictures, with the larger body of the cycle also demonstrates
the dissonance that could exist between the cycle as produc-
tion practice and as discursive construction. At the same
time, these differences in the understandings of the cycle
shift according the interests of the speaker and the current
economic and industrial context. While these multifarious
factors make it difficult to establish a universal model for
film cycles, they also contribute to cycles’ dynamism and
the very aspects that make them a useful and compelling
framework for film historians. Yet, for all its intricacy, the
girl reporter cycle exemplifies one of the most basic forms
of cycles under the studio system.
About the Author
ZOË WALLIN is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department
of Screen and Media at Flinders University in South Australia.
She also holds degrees from the University of Sydney and the
University of East Anglia. Her current research considers the
operation of film cycles in the Hollywood studio system.
Notes
1. William Paul, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture,
Exhi-
bition, and the Evolution of American Film, Film and Culture
Series,
Kindle ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016),
locations
3396–402, 2675–77; Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a
Mod-

ern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939, vol. 5, History of the
American
Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 318.
2. See the work of Peter Stanfield, The Cool and the Crazy: Pop
Fifties Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2015);
Amanda Ann Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres,
Screen-
ing Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures (Austin:
University of
Texas Press, 2011); Richard Nowell, Blood Money: A History
of the
First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2011).
3. Janet Staiger in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of
Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985),
97, 110–11.
4. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: BFI, 2000),
243.
5. Ibid.
6. Ideally this study would include an examination of how
audiences may have similarly built interconnections between the
pictures, but the available information of audiences’ responses
to
the pictures is limited.
7. Nowell, Blood Money, 46–54.
8. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999).
9. “Girl-reporter angle” in “City of Chance,” Variety, 24
January

1940, 14; “girl reporter theme” in “My Dear Miss Aldrich,”
Motion
Picture Daily, 8 September 1937, 2; and “There Goes My Girl,”
Washington Evening Star, reprinted in Independent Exhibitors’
Film
Bulletin, 19 June 1937, 10; girl reporter “situation” in “My
Dear
Miss Aldrich,” Variety, 6 October 1937, 12.
10. “There Goes My Girl,” Variety, 16 June 1937, 13.
11. The American Film Institute Catalogue’s online database,
which has searchable tags for the categories of “women
reporters,”
“reporters,” and “newspaper,” was used to establish the
quantities
of production by season.
12. For further discussion, see Ben Singer, “Female Power in
the
Serial Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly,” Camera
Ob-
scura 8 (1990): 90–129; Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls:
Women
Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca,
NY:
Cornell University Press, 2007).
13. The Welfare Island prison scandal erupted in early 1934
after

a raid from new Corrections Commissioner Austin H.
MacCormick
exposed the gang rule of the facility that trafficked in drugs and
enforced an extensive privilege system with the cooperation of
the
prison wardens.
14. “That’s My Story,” Variety, 1 December 1937, 14. Despite
this, the number of productions for 1938–39 rose to nine. Many
of
these pictures combined the girl reporter with other popular
cycles,
such as that of “tough kids,” or with contemporary interests,
like
that surrounding the Dionne quintuplets. Five of a Kind
(Twentieth
Century Fox, 1938), Off the Record (Warner Bros., 1939).
15. “Studios Turn to Femmes in Profesh, after Overload He-
Man
Fare,” Variety, 22 June 1938, 5.
16. “Private Detective,” Variety, 6 December 1939, 14.
17. “City of Missing Girls,” Variety, 2 April 1941, 16.
18. John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny, “The Financial and
Economic Risks of Film Production,” in Film and Risk, ed.
Mette
Hjort (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 181–95.
19. Richard Nowell, “Hollywood Don’t Skate: US Production
Trends, Industry Analysis, and the Roller Disco Movie,” New
Review
of Film and Television Studies 11 (2013): 73–91.
20. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. (Oxford:

Black-
well Publishing, 2003), 60.
21. See Campbell McCulloch’s account in Richard Maltby,
“Sticks, Hicks and Flaps: Classical Hollywood’s Generic
Concep-
tion of Its Audiences,” in Identifying Hollywood Audiences:
Cultural
Identity and the Movies, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby
(London: BFI, 1999), 24.
22. “‘B’ Films Become Issue of Studio and Theatre,” Motion
Pic-
ture Herald, 13 February 1937, 13; J. H. Thompson, “Calls
Double
Feature Octopus Strangling Quality and Receipts,” Motion
Picture
Herald, 13 February 1937, 70; “B Films, Exhibs and the Coast,”
Variety, 20 January 1937, 5.
23. “Need Twice as Many Pix: Duals Decision Seen as a Boon,”
Variety, 14 August 1934, 5; Martin Quigley, “Alphabetisation,”
Motion Picture Herald, 14 March 1936, 7.
24. “Studio feels that the top directors can give the less impor-
tant pictures class handling which might elevate them to a spot
where they can stand alone in the de luxers. Pictures are
obviously
made for subsequent and double bills but occasionally hold their
own in the first runs. When they do, they make up in returns for
A
product which does not live up to pre-production expectations
and
sales talks” (“Director’s Class Touch May Be the Diff between
‘A’ Pix

and Also-Rans,” Variety, 17 April 1935, 3). See also Frank
Nugent,
“Although the Warners deny making Class B pictures—the
brothers
label their products AA and A—‘Smart Blonde’ is pretty far
down
the alphabet” (“Smart Blonde,” New York Times, 9 January
1937).
25. Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 96–112.
26. Bob Moak, “Box Office Slant on Bs,” Variety, 5 July 1939,
5, 20.
27. Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: The Film Libraries before
Home
Video (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 79–
81.
28. Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1936); Robert Van Gelder, “Books of the Times,”
New
York Times, 21 September 1936, and 21 December 1936;
Gallico’s
stories were adapted for Wedding Present (Paramount, 1936),
Wild
Money (Paramount, 1937), No Time to Marry (Columbia, 1938),
and
Rogers St. John’s Cosmopolitan story “Angle Shooter” was
made into
Back in Circulation (Warner Bros., 1937).
29. Warner Bros. Press Book: The Adventures of Jane Arden,
1939.
30. The Mad Game (Fox, 1933), Hold That Girl (Fox, 1934),

Human Cargo (Fox, 1936), and One Mile from Heaven (Fox,
1937).
31. “Blondes at Work,” Variety, 16 March 1938, 17; “Blondes
at Work,” Independent Exhibitors’ Film Bulletin, 29 January
1938,
11; “In the Cutting Room: Torchy Blane in Panama,” Motion
Pic-
ture Herald, 12 February 1938, 15; “What the Picture Did for
Me:
Adventurous Blonde,” Motion Picture Herald, 8 January 1938,
61;
“What the Picture Did for Me: Blondes at Work,” Motion
Picture
Herald, 14 May 1938, 60; Screenland, March 1939, 23; Modern
Screen, December 1938, 70.
32. Screenland, March 1939, 23.
33. “Newest H’wood Idea Is Series Pix; B.O. Shows Yen for
Same
Names,” Variety, 26 May 1937, 25–26.
34. “Serials Return to New Strength,” Motion Picture Herald, 20
July 1935, 14; “Serials for Adults,” Motion Picture Herald, 6
June
1936, 96.
35. Guy Barefoot, “Who Watched That Masked Man? Holly-
wood’s Serial Audiences in the 1930s,” Historical Journal of
Film,
Radio and Television 31 (2011): 167–90.
36. “The Phantom Creeps,” Variety, 9 August 1939, 14, 18. This
was identified as a horror-science serial by the trade press and
is

not directly part of the girl reporter / newspaper cycle.
37. “The Adventures of Jane Arden,” Variety, 22 June 1938, 28.
38. Derek Johnson, “Devaluing and Revaluing Seriality: The
Gendered Discourses of Media Franchising,” Media, Culture &
Society
33 (2011): 1077–93.
39. Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From
Edison
to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013),
61.
40. Ibid., 85.
41. These attitudes were challenged by the growing protection
of
writers’ rights through the formation of guilds and unions from
the
late 1930s. Decherney identifies how, over the next two
decades, the
studios developed a system based on contracts that could protect
the idea as well as the expression (ibid., 102). See Desney v.
Wilder
for protection of ideas.
42. Altman, Film/Genre, 117.
43. Ibid., 59–60.
44. “Pounce on Topical Yarns, Sell It Fast Becomes Credo of

Film Writers,” Variety, 2 July 1941, 21. This separates cycles
from
so-called star-genre formations such as RKO’s Astaire-Rogers
musi-
cals or Warner-Bros.’ Flynn–de Havilland romantic
swashbucklers,
which are proprietorial, formal modes of seriality and stem from
the star-studio contract system.
45. Blessed Event in Film Daily, 2 December 1932, 6–7; night
nurse predicting cycle, Motion Picture Daily, 15 July 1933, 3;
WB ad
for 1935 release schedule in Motion Picture Daily, 1 June 1934,
6.
46. “In the Cutting Room: Exclusive,” Motion Picture Herald,
12
June 1937, 46.
47. Frank Kelleter, “‘Toto, I Think We’re in Oz Again’ (and
Again
and Again): Remakes and Popular Seriality,” in Film Remakes,
Adap-
tations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel, ed. Kathleen
Lock and
Constantine Verevis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
22.
48. Martin Quigley, “Classification,” Motion Picture Herald, 19
January 1935, 7.
49. The discussion of preferences and different tastes was
linked to the wider attempt to define and give voice to
showmen’s
dissatisfaction with the current industry practices, John C. Flinn
argues, at a time when organized exhibitor lobby groups were

petitioning Congress for reform. See “Lah-De-Dah Stuff Blah,”
Variety, 27 July 1938, 5.
50. Roy Chartier, “The Grosses,” Variety, 5 January 1938, 3.
51. “Pix Slipping in Stix,” Variety, 20 July 1938, 1; “‘Clean
House,’
Goldwyn Warning to Hollywood,” Los Angeles Herald and
Express,
25 April 1938, A-8.
52. “Trouble Is, Bs Are Ds,” Variety, 22 February 1938, 2;
“Mix
’Em Up and Keep ’Em Away from Standardisation, Schenck
For-
mula: Agitation the Problem, Not Dual Bills,” Variety, 23
February
1938, 2.
53. The menaces included Neely’s anti-block-booking bill, the
ongoing divorcement legislation, numerous antitrust civil suits
from exhibitors, labor unrest amongst industry workers, and the
Ohio playdate situation. “Film’s Five Major Menaces,” Variety,
19 November 1938, 2; “Hollywood Buckles Down,” Variety, 28
December 1938, 3; Roy Chartier, “The Year in Pictures,”
Variety, 4
January 1939, 19.
54. “Press Pet Peeves at Pix: Chiefly Hollywood Libels the
Craft,”
Variety, 19 October 1938, 1, 26; Chartier, “The Year in
Pictures,”
Variety, 4 January 1939, 19.
55. “Some of the People All of the Time,” Motion Picture
Herald,

28 November 1931, 3.
56. “MPPDA Seeks to Learn the Film Preferences of the Entire
Nation,” Motion Picture Herald, 12 March 1932, 33; “Better
Films
Creating a Universal Public,” Motion Picture Herald, 3 April
1937, 58.
57. “Women Are Trouble,” Variety, 2 September 1936, 22.
58. “Woman in Distress,” Independent Exhibitors’ Film
Bulletin,
30 January 1937, 7.
59. The suitability of Beware of Ladies (Republic, 1936) was
mentioned as adequate for both men and women in Film Daily’s
review, while the human interest elements of Five of a Kind
(Fox,
1938) and One Mile from Heaven (Fox, 1937) were suggested to
be
of greater appeal to female viewers. “Beware of Ladies,” Film
Daily,
12 January 1937, 6; “One Mile from Heaven,” Harrison’s
Reports, 14
August 1937, 130; “Five of a Kind,” Variety, 12 October 1938,
15.
60. Melvyn Stokes, “Female Audiences of the 1920s and Early
1930s,” in Stokes and Maltby, Identifying Hollywood
Audiences, 43–
44; Balio, Grand Design, 241.
61. Susan Ohmer, “The Science of Pleasure: George Gallup and
Audience Research in Hollywood,” in Stokes and Maltby,
Identifying
Hollywood Audiences, 70.

62. “The Girl on the Front Page,” Independent Exhibitors’ Film
Bulletin, 21 October 1936, 5.
63. Mark Jancovich, “‘Two Ways of Looking’: The Critical
Recep-
tion of 1940s Horror,” Cinema Journal 49 (2010): 46.
64. Criminals of the Air (Columbia, 1937) is applauded for its
action and genuine gusto: “Our departmental theme-song, in the
secondary or ‘Class B’ field, is still ‘Hail Columbia’”
(“Criminals of
the Air,” New York Times, 28 October 1937).
65. “Back in Circulation,” Variety, 28 July 1937, 2; “Back in
Circulation,” Motion Picture Herald, 7 August 1937, 52.
66. “Back in Circulation,” Motion Picture Herald, 7 August
1937,
52; “Back in Circulation,” Independent Exhibitors’ Film
Bulletin, 14
August 1937, 14.
67. “What the Picture Did for Me: Back in Circulation,” Motion
Picture Herald, 11 December 1937, 63.
68. Frank Nugent, “Back in Circulation,” New York Times, 4
October 1937; S. Howard Bohell, “What the Newspaper Critics
Say: Back in Circulation,” Independent Exhibitors’ Film
Bulletin, 19
October 1937, 12.
69. “The Girl on the Front Page,” New York Times, 7 November
1936.
70. Jennifer Forrest, “Of ‘True’ Sequels: The Four Daughters

Movies, and the Series That Wasn’t,” in Second Takes: Critical
Ap-
proaches to the Film Sequel, ed. Carolyn Jess-Cooke and
Constantine
Verevis (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010),
36.
71. Pressbook: His Girl Friday, Columbia, 1940.
72. “His Girl Friday,” Variety, 10 January 1940, 14.
73. “Wedding Present,” Variety, 25 November 1936, 15; “There
Goes My Girl,” Variety, 16 June 1937, 13.
74. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2006), 2–30.
75. “Remakes on the Uptake,” Variety, 7 April 1937, 21; “Have
the Hollywood Brains Gone Dry?,” Harrison’s Reports, 25
February
1939, 29.
76. “Have the Hollywood Brains Gone Dry?,” Harrison’s
Reports,
25 February 1939, 29.
77. “Twice-Told Films Fliv: Fans Resenting Story Remakes,”
Variety, 26 April 1939, 1, 45.
78. Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, 36.
79. “Newest H’wood Idea.”
80. “Bread’n’Butter Pix Back,” Variety, 9 March 1938, 5, 16.
81. Ibid.

82. “Smart Blonde,” Motion Picture Daily, 20 November 1936,
11.
83. William Boebnel, New York World Telegram, quoted in
“What
the Newspaper Critics Say: Smart Blonde,” Independent
Exhibitors’
Film Bulletin, 13 January 1937, 6.
84. Smart Blonde’s opening week earnings, as reported in
Motion
Picture Daily: in San Francisco it was paired with East Meets
West
at the Warfield Cinema, earning $15,500 (average $13,000),
Mo-
tion Picture Daily, 5 January 1937, 4. Indianapolis’s Lyric
Theatre
played it as part of a Christmas revue and vaudeville show and
made $7,500 (average $7,000), Motion Picture Daily, 8 January
1937, 10. New Haven’s Sherman Cinema played it with Garden
of Allah for $5,000 (average $4,700), Motion Picture Daily, 19
January 1937, 10. Chicago’s Oriental Theatre, with a stage
revue,
$15,000 (average $15,000), Motion Picture Daily, 2 February
1937,
10. Exhibitors report that it went over well with rural and
general
audience groups, “What the Picture Did for Me: Smart Blonde,”
Motion Picture Herald, 20 February 1937, 76, and Motion
Picture
Herald, 15 May 1937, 74.
85. This figure does not include distribution and advertising
costs. Mark H. Glancy, “Appendix: Warner Bros. Film Grosses,
1921–51: The William Schaefer Ledger,” Historical Journal of

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