Thursday, May 19, 2011  The Strawberry Blonde (1941)  “If you
don’t like this one,” the Siren told her husband, “I’ll eat the
DVD case.”  The Siren admits she said this knowing she was in no
danger of having to digest plastic, since she could tell her
husband, “Hey, I just bought a four-hour dialogue-free movie
about a man matching socks and suffering torments over whether
to fold them into squares or invert the top over the foot
portion, and by the way the man doing the folding is James
Cagney,” and presto, her husband would clear a four-hour hole in
his schedule and afterward say things like “Nobody handled fiber
content like Cagney, nobody.”  Still, Raoul Walsh’s The
Strawberry Blonde is a beloved movie, one with a reputation that
quietly extends well beyond hardcore classic-film fans, to
horror-film lovers, savorers of superheros and serial killers,
to people who really would watch a movie about folding socks.
When the Siren mentions The Strawberry Blonde, they get this
look James Cagney would call “sappy