When movie theater audiences in 1945 sat down for the first installment of the film serial Brenda Starr, Reporter (Fox 1945), entitled Hot News, they no doubt felt in familiar territory. There was Brenda, the daring crime reporter they knew well from Dale Messick’s syndicated comic strip of the same name (which ran for 71 years, from 1940 until 2011). Played by B-movie starlet Joan Woodbury, Brenda was now a blonde instead of a redhead, her clothes more modest and less form fitting, yet she promised the same pluck and courage as her comic book original (Figure 8.1).

But Brenda was not only recognizable from her life on the printed page; she also fit the big-screen archetype of the “girl reporter”—a formula character who by the mid-1940s had been replicated in hundreds of Hollywood movies, among the most famous of which were the “Torchy Blane” series (1937–1939), His Girl Friday (1940) and Woman of the Year (1942). The opening scene of Brenda Starr, Reporter is the hallmark setup for the “girl reporter” genre: we see Brenda at the wheel, her sidekick photographer, Chuck (Syd Saylor), beside her, on their way to the hiding place of a burglary suspect (Figure 8.2). “Step on it Brenda,” he says, “we want to beat that police friend of yours Lt. Farrell and that dumb [unintelligible] of his.”

The shot soon shifts to Lt.—Larry—Farrell himself (Kane Richmond) in a car alongside his sidekick cop partner Tim (Joe Devlin). And there you have it: the attractive female reporter chasing a scoop and the handsome police lieutenant chasing a suspect, the two locked in a professional rivalry whose contours vibrate with romantic tension. The girl reporter offered audiences a tough but always beautiful heroine who was part fantasy—for both men and women— and part reality, as she emerged out of the Depression era when newspaper reporting began to open up as viable professional path for women in search of a paycheck. Indeed, she was birthed by the paradox of the ages: the clashing desires to buck traditional gender roles and to cleave to them.