Viilain of the Month: Marion Martin
Marion Martin got into show business due to the stock market crash of 1929. Coming from a well to do family, their fortune, like so many others, was wiped out in the crash, Martin became a chorus girl where she was eventually discovered by Flo Ziegfield and made a member of his Follies in 1933. She would eventually be signed by Univrsal in 1938 where after appearing in several shorts she made Sinners in Paradise (1938), where her monicker of Hollywood’s Blone Menace would be perfected, a personae of a brassy blonde who seemed slightly bored by and disdainful of the hunks attracted to her.
She would continue appearing in supporting roles in films as diverse as The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), The Marx Brothers’ The Big Store (1941), Gildersleeve’s Ghost (1944), Angel On My Shoulder (1946) and Journey Into Light (1951). Martin eventually left acting in the fifties to marry and raise a family.
Her one serial was Universal’s Mystery of the Riverboat (1944), playing Lyle Talbot’s moll, helping in a land grab scheme on the Louisiana Bayou where they discover there is a newly discovered fuel source under several people’s property, with everybody traveling to the siite on a riverboat in the early chapters.
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