The actress Joan Blondell (1906–79), subject of “Joan Blondell: The Bombshell From Ninety first Street,” a 13-film retrospective beginning to day at the Museum of Modern Art, was blessed with a high forehead, wavy blond curls saucer-size blue eyes, broad cheekbones, and a gently salacious smile that naturally beckoned out to the audience from a close-up. “Hers was a three dimensional face on a two dimensional screen,” Matthew Kennedy wrote in his new biography of the actress, “Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes.”

A New York-raised child of vaudevillians, Blondell, born Rose Joan Blondell and billed as “Baby Rosebud” for her stage debut at the tender age of 14 months, was the trouper’s trouper. “Without work,” the actress once offered, “what is life?” Childhood work alongside her parents and siblings in stages and tents all over the globe and in various small business attempts to establish family stability across America led Blondell to the Broadway stage. In 1930, still just 24, she and a young co-star named James Cagney caught the eye of Warner Bros. talent scouts.

Harry, Jack, and Abe Warner’s studio — one of the few Hollywood film factories that didn’t have a newsreel division — courted topicality through the subject matter of their dramas, comedies, and musicals. During the halcyon days between the advent of sound (a Warner Bros. breakthrough) in 1927 and the major studios’ collective punt of creative sovereignty via capitulation to the “Breen Office” production code in 1933, Warner Bros. pictures took aim at jazz age excesses and the hypocrisy and deprivations of the Great Depression. The result was a vigorous new irreverence and immediacy at the movies. With her stage-born camera-friendly presence and what Mr. Kennedy, who will introduce several of the screenings in MoMA’s series, characterizes as a “distinctive cello voice,” Blondell was a perfect fit for the tough-talking, heart-melting, good bad-gals that Warner Bros. celebrated in such fast-paced, sooty, pre-code confections as William Wellman’s “Night Nurse” and Roy Del Ruth’s “Blonde Crazy.”

“A picture, all it is is an expensive dream,” Harry Warner told Forbes magazine in 1937. “Well, it’s just as easy to dream for $700,000 as for $1,500,000.” Even before Blondell tired of the pace and the sameness that eventually crept into the roles she was assigned in the late 1930s, the Warners had gotten their money’s worth from her. In 1931 alone she appeared in no fewer than 11 of the company’s films. But even in the anything-goes pre-code period, Blondell’s curve-packed 5-foot-3-inch frame posed a potential liability. “We must put brassieres on Joan Blondell and make her cover up her breasts, because otherwise we are going to have these pictures stopped in a lot of places,” the studio head, Jack Warner, wrote in a memo to the director of “Convention City,” Archie Mayo.

To what degree Mayo and Blondell were able to oblige Warner is unknown today, as “Convention City” is a lost film. The fact that the Internet Movie Database offers “Adultery,” “Atlantic City New Jersey,” “Bestiality,” and “Blackmail” as its first four cross-referenced keywords to describe the film gives a good indication that, as far as censors were concerned, Blondell’s cleavage was the least of Warner’s problems.

After leaving Warner Bros., Blondell divided her time between stage and screen, and eventually television, lending her talents to such varied fare as Edmund Goulding’s excellent and spectacularly sordid “Nightmare Alley” (1947) and Elia Kazan’s sentimental 1945 ode to the Borough of Churches, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Despite a half century in front of the camera, she received only one Oscar nomination, for her supporting turn in 1951’s “The Blue Veil.” The film itself is a bizarre “woman’s picture” weepie that showcases a series of adorable infants with almost fetishistic intensity. But Blondell’s role as a stage star juggling single motherhood with a fading career in the footlights was an appropriate one for a woman, then midway through a life, boasting three failed marriages, two children, and hundreds of stage and screen performances.

“Learn the words, do the scenes,” was how Cagney described the ’30s back-lot treadmill he shared with Joan Blondell (the pair made six films for Warner Bros. in all). In Hollywood, then as now, seasoned performers such as Blondell were left to their own devices when it came to just what to do with those scenes. “There’s a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all,” the actress once said. Blondell used those enormous blue eyes (rendered steel gray in black-and-white) to effortlessly punctuate her roles with strength, sensitivity, and intelligence. She typified the unique combination of personal showmanship and emotional transparency that were the hallmarks of the great pre-Strasberg film actors of Hollywood’s golden age.

Through January 1 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).