Despite its god-awful title, it’s a lovely and funny little movie. The humor isn’t madcap or frenzied, like in His Girl Friday<\/i> or Bringing Up Baby<\/i>. It’s a subtler brand of humor. All Cary Grant needs to do is just stare at someone who has just said something he thinks is ridiculous. Why the HELL is it so funny? I don’t know. It’s a kind of magic.<\/p>\n
The movie tells the story (in a kind of trite way) of a married couple with 2 kids, who live in a cramped apartment in New York. He is an advertising executive. Their apartment is small. Mr. Blandings has (of course, because Cary Grant plays him) a rather cranky put-upon nature. (It’s interesting – that is where so much of Grant’s comedy comes from. The sense that the world around him is insane, and he is the only rational person in existence, and yet events move too quickly for him to control, and so he gets really cranky about it.)<\/p>\n
His two children are girls, ages 12 and 10, and so he is hen-pecked. He can never get into the bathroom to shave. He tries to maintain his masculine dignity as “the man of the house” but he is completely over-ruled, and defeated by how many girlie-products fall out of the medicine cabinet every time he opens the door.<\/p>\n
Myrna Loy plays his wife, who secretly wants to make “improvements” in their apartment, knock down walls, etc. She has hired an interior decorator behind her husband’s back. We never see the interior decorator, but his name is “Bunny”, and Cary Grant refers to him witheringly as: “Oh, that gentleman who wears open-toed sandals<\/i>?” <\/p>\n
Eventually, Mr. Blandings comes to the conclusion: Why should he spend money renovating what is, in essence, somebody else’s property – when he could buy a nice property all his own out in Connecticut and fix it up?<\/p>\n
And so there you have it. The “dream house” is born. A money pit? You decide.<\/p>\n
The movie is all about middle-class material aspirations, getting a slice of the American dream, etc. Cary Grant, in this phase of his career (the Bachelor and Bobby-Soxer<\/i> phase, the POST Notorious<\/i> phase), settled into playing these types of parts. He enjoyed them. As a Cockney runaway, with no real roots, he loved to embody middle-class Americans. It was very important to him. He loved America. He had escaped the strict class-conscious society of England, and he worked hard to change his voice, get rid of his accent, so that he could assimilate. But still, there was always something a little “off” about him. Always. He never assimilated completely. Which is part of his enduring appeal. Alfred Hitchcock was pretty much the only director who could challenge him yet again to leave that middle-class turf – in North by Northwest<\/i> and To Catch a Thief<\/i>. Hitchcock always saw Cary Grant as being appropriate for this more challenging material. He knew that the audiences had a great attraction to this man, and so he would set about making the audience uneasy, nervous, unsettled. Hitchcock never wanted to just accept Grant’s handsomeness as a fact of nature, he always wanted to mess with it, comment on it, admit that beauty like that is unusual<\/i>, and that we, as regular people, have feelings<\/i> about people who are that beautiful, and the feelings are not always admiration. Sometimes we envy them, we want to see them suffer. Hitchcock made beautiful people suffer in his movies better than anybody.<\/p>\n
But after Notorious<\/i>, Cary Grant (perhaps realizing how much he had revealed in that film?) retreated to safer ground for a time. The Bishop’s Wife<\/i>, Mr. Blandings<\/i>, Bachelor and Bobby-Soxer<\/i>. I love all of these movies, but there is a lightness to Cary Grant in them, an ease, which Hitchcock never really allowed him. Or, if he did allow Cary Grant to move through the world with ease in the beginning of the films, he made Cary Grant PAY for that very ease by the end. (North by Northwest<\/i> is the best example of that.)<\/p>\n
In Blandings<\/i>, Cary Grant is working his ass off so that his two daughters can go to a prestigious private school. The conversation he has during breakfast one morning with his daughters could be completely relevant in our society today: he learns that the teachers of the school are pretty close to Socialists, and decry capitalism, and decry advertising, in particular. The two girls parrot back the teachers pronouncements about the evils of advertising. Cary Grant, holding his knife and fork, sits frozen, listening to them. He finally says something like, “Well you tell Mrs. Sparrow that the evil money from advertising is paying her salary at the moment!”<\/p>\n
They all sit down to breakfast, and one of the daughters starts to talk about one of her assignments. She goes on and on about the plight of the working man, and how she had to write an essay about it, etc. Cary Grant says, looking right at his wife, with that deadpan face I find so amusing, “Just once<\/i> darling, I would like to have a breakfast without social significance.”<\/p>\n
It’s that crankiness again which is so funny. Think of how eternally cranky he is in Bringing Up Baby<\/i> … Yes, he is also a geek, but … he has enough of a sense of self-entitlement to get indignant and cranky over how Katherine Hepburn treats him. For whatever reason, that combination is hysterical!!<\/p>\n
So of course, the Blandings buy their “dream house” and start to renovate it, but it rapidly turns into an enormous money pit – they don’t know what they’re doing, the construction foremen pretty much take over the entire operation, and the Blandings cannot tell if they are being cheated, swindled, etc.. The Blandings try to gain control, but they don’t even know the lingo.<\/p>\n
“Hey, Mr. Blandings.” shouts one of the workers. “Do you want me to rabbit these lintels?”<\/p>\n
Cary Grant, knowing he should know the answers, stands there, frozen. Not saying anything. Deadpan. Very funny.<\/p>\n
He splutters, “Uhm – no. No rabbits will be necessary. No.”<\/p>\n
The worker shouts up to his men: “TAKE ALL THE RABBITS OFF THE LINTELS!”<\/p>\n
You begin to hear crashes up above as all the lintels are taken apart, and Cary Grant looks horrified, and frightened. He has no idea what is going on.<\/p>\n
I can’t get over his naturalness, his beauty. I mean, it’s a ridiculous scene in the beginning – where the smallness of the urban apartment is established. You see Blandings and his wife fight for space in the bathroom, you see him open closet doors and have contents spill out immediately. In order to get from Point A to Point B, he has to step over two ottomans. The medicine cabinet is booby-trapped. All of this is cliched stuff, but – as always – Cary Grant underplays it. He is not acting as though he is in a comedy<\/i>. And that’s why it’s so funny. I saw him open that medicine cabinet and deal with things falling out three times – and it’s hysterical each time. Because he is truly dealing with it on a real<\/i> level, not a yuk-yuk condescending level.<\/p>\n
Maybe that’s why he is so beloved. He never ever seems to condescend to the material. Even when he’s playing just a regular middle-class guy. I think audiences really respond to that in a positive way. If you get the feeling that the actor is “slumming” by playing a regular person, it’s insulting. You’re insulting the audience who actually live lives like that.<\/p>\n
You never catch Cary Grant slumming.<\/p>\n
He opens the closet in his apartment, and things cascade out all over him. His response to this is one of stifled rage, frustration, and thin-lipped aggravation. And – somehow – when Cary Grant is filled with stifled rage, we laugh.<\/p>\n
The movie is realistic, in its own way, and maybe that’s why I found it so funny. I’ve lived in and around New York City for almost 10 years now. I laughed out loud in recognition at some of this stuff. I open closets and things fall out on my head, etc. I store items in completely counter-intuitive places, because there just isn’t room for them<\/i> in the normal spots (my sewing kit kept in my underwear drawer for example. That really makes no sense. But there’s ROOM for it there. So that’s where I keep it.)<\/p>\n
So Mr. Blandings Builds His Feckin’ Dream House<\/i> confirms for me again what I have known all along. It confirms for me the TRUTH of the matter which is NON-NEGOTIABLE (at least on this blog): Cary Grant is the best film actor we have yet produced in this country. Nobody can touch the guy. He is absolute magic. I treasure him. I really do. In the same way I treasure the great works of literature, or the great works of art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite its god-awful title, it’s a lovely and funny little movie. The humor isn’t madcap or frenzied, like in His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby. It’s a subtler brand of humor. All Cary Grant needs to do is just … Continue reading