Rhapsodies

This week I watched comedies about homebuilding, more specifically the horror that is a fixer-upper. 

The first film on my list was H. C. Porter’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas. Cary Grant plays Jim Blanding a successful Ad executive who feels cooped up by his New York apartment. When he and his wife Maureen (Loy) realize that buying a new house is actually cheaper than the apartment remodeling they have been planning, they jump at the opportunity to buy a house in Connecticut, despite the warnings of their friend and lawyer Bill Cole. 

They soon realize that the house is not quite the steal they thought soon having to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch… and that’s just the beginning of their troubles!

I had mixed feelings about this film. Make no mistake, Loy and Grant had great chemistry, but I found the humor to be inconsistent. Considering a lot of comedy comes from witty dialogue, it is a bit of a contrast that a lot of the plot being carried by sheer stupidity with the Blandings bringing almost half of their problems on themselves.

The other thing I found strange about this was how much culture shock this film provided me. The big one was how Bill Cole merely hanging out at the house raising peoples eyebrows. The other one was realizing how much inflation there has been since the forties. I kept had trouble believing that the main character had a New York apartment with a wife, kids, and a maid, with an income of 15,000 a year! 

The next film on my list Richard Benjamin’s The Money Pit starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. Hanks and Long play Walter Fielding and his girlfriend Anna Crowley. THey’ve been having financial problems ever since Walter’s father embezzled millions of dollars from his firm. To make matters worse they’re thrown out of the apartment they’ve been subletting from Anna’s ex-husband Max (played with narcissistic glee by Alexander Godunov. Finding a place in New York is impossible though.

Walter gets a tip from on a great deal, for a beautiful old house out of town that he and Anna jump on. However, this turns out to be a con with the house starting to fall apart nearly as soon as the purchase is made. 

It was interesting to watch the Hanks’ early career as a comic actor along with Long’s attempt to break into film. Otherwise, this film suffers from most of the usual problems of eighties comedies with most of the humor dependent on physical humor and dumb pratfalls (and face it once you’ve seen Tom Hanks fall through a floor once you’ve seen it a hundred times.)