Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House

H C Potter, USA 1948, 93 minutes

If you've just moved in to a charming but condemned shoebox of a flat, your companions drive you insane with their inconsiderate little habits and work just doesn't go the way it used to, this film is for you. It'll give you hope for the future and a warm glowy feeling inside.

Directed by H.C. Potter (who also worked with Cary Grant on Mr Lucky), written and produced by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, this is the tale of Jim Blandings (typical Grant character), an honest and hardworking advertising executive.

The story runs something like this: Jim Blandings grows tired of his cramped, conventional Manhattan apartment and goes out and buys a lovely old house in Connecticut. As in all the best farcical comedies everything that could go wrong does, and the Blandings end up spending a fortune building a new `dreamhouse'. The plans are wildly extravagant, the builders are worryingly odd (but in a charming sort of way of course) and Mrs Blandings (Myrna Loy) is endearingly dizzy: "I refuse to endanger the health of my children in a house with less than four bathrooms."

The narration of Bill Cole (Melvyn Douglas) as the pessimistic down-to-earth lawyerfriend-of-the-family gives a very familiar bed time story feel to this simple RKO comedy. It wouldn't win any prizes for attention grabbing action and nerve wracking suspense, but the characters make it special, particularly the good-hearted well-digger with a three word vocabulary and the Italian with an obsession for blowing up large rocks. It maybe very quaint but the ending is as satisfyingly happy as they come.

Review by Seona Bromage
Taken from EUFS Programme 1997-98