MR BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 489, 5 November 1948, Page 24

MR BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE

(RKO-Radio) R. BLANDINGS, Etc., is the film version of a novel I have not read, by an author whose name at the moment escapes me, but anyone who has dipped occasionally in the main currents of contemporary humour (both British and American) will. find in it much that is familiar. When Anthony Armstrong bought a country place on the profits of Ten-Minute Alibi, and recouped his incidental losses by writing Cottage Into House, he anticipated a good many of the exasperating but comic situations in which Mr. Blandings finds himself. Parts of the story, too, reminded me of a hilarious sketch by Cornelia Otis Skinner, which appeared a year or -two ago in the New Yorker; there is a scene featuring a bathroom medicine-cabinet which might have been the second instalment of a well-known Benchiey piece; and the dialogue is occasionally reminiscent of S. J. Perelman. If all that suggests that Mr. Blandings is fairly good fun the suggestion is not far from the truth. Like a good deal of what passes for fun to-day, of course, it is not 24-carat humour. It is somewhat wry satire, the frustrated comedy of man at Gudds with his environment which, in this technological age, seems to have usurped the place of the simpler humour of earlier and less complicated times. Humour in | this particular defensive sense is; of course, not purely 20th Centuty-Beau-marchais’s Figaro hastened to laugh at everything for fear of being obliged to weep at it-but so far as the creator of Mr. Blandings is concerned the wheels -of his invention (to borrow ‘Thurber’s phrase) are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy. And very topical melancholy at that. _ Naturally our enjoyment of Mr. Blandings’s frustrations will depend largely upon the extent to which we can relate them to our own misfortunes, and since housing is his prime preoccupation the film starts off with an initial advantage. I thought it started off very well. First of all there are a few lines of caustic commentary on the joys of life in New York: the smooth efficiency of its transpgrtation system (shot of the subway at the rush-hour), the "leisurely gracious living encountered #in its. sidewalk cafes" (swift cut to a crowded hamburger joint), the delightful variety of its climate (a newsclip from last winter’s blizzard). Then we are intro- duced to the Blandings apartment-the | first New York apartment I can recall seeing on the screen where the rooms didn’t run to about a quarter of an acre apiece. Quite the contrary, in fact, for space chez Blandings is at a premium. The premium isn’t so high as in most New Zealand homes, I should say----Mr. B’s. two small daughters appear to have an adequate room to themselves, and there is a large cook accommodated ‘elsewhere, but the parallel is close _enough to be enjoyable. The family spend a good deal of time edging round | furniture which is just a shade too big _for the rooms, the wardrobes and closets | are so full of odds and ends that it’s a

hazardous business trying to get anything out of them, and the bathroom medicine cabinet is so full of junk that it can’t be closed and daren’t be opened. Life in the Blandings apartment, in fact, is a good illustration of the ancient truth that it’s not the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune that really get us down, it’s the trifling pea-shoot-ing trivialities — the toothpaste tube squeezed at the wrong end, the lost socks, the mussed-up morning paper. So far so good. We can laugh wryly with Mr. B., and sympathise comfortably. But when he suddenly decides that he has had enough, takes the plunge into the Connecticut countryside and buys an ancient farmhouse and 35 acres (more or less) the story moves a bit outside our experience and thenceforward we laugh at Mr. Blandings-but with a mixture of envy, for it has become more or less a fairy story. However, it isn’t a bad one, there are plenty more embarrassments (though at several .thousand dollars a time that is perhaps hardly the word for them) and Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are just the people to make the most of them. And, of course, in spite of all the embarrassments the dream house finally does get built, and they move in, and live happily ever after with umpteen bedrooms and three bathrooms and 35 acres (more or less). As the curtain fell on all the smiling Blandings faces I felt that only Mr. Chad could supply the final comment-‘Wot, no mortgage?"