Only two movies this week. As it turns out, both were oddly similar (beyond the obvious genre match), but what worked in one didn't so much work in the other.
And I'm thinking no more comedies next week.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
H.C. Potter, 1948
What a strange, unpleasant little comedy this is. At first glance, it appears to be a screwball Cary Grant comedy in the vein of The Philadelphia Story or Bringing Up Baby. Once it gets underway, however, things look very different. Still a comedy, Mr. Blandings. . . is much slower paced than others of its ilk and quite a bit drier in its humor, largely thanks to the acerbic narration (which I quite enjoyed). There’s a bizarre undercurrent of anger in this movie, though, which threw it off-kilter. Many of the characters, especially Cary Grant’s, spend a lot of time being angry – and not the fun, frazzled, frustrated kind of angry – the miserable kind of angry. This aspect reaches its apex with an extended subplot in which Cary Grant increasingly suspects his wife of infidelity – a subplot that yields no jokes, no laughs, and only a mild catharsis at the end of the movie.
Comedy and misery are, admittedly, closely related – and sometimes they work to enhance one another (Being John Malkovich, for one example off the top of my head). Unfortunately, that is not the case here, and the movie never seems to find its footing as a result. Still, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are always watchable, and just about everything that comes out of Melvyn Douglas’s mouth is golden – so it’s not a total loss.
4/10
George Cukor, 1949
This is the first movie I’ve seen featuring the famous Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy duo, although I’d enjoyed separate performances from them before (Bad Day at Black Rock for
Gender inequality is an ongoing topic of discussion throughout the movie, and the nature of the discussions is probably the most dated aspect. Even looking beyond that, though, things don’t tend to progress much beyond very basic disagreements – men and women are the same/no they’re not, there’s a double standard/no there isn’t, etc. It gets tedious, and edges Hepburn’s character toward being unsympathetic, since she is the one typically forcing these discussions to occur.
Much more interesting than that is the disillusionment and eventual recovery of Hepburn and Tracy’s marriage. The actors’ natural chemistry is key here - in the beginning, they really feel like they’re in love. When they’re angry, they really feel hurt. I should also mention David Wayne, who plays the creepy, overbearing, piano playing neighbor. His attempted seduction of Katharine Hepburn late in the movie has a tremendously skeevy quality worthy of some of the better horror movies; and the scene where he (very unfunnily) narrates home videos while Spencer Tracy glares at him in the darkness was a highlight of the movie.
As screwball romantic comedies go, it’s no Philadelphia Story (probably the apex of the genre), but it’s certainly not bad, either.
7.5/10
Progress: Par +1 (still)
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