{"id":35047,"date":"2023-05-27T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2023-05-27T06:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=35047"},"modified":"2023-05-25T21:55:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T03:55:32","slug":"streaming-review-mr-blandings-builds-his-dream-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/streaming-review-mr-blandings-builds-his-dream-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Streaming Review: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ss&amp;ref=as_ss_li_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=adamsblog03-20&amp;language=en_US&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=B000KHX9J2&amp;asins=B000KHX9J2&amp;linkId=e94a902773cc7c7a85947b90a978f2fc&amp;show_border=true&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=true\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" sandbox=\"allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In the 1948 film,\u00a0<em>Mister Blandings Builds His Dream House,\u00a0<\/em>New York City advertising executive Jim Blandings (Cary Grant) shares a cramped apartment with his wife (Myrna Loy) and\u00a0 his daughters. In a fit of inspiration and pique, Blandings decides to move his family into a beautiful old house in rural Connecticut about an hour from the city. However, Murphy&#8217;s Law hits in force and before Blandings knows it, he&#8217;s having to build a new home from scratch.<\/p>\n<p>While this film is seventy-five years old, it&#8217;s still charming. While both Grant and Loy were veterans of more uproarious screwball comedies in the 1930s, <em>Mister Blanding Builds His Dream House<\/em>&#8216;s comedy is different. It&#8217;s down-to-earth, subtle, and relatable. Anyone who&#8217;s gotten themselves into the stressful and complicated process of a real estate transaction should be able to relate to the Blanding&#8217;s plight, though the situations are amped up for comedic effect. Long-suffering family friend and lawyer Bill Cole (Melvyn Douglas) is both a great voice of reason and delivers the best comedic lines in the film. The film also has a serious point and character arc for Jim that really only becomes apparent in a surprise end towards the end of the picture..<\/p>\n<p>The film did have points that seemed underdeveloped. In particular, Jim&#8217;s struggles to develop a slogan for Wham! (an obvious ripoff of Spam) because a predominant plot point in the last quarter of the movie. Having Cary Grant read off lame slogan ideas isn&#8217;t exactly comedy gold and we&#8217;re given little reason to care about him coming up with this whole issue. The threat of losing his job could have gotten me to care if done right, but there&#8217;s no reason to think he doesn&#8217;t get another job just a s good in two weeks.<\/p>\n<p>Still, this is a very enjoyable film\u00a0 when it sticks to its strengths aa\u00a0 a story of love and real estate.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 4..0 out of 5.0<\/p>\n<p><em>This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchase.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled\">\n<div class=\"robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-icon sd-sharing\">\n<h3 class=\"sd-title\"><em>Note: There was a 1951 radio follow up series to this film called<strong> Mr. and Mrs. Blandings.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><strong>The series will be the focus of this Summer&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/amazing.greatdetectives.net\">Amazing World of Radio<\/a> podcast summer series beginning Wednesday.<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1948 film,\u00a0Mister Blandings Builds His Dream House,\u00a0New York City advertising executive Jim Blandings (Cary Grant) shares a cramped apartment with his wife (Myrna Loy) and\u00a0 his daughters. In a fit of inspiration and pique, Blandings decides to move his family into a beautiful old house in rural Connecticut about an hour from the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"both","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":301,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[298,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd-review","category-golden-age-article"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-97h","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35050,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35047\/revisions\/35050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}