Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
Apr. 20th, 2020 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI am sorry to report that Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is another Cary Grant movie that sort of edges all the way around the OT3 potential without, at any point, actually delivering on any OT3 feels, despite this excellent exchange:
Mr. Blandings (Cary Grant): Every time Bill Cole visits, he shakes my hand and kisses you.
Mrs. Blandings (Myrna Loy): Would you prefer it was the other way around?
Bill Cole is the Blandings’ lawyer, as well as Mr. Blandings’ best friend - or, as Bill Cole puts it at the beginning of the film, Mr. Blandings’ “quote unquote best friend” - and also a former college flame of Mrs. Blandings, who, we discover, still has Bill Cole’s fraternity pin in her jewelry box! This ought to be a juicy setup and yet it isn’t quite, perhaps partly because it’s not clear what “quote unquote best friend” is meant to convey. Possibly Cole hangs around for the amusement value of watching the Blandings dig themselves into an ever deeper financial pit as they build their dream house in Connecticut.
Unlike The Bishop’s Wife, which also teases OT3 potential it never delivers, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House doesn’t deliver many compensatory pleasures, either. It’s amusing in a mild way, but it never seems to get the timing on its gags just right: many of them drag on too long, like the sequence at the beginning where Grant walks through his too-small (although actually pretty large for New York City) apartment. It’s like they tossed every single too-small apartment gag they could think of at the screen, and they would have done much better to pick one or two and polish them to perfection instead.
Mr. Blandings (Cary Grant): Every time Bill Cole visits, he shakes my hand and kisses you.
Mrs. Blandings (Myrna Loy): Would you prefer it was the other way around?
Bill Cole is the Blandings’ lawyer, as well as Mr. Blandings’ best friend - or, as Bill Cole puts it at the beginning of the film, Mr. Blandings’ “quote unquote best friend” - and also a former college flame of Mrs. Blandings, who, we discover, still has Bill Cole’s fraternity pin in her jewelry box! This ought to be a juicy setup and yet it isn’t quite, perhaps partly because it’s not clear what “quote unquote best friend” is meant to convey. Possibly Cole hangs around for the amusement value of watching the Blandings dig themselves into an ever deeper financial pit as they build their dream house in Connecticut.
Unlike The Bishop’s Wife, which also teases OT3 potential it never delivers, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House doesn’t deliver many compensatory pleasures, either. It’s amusing in a mild way, but it never seems to get the timing on its gags just right: many of them drag on too long, like the sequence at the beginning where Grant walks through his too-small (although actually pretty large for New York City) apartment. It’s like they tossed every single too-small apartment gag they could think of at the screen, and they would have done much better to pick one or two and polish them to perfection instead.
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