Friday, October 21, 2022

Three Beautiful Things 10-20-2022: Baking More Muffins, Art Linkletter Was Right, 1948 Version of *Green Acres*!

1. Looking ahead and knowing Debbie's day is made a little better by taking a homemade muffin to school, I baked a dozen more Morning Glory muffins today. I needed a couple of things from Yoke's and enjoyed a sunny walk to the store and back. 

2. You might remember the segment on Art Linkletter's daytime show, House Party, called "Kids Say the Darndest Things".  Kids continue to say the darndest things. Today one youngster at school told Debbie she smelled like tuna fish. 

3. This evening I returned to the Criterion Channel and watched another movie featuring James Wong Howe as the Director of Photography.

The movie was a fun dessert, light and sweet. 

As I watched Cary Grant and Myrna Loy with supporting help from Melvyn Douglas in the 1948 screwball comedy, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, I had fun flashbacks to the television show, Green Acres.

In this movie, Cary Grant plays Jim Blandings, a successful Manhattan advertising executive, who lives with his wife (Myrna Loy) and two daughters in an apartment where space is tight.

Blandings becomes obsessed with moving out of Manhattan into the Connecticut countryside and purchases a ramshackle house with acreage.

Much like Green Acres and much like the Tom Hanks/Shelly Long movie, The Money Pit, the movie presents one scene after another of Mr. Blandings spending more and more and more money on financing this big change in his life and gives us scene after scene of things going awry with the project.

The story was funny. 

Most all, though, I enjoyed the elegant Cary Grant playing the bumbling, stubborn, mistake-prone Jim Blandings and the chemistry between Blandings and his patient, whip smart wife, Muriel, played brilliantly by Myrna Loy. 

I went through a phase of renting screwball comedies from the 1940s back in the mid-1980s. I had fun watching a handful of them and I see turning toward them again. I love watching film noir, but, I admit, taking a break from all those murders and all the conniving in those movies might be a good thing. 




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