BEFORE: I know I said I'd wait until April 15 to re-order my watchlist (now down to 177 films), but I couldn't help myself last night, I took a stab at it, unfortunately with mixed results. Oh, sure there are these little building blocks of 6 Matthew McConnaughey films or 3 Nicole Kidman films, but I haven't found a coherent chain that runs through all of them. Plus, I haven't decided if the chain should be partially thematic, or entirely actor link-based - and what's worse, new linking possibilities open up nearly every time I add a film. So I've decided to table the discussion for now, and I'll just have to review a bunch of cast lists and re-visit the situation next month.
For now (M)Archie Madness continues, as I watch a film that SHOULD have been programmed for Friday the 13th, I only realized too late how it represents a situation where everything that could go wrong does, which is the technical definition of bad luck, right? I wish I'd thought of that a few days ago, I could have moved "Father Goose" to the war chain and pushed all the Cary Grant films up another day, and this would have landed perfectly on 3/13. Damn it all.
THE PLOT: A man and his wife decide they can afford to have a house in the country built to their specifications. It's a lot more trouble than they think.
AFTER: Of course, I've seen "The Money Pit", the 1980's not-a-remake-but-essentially-it-is version of this story, with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. But to date I'd never seen the original, which should be required viewing for anyone thinking of remodeling a house. As expected (by everyone except the lead couple), everything goes kablooey, leading to cost overruns and eventually even marital troubles. Yes, they found a way to cram a love triangle storyline in here, like an unwanted addition to a construction project.
Through a contrivance, the couple's daughters discover their mother's old diary while moving, and also (gasp) not one but TWO fraternity pins, which could mean that she's still holding a candle for her old boyfriend, who happens to be the couple's best friend, lawyer and surrogate uncle to their kids. I don't know if college kids today still get "pinned", or if that's now some code word for some sex thing, but in the old days if you were going steady in college the girls wore a pin with their boyfriend's initials or something. This now seems like a neanderthal method of a male marking his territory, but whatever.
This happens in the midst of the couple's attempt to leave the cramped apartments of New York City for rural Connecticut, which is telegraphed by a daughter's school essay, based on a classified ad (another contrivance, this doesn't sound like any school project ever assigned by any teacher). It's funny, the lead character is an advertising man, notably stuck on writing copy for a Spam-like product called "Wham", and you'd think that someone working in advertising would be more savvy, but he falls for the promises of Connecticut realtors like a total noob.
He also makes snap decisions about his family's future, manages to buy the land without a proper appraisal, and signs contracts without having his lawyer friend check them first. So my sympathy for him waned a bit with every bad move he made. I may not be a real estate mogul myself, but I've been through the process of buying both a condo and a house, and if I didn't understand the process, I asked someone. A lot of it is just common sense, like having the property inspected before you buy it, not after. Or searching the public records on a property, to find out if there are any liens against it.
That's probably the most glaring NITPICK POINT here - Blandings has a number of inspectors view his property (notably AFTER he buys the place), and their advice is consistent: instead of fixing, he should tear down the house and start from scratch. So he does, then finds out there's an outstanding mortgage on the house, which he must now pay. Huh? Did he buy the house or not? Any outstanding mortgage would be the responsibility of the previous owner, and should have been covered by the money paid when the house changed owners. This would have been addressed by both lawyers at the closing, unless I'm mistaken. Perhaps Blandings didn't have his lawyer present at the closing, or didn't do a title search and paid the price for his folly, but a proper closing would have addressed any outstanding liens.
I'm surprised that he didn't get in trouble with the city for tearing down a historic property - it seems like they were setting this up by pointing out that a Revolutionary War general once stopped at the house to water his horses, and then this little point was never brought up again. Instead of some weird non-paid old mortgage, it would have made more sense for Blandings to have to pay a fine for destroying a landmark. How did the screenwriter miss this opportunity?
I'll allow that the children here were better actors than most, they were believably precocious, unlike the kids seen recently in "Father Goose" or "Houseboat", and all of their neuroses. And the slapstick could have been worse, they at least tried to keep a lid on it, where the 80's version "The Money Pit" just went totally Laurel & Hardy - I remember people covered in plaster and falling through holes in the floor, where here there's just a few falling lintels or footprints in the varnish. I appreciate that, but on the other hand, it really should be "show, don't tell", and physical comedy works better than people talking about cost overruns. Believe it or not, this film was so popular that it was adapted for a radio show, and I just don't know how they pulled that off without visuals.
As you might imagine, everything eventually works out, but the wrap-up of the advertising slogan plot-line felt particularly tacked-on, and it wasn't even really that good of a tagline. I've seen better ad campaigns for products that were much worse.
Also starring Myrna Loy (last seen in "Airport '75"), Melvyn Douglas (last seen in "The Candidate"), Reginald Denny (last seen in "Rebecca"), Louise Beavers, Ian Wolfe (last seen in "Now, Voyager"), and Jason Robards Sr.
RATING: 5 out of 10 paint samples
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