Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

I just watched a Cary Grant film from 1948 called Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House—essentially the original Money Pit. While most of the plot revolves around the house, there is an advertising/design subplot that is pretty amusing. In the film, Grant is a New York advertising executive who makes "about $15,000 a year" (a six-figure salary today) and who's big assignment is to come up for a decent slogan for WHAM, aka a "whale of a ham" (the previous man on the account was let go because of lines like "for a grand slam in ham, try Wham!"). Grant's daughters calmly inform him that their teacher describes advertising as a "basically parasitic profession" filled with "crass commercialism". At one point Grant and his wife run roughshod over their architect in a classic example of the nightmare client, demanding the impossible on a miniscule budget and literally seizing the pen from his hand to sketch on their own. Later Myrna Loy has a rant about color that would make Pantone proud—she gives careful instructions about colors for the interiors (ex. "a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin's egg but not as yellow-green as daffodils...", "if you'll send one of your workmen to the grocer for a pound of their best butter, and match that yellow exactly...", "as you can see, it's practically an apple red, somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Johnny..."), after which the workman turns to his buddy and says "Got that Charlie? Red, green, blue, yellow and white." It's always a nice surprise to enjoy films from a design perspective, and Mr. Blandings was no exception. If you're in the mood for an old movie (and the gender and racial assumptions that come with the territory) or some classic Cary Grant, it's worth a watch. The film was released on DVD in 2004 and is available from Amazon, where one reviewer nails the film as an analogy for [substitute your creative profession here] and says that it "contains almost every gotcha ever seen on a project."

The Blandings DVD includes an old Tex Avery animation called The House of Tomorrow, which depicts the future of domestic progress and is one of the strangest things I've seen in a long time. The animation is standard early Looney Tunes style (Avery created Bugs Bunny), and holds up nicely, but the tone and quips are mildly offensive and the slew of mother-in-law jokes seem oddly cruel, even for the 40s. Something of a relic, I suppose.