My Classic Movie Pick: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse

My mom, born in 1946 and thus a baby boomer, has learned a lot about tech this past year: she knows how to take pics and post them to her Kindle, she and my dad got an Amazon firestick and know how to watch movies via streaming with that device, and she recently joined Facebook.  One thing I’m tickled for her is that she has been watching more classic movies on TCM, many from when she was just a tot, that she remembers hearing my grandparents say were good films, but she had never seen before.  One such film is my classic movie pick for this week, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse.    

For anyone who has ever had a house built, this film is for you! A comedy, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a fun view of the aspects of having one’s dream house built.  Set in NYC, it’s 1948 and  ad man Jim Blandings(Cary Grant) and his wife Muriel(Myrna Loy) live in a cramped apartment with their two daughters.  Muriel wants to redecorate the apartment and Jim nixes that idea.  One day he sees an ad in the newspaper touting the beauty of building a house in nearby Connecticut and he quickly passes on that idea to Muriel and their daughters.  The Blandings contact a real estate developer in Connecticut and soon they are the proud owners of the old “Hacket Place”, an  American Revolutionary War era farm house.  The Blandings good friend and lawyer, Bill Cole(Melvyn Douglas) mildly chastises the Blandings for getting “took” for buying this property, and spending more on it than what the area market sells land for.  The family soon finds out that the farm house is structurally unsafe and it has to be torn down.  The family decides that a new home will be built in its place.

What makes this movie fun to watch is the every man woes of Grant, as Jim, simply wanting a new house built on his purchased land.  He doesn’t want an extravagant house, just a nice, basic house.  However, he and Muriel and his daughters begin  adding  rooms and other ideas  to what the house should  have with the architect.  After some more legal foibles having to do with the property, digging for a well, having to blast away a stone ledge before the foundation can be laid, sketchy construction workers, you’d think Jim Blandings would be ready to forget the whole plan of building this house!  However, Jim and Muriel carry on with their dream.  Two funny side plots involve Jim having to come up with a winning ad campaign for Wham Ham or he’ll lose his job, and the daughters putting it into Jim’s head that Muriel truly loves Bill, their lawyer friend, as he was a guy she dated in college, before she ever met Jim.  To me, one of the funniest scenes from the movie is when Muriel, in true interior design mode, explains the colors of paint she wants for rooms in the house and after she leaves the room, the painters look at each other and rattle off her paint colors in their basic names: red, green, blue, yellow, and white.  Here’s a link to that funny scene.  Here is also a fun trailer that was made to help introduce the movie to theatre audiences in 1948.

Based upon a best-selling novel, filled with a great cast, screenplay, and director, try to see this film.  It’s available to purchase at TCM’s Shop, one can purchase it or view it via instant rent at Amazon, and from time to time, TCM does air it.    

Goats Cause a Grievance!

I was perusing the news last week and saw a story that I thought was ridiculous!  Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, had a 15 acre area on their campus that was overgrown with weeds, poison ivy, and  brush;  just unsightly vegetation.  The school discovered a solution to clearing out that area of land that was unique: hire a herd of goats!    

Munchers on Hooves, the name of  a goat rental company in Coldwater, Michigan,  arrived and the goats went right to work with a literal relish.  They ate and chomped their way through all of that plant life and cleaned up the area.  The school felt it was an environmentally safe choice as the goats could clear 3-5 lbs. of vegetation a day and leave behind natural fertilizer.   The school was happy that the land was cleaned up. The owners of the herd were happy as they received a payment.  The goats were obviously happy as they had  full tummies!  The school decided to keep Munchers on Hooves around for some more land clean up projects until the start of the new school year.

What should have been a nice story, even an educational story, has now ended in a grievance filed by AFSCME against the school.  American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union’s  local affiliate in Kalamazoo, when they  found out about the herd of goats,  filed a grievance stating that the goats took jobs away from  human workers.  A spokeswoman for Western Michigan’s, who couldn’t speak directly about the goat herd issue did reassure the public by stating that no workers at Western Michigan were laid off while the goats were munching away!  One of the owners of Munchers on Hooves  added that the 15 acres the goats cleared was very thick with vegetation and that the goats can clear up to 5 feet above the ground, so whatever they couldn’t get at, human workers would now be able to go in and clear out the rest with more ease.

An example of the land clearing expertise a herd of goats have.

I began to think more about the goat herd hired to do this job. The goats probably went right to their task at hand.  They didn’t need to stop for cigarette or coffee breaks, they probably kept right on munching rain or shine. The goats did emit methane but no other pollutants as machinery would in clearing vegetation off of a 15 acre area of land.   If one of the goats got injured, it didn’t need to file for any workers comp.  The only down-side to letting a herd of goats clean up this land was perhaps if one of the goats was onery and decided to chase a human who might be walking through their work area.

This lawsuit is silly, in my opinion, and I am hoping that the judge throws it out; he or she should let the goats have  the paper it’s written on!

 

 

Information for this blog post: Kalamazoo Gazette, http://www.mlive.com/kalamazoo July 11, 2017. Devereaux, Brad.