Posted on 04/13/2025 5:53:17 AM PDT by Twotone
Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House is remembered as a hit even though it lost money at the box office during its initial theatrical run. It's more accurate to say that the 1948 picture (and the book it was based on) was a cultural sensation, hitting a nerve with the American public during that anxious moment when World War II was over but nobody was confidently predicting a postwar economic boom that would last two decades.
When journalist Eric Hodgins published his comic novel in 1946, inspired by his disastrous attempt to build a home for his family in New Milford, Connecticut, hostilities had been over for a year but the United States hadn't been building homes for a decade and a half thanks to the Depression and the war. Millions of Americans, including returning servicemen and their families, were living in cramped conditions with parents or relatives, or in emergency housing in parks or on waste land.
It wasn't much different with allies like Australia and Canada (a row of emergency housing, now long gone, was built in the park at the bottom of my street), though the crisis was put into perspective by Britain's bombed cities, not to mention Europe and Asia, where vanquished enemies German and Japan and neighbouring countries that had been battlefields were in ruins. The titular Mr. Blandings might have been put through comic agony trying to build his dream house, but tens, even hundreds of millions of people were desperate for any kind of home. cliff dwellers" as the narrator describes them, living in four rooms, high in an uptown apartment building.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
We built a few years ago, and the amazing thing is that after 70 years, so much was the same. This movie should be mandatory viewing for anyone building a home.
Excellent article on one of my favorite movies.
Now do Apartment for Peggy
I can’t remember the prices but they were ridiculously low compared to now in that movie.
That movie reminds me of the later THE MONEY PIT(1986). I bought two of them in my lifetime. Still living in the last one we bought in 1989. Moved in after 5 years of rebuilding.
If you ain’t eating Wham you ain’t eating ham.
and every aspiring architect for the complex and often disappointment between designers, clients and builders.
or...
“If it ain’t WAM, it ain’t ham!”
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