Blondie Brings Up Baby 
                                                   
Director: Frank Strayer
Year: 1939
Rating: 6.0
Giving a 6 out of ten stars to a Blondie film may get me sent to film purgatory but this one wasn't actually too bad. Better than the first three for sure. These are so-old fashioned and nostalgic for another time that I find them a bit charming if totally corny and mawkish. It occurred to me this time around how this film and the world it creates perfectly encapsulates a lost world. Dagwood Bumstead (Arthur Lake) may be one of the stupidest men alive. A very nice man but he has trouble putting on his pants in the morning. And runs over the mailman every day. Incompetent at everything - other than loving his family.

 

He constantly gets fired for screwing up at work and yet always gets back his job from Mr. Dithers (Jonathan Hale). It was a time in our history in which you could own a house and have a family with the wife staying at home on the husband's salary and put a little bit into the bank. And he is an idiot. With an office. And it occurred to me that this was only because he was a white male. When white men ruled the earth. You could be an idiot but you were still white and you were still male and that put you ahead of everyone else who wasn't in terms of opportunity. And it still does. So every time I hear male Trump supporters whining about how the world is cheating them I want to say STFU - if Dagwood could make it, so can you.

 

This has a few comic moments and a big heap of sentimentality. Dagwood loses his job again - Dithers has a built in shower just to cool off when he gets angry at Dagwood - loses the dog Daisy, loses Baby Dumplings and gets tear gassed by the police. Just another day in Dagwood's life. A salesman convinces Blondie (Penny Singleton) that Baby Dumpling has an I.Q. of 166. Both Blondie and Dagwood panic thinking that is akin to a fever. Blondie is no genius either. And so she decides to enroll him in kindergarten. Where he gets a black eye on day one. Daisy gets picked up by the dog pound - even after imitating a statue - gets adopted by a little rich girl in a wheelchair - and you can sort of take it from there. In the end Dagwood gets his job back. And he hands their annoying next door neighbor child a tear gas ball he picked up and says go play with this at home.