Blondie on a Budget
Director: Frank Strayer
Year: 1940
Rating:
5.5
This fifth in
the long-running Blondie series of films should have been titled Ball Buster
Blondie. She is on the warpath about the family budget and Dagwood is the
ire of her anger. He wants to join the Fishing Club and she wants a fur coat.
She tells him over breakfast that she had a dream that he asked her for $200
for the club and that she killed him. A dream he says. A prophecy she says.
I almost feel guilty laughing at the going-ons of the Bumstead family - Dagwood,
Blondie, Baby Dumpling and Daisy the Dog. It is all so silly, The sort of
humor where the dog drinks champagne and gets drunk, where the kid keeps
asking every shop keeper if he has any old dollar bills he doesn't want and
poor Dagwood. He literally can't do anything right. He quivers like jelly,
he has no backbone, how Baby Dumpling came to be is a mystery - Dagwood much
have had a map and a flashlight.
But that doesn't stop an old female friend
from trying to steal him away. Any man in a storm. There must have been a
shortage in 1940. This is not any old female friend - when Alvin (the annoying
child from next door) opens their door in walks a 1000 wat dream. Rita Hayworth.
Looking as fabulous as fabulous can get. It is amazing that six years after
her debut she was still appearing in films like this. B films except a fourth
billing in Only Angels Have Wings the year before this. One look at her in
this and you want to announce Star. That wasn't far off. In 1941 she starred
in Strawberry Blonde - again the other woman but wow - Blood and Sand with
Tyrone Power and then You'll Never Get Rich with Fred Astaire. She was there.
As hard as it is to believe, she seems to
want to rekindle an old romance with Dagwood and he is such an idiot he doesn't
even get it. But Blondie does. Dagwood is such a weenie, a milquetoast that
I wonder what audiences thought back then. Were the women - who I would guess
were the target audience - going my Harry would do just the same thing; Lloyd
is lazy just like him, Bob doesn't know left from right. But maybe they came
away thinking that their husband wasn't so bad after all. At least he can
pop a cork without spilling it all.
