Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) on Netflix
Approved19481h 34mComedyRomance
Jim Blandings, an advertising man, shares a cramped New York apartment with his wife Muriel and their daughters. An ad for country homes sends the couple to a rundown farmhouse in Connecticut.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.2/1013,832 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jim Blandings is an account executive at a New York advertising agency, and he shares a leased apartment with his wife Muriel and their daughters Betsy and Joan. Muriel wants to knock out a wall and remodel the place for $7,000, and he says no. An advertisement for new houses in Connecticut catches their eye, and a real estate agent sells them the old Hackett Place in Lansdale County, an almost two-hundred-year-old farmhouse on 35 acres. Jim pays far more per acre than local buyers, and his lawyer and friend Bill Cole tells him he is following his heart rather than his head. Engineers find the house unsound, so the couple engages architect Henry Simms to replace it, with four bedrooms and four bathrooms that Muriel insists on.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- As a promotion for the film, the studio built 73 "dream houses" in various locations in the United States, selling some of them by raffle, and over 60 were equipped by General Electric.
- In 1950, after seeing the film at a local theater, a dentist and his wife purchased the plans for the house from RKO and built a complete replica of it in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, moving in that Christmas; he remained the house's sole occupant until his death in 2002.
- The house built for the 1948 film still stands on the old Fox Ranch property in Malibu Creek State Park, and is used as the park's office and as offices for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.
- The film was loosely remade in 1986 as The Money Pit, starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, and again in 2007 as Are We Done Yet?, starring Ice Cube.
- The story behind the film began as an April 1946 article written by Eric Hodgins for Fortune magazine, reprinted in Reader's Digest and, in condensed form, in Life before being published as a novel.
- Although it was quite popular, according to one source the film actually recorded a loss of $225,000 during its initial theatrical release.
