The previous movie was Blondie on a Budget, a situation everyone can sympathize with. This movie is Blondie Has a Servant Trouble, a situation about 0.01% of the population can sympathize with. Don’t you just hate it when your lazy butler washes your sock garters, and they’re still covered with schmutz*?
*This joke stolen from “The Simpsons.”
Oh wait, it turns out this movie actually has a butler! But I’m getting ahead of myself…We open, as we always do, with a gag between the paperboy and Daisy the dog. This time Daisy refuses to collect the paper because a black cat crosses her path, starting up a threat of superstition jokes they totally don’t follow through with.
Inside, Dagwood is struggling to change a light bulb, a legitimate challenge for this mental ignoramus, we see, which invokes the movie’s only other superstition – walking underneath a ladder. Indeed, Dagwood soon electrocutes himself and tumbles down the stairs. Sometimes a character’s incompetence can feel humorous, and sometimes it makes you glad we have education for the learning disabled nowadays.
Seeing as we’re six minutes into the movie, Alvin joins the family around the breakfast table for his standard few minutes of screen time. Blondie feels harried – I said harried, not harry, sicko! – and wishes for a maid to help her around the house. They hold a little argument about Dagwood getting a raise, and seeing as we’re now about eleven minutes into the movie, it’s time for Dagwood to race outside and collide with the mailman. As usual we get a variation on the joke, as Dagwood happens to emerge from the neighbor’s house for reasons I haven’t the energy to recount.
Dagwood dithers around in his own office, rehearsing his demand for a raise from Mr. Dithers. He also proceeds to go and literally kick Dithers in the ass, again because Dagwood’s life is defined by elaborate contrivance. So far all this is developing as I’d expect for these Blondie movies, except here comes one of Dithers’ business partners with a plot device that shall distinctly set this entry apart from all the others. It usually takes too much effort to explain the whys of these things, so I’ll just go and say what is to happen:
Dagwood has to spend the night in a haunted house.
Let me repeat that in case you missed it…
Dagwood has to spend the night in a haunted house!
It’s really amazing to watch these old movies and come across a story idea so hoary – I said hoary, not whorey, sicko! – that the only time we encounter it nowadays is as a joke on a joke on a – well you get the idea. So at this point it becomes clear that Blondie Has Servant Trouble won’t be a typically lackluster family sitcom from the 40s, but a typically lackluster horror movie from the 40s. And the goings on at the haunted house are so clichéd and uninvolving that it’s easy to see why this sort of story is now a dead horse trope. (Of course there are always good examples of any fool notion, so I’ll simply point you to The Haunting for how this can be done right.)
The Bumsteads arrive at the old Forest Hills mansion, once the property of a deceased millionaire magician (!), Mr. Paterson. They head inside, their cabbie fleeing the deserted acres of the estate in terror. The interior is a massive set, and without further precise knowledge I must assume it’s the set from some top dollar picture being recycled. The stock elements of such a gothic setting rattle off dutifully one after another, from the cobwebs to the candlesticks to the door closing on its own. Adding a little horror to your comedy can often be an invigorating mix, but the treatment here simply slows everything down. They try for suspense, needing care and precision, yet they try for laughs, in direct opposition, and nearly nothing works out right.
Then there’s a series of clichés I cannot even believe. Slowly, slooowly, a set of bed sheets creeps towards the Bumsteads like a ghost – Why are ghosts represented as bed sheets? Seriously, where did this come from? Anyway, it turns out that under the sheets is a disgusting, stuttering Negro stereotype, Horatio Jones (Ray Parker, who made a career on setting his own race back decades). The only justification at all given for why this unwanted character shall be around for the rest of the movie is given, in Horatio’s own words, that he “sho’ nuff done bin let in.” Why that’s just swell! I’ll get all my comments about Horatio out of the way right here…Now, amongst the awful “Golden Age” Negro stereotypes they could have gone with (watermelon eating, chicken stealing, shufflin’ obediently for honkeys), the Blondie people went with “perpetually terrified.” Sure, the setting justifies it a bit, but people acting scared isn’t funny even when it isn’t horribly offensive to everyone. As a catalogue, during the tale Horatio shall scream in fright when he sees the following: sheets, a book and his own reflection. Sigh.
That over with, let’s consider the other two new characters of this piece. At the door are the Vaughns, Eric and Anna (Arthur Hohl and Esther Dale), who the Bumsteads take for the house’s servants, sent up by Mr. Dithers. The Bumsteads instantly wander off and Eric says some things to Anna that send up serious warning flares. I mean, episodes of “Scooby Doo” make it harder to pick out who the villain is. This guy is so obviously the bad guy, which means wheels are gonna spin until ten minutes from the end when our heroes finally figure it out for themselves.
Wait…This is a story where the butler actually did it?! Well, “did it” so much as a guy can in a family movie that disallows murder. There’s another old stock cliché I never thought I’d actually see in person. Boy I wish there were something clever or meta about its use here, but there ain’t.
Let me sum up the entire, and I mean the entire rest of the movie in a series of vague descriptions, because things just sort of happen on screen until it ends. Put most broadly, characters just proceed to stumble blindly around the house, losing track of each other and then running into each other, and as a result getting frightened. There’s not much fun in actually recounting the various distinct scenes of stumbling. However, if you really love overacted moments of cartoonish characters screeching loudly at nothing, have I got a film for you!
This turns out to be one of those movie mansions with swiveling secret passageways everywhere, and a familiarity with the lesser Universal horrors of the early 30s reveals how trite this was even by 1940. It does lead to the best comic routine in here, where the entire Bumstead family pursues each other around one of these spinning doorways in a manner that recalls good bits from Young Frankenstein or The Last Crusade. I didn’t think I’d favorably compare this movie to those when I started this!
Also, a large portion of the flick concerns Dagwood inexplicably getting a flashlight stuck in his mouth. They apparently thought this joke was so funny they neglected to write any others, and simply returned to it time and again. (It gets to the point where Dagwood intentionally stick in his mouth to show others how he did it by accident before – and remember, sicko, the “it” here is a flashlight!)
All this takes about an hour. There’s seriously nothing more in this movie. Finally Daisy, channeling The Thin Man’s Asta, discovers a “clue” at the base of the mirror. It is a newspaper shred from yesterday’s paper, explaining how Eric is really an escaped lunatic psycho magician (this movie has a real thing against magicians), who believes the old Paterson place should be his. There is never any legitimate justification given for what this bit of newspaper is doing in this isolated, abandoned mansion, but whatever.
The whole Bumstead family weeps in terror. Blondie finally reveals the lesson she has learned from all this, as much of a leap of logic as it is – it’s eeevil to want servants. Why, because the guy posing as a servant turned out to be a psycho killer?! Keep railing against those major problems in society, Blondie movies.
Dagwood finally heads downstairs armed with a gigantic club to defend his family from the wicked Eric. What this basically boils down to is another sequence of him and Eric stumbling randomly all over the house, with no sense of space or geometry to aid with the suspense. Eric chooses to sneak into Blondie’s room, where he is prepared to enact a scene from Psycho about twenty years ahead of schedule. (Blondie, for her part, simply stands there for roughly a minute as Eric advances on her, an irritating horror trope they still haven’t entirely dropped.) Then, in a truly surprising display of competence, Dagwood barges in and lays Eric flat with a single punch.
The morning sees everything settled, Eric in police custody and literally around twenty-five reporters all over the place. Dithers arrives and decides to let Dagwood have his raise. Then, sensing the need for a final gag more than an actual reason, both Dagwood and Blondie sprint from the house, colliding outside with their mailman – it turns out he also delivers mail to this long-abandoned house, on foot, at least a mile from any other homes. Sure, guys…
This one was boring, something I can’t quite say about any other Blondie movie. Pretty much all the criticisms I have about it are unique to this entry, stemming from problems that I see in antique haunted house stories (and 1940s racism). That is to say, none of my issues here apply to any other Blondie picture, and never will...eh, they might be racist again. Subject matter wise, this is clearly a one-off episode, as it’s not uncommon for long-running series to eventually resort to other genre stories as a means of filling one movie. But every time a series like this opens itself up to new avenues like this, it becomes harder and harder to return to business as usual. I’d suspect, based on the titles of some upcoming entries, that more and more we’ll see the Bumsteads travelling far afield for weird, specific little stories.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Blondie (1938)
• No. 2 Blondie Meets the Boss (1939)
• No. 3 Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939)
• No. 4 Blondie Brings Up Baby (1939)
• No. 5 Blondie on a Budget (1940)
• No. 7 Blondie Plays Cupid (1940)
• No. 8 Blondie Goes Latin (1941)
• No. 9 Blondie in Society (1941)
• No. 10 Blondie Goes to College (1942)
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