Next!
Blondie Plays Cupid is the most boring Blondie movie yet. Honestly, don’t expect a lot of commentary here. It’s very difficult to devise new ways of describing stultification, of saying “I was bored,” or “I regularly paused the movie to read Cracked articles.” The surprising thing is, there seems to be enough plot here to fill a regular Blondie movie, and for whatever reason they’ve gone ahead and squeezed it entirely into the final third of the picture.
We don’t even open with a paperboy gag this time. Rather, Daisy the dog simply enters the house, newspaper already acquired. I intend to read this as an admission of creative ennui, that the gag has worn thin…Then a whole mass of dogs randomly races into the house, suggesting a far more exciting film that we’ll get. This hoard of rabid hounds even proceeds to viciously maul poor Blondie, in an event that shall never be mentioned again, or serve any point. It is the highlight of Blondie Plays Cupid.
Then series regular Alvin literally just pokes his head in through the doggie door and leaves just as suddenly, not to be seen again in this entry. If they can’t even find something for Alvin to do, they should just stop trying.
The regular sequence of morning breakfast table shenanigans comes next, even though there is now hardly any plot information or even theme to convey here. That means that there’s very little to do, and yet the same amount of formula-driven screen time to fill. The most important event is that Dagwood hides a cache of firecrackers in a suitcase, in anticipation of tomorrow’s Fourth of July. He allows Baby Dumpling to possess a single firecracker himself, a decision that surely will not ensue in hilarity.
Indeed, despite Dagwood’s comic mugging, Blondie indeed discovers the firecracker in Dumplings back pocket, that little proto-Dennis the Menace, only with actual menace. This causes Blondie to weep in sorrow, once again lamenting her awful, failed marriage. Happy times, folks! The responsible, level-headed Blondie confiscates the firecracker, placing it against some sort of old-timey machine that proceeds to light it. Cue the expected high-pitched anarchy, substituting loudness for jokes. After seemingly several tiresome minutes of Dagwood racing blindly around, he hurls the firecracker out the window and explodes their mailman – an event that those familiar with the series were already expecting at this point.
All this takes roughly twenty minutes, all to no point, as even the remaining cache of firecrackers is shortly discovered and doused by Blondie, herself in a sad, petulant funk for the entirety of this entry. The only important thing set up here, apart from satisfying longtime franchise formula elements, is to establish the fact that Dumpling likes fireworks. A young kid likes fireworks, conveyed through two reels worth of celluloid! Brevity, thy name is not the Blondie series.
The scene at J.C. Dither’s Construction Company is usually the next bit of formula that has to be satisfied. As with everything leading up to now, this scene serves its standard time allotment dutifully without actually furthering the plot or telling jokes. The only thing that takes place is a lengthy, uninvolved announcement from Mr. Dithers that he shall be giving his employees a four-day weekend. You know, you could just have Dagwood announce such content at the start of the film, like with Blondie Takes a Vacation, and save us all a lot of time.
Dagwood returns home, and the family decides to make good their four-day holiday by taking a vacation. Yes, this ultimately proves to be another location switch entry. They clearly were tired of the normal Blondie suburban thing by now, even though they waste a major chunk of the picture going through those motions. So the family heads off to the train station, hound dog Daisy now swaddled in a toddler’s maternity clothes to give strangers the impression the Bumsteads are parents to a hideous, hairy, mouth-breathing monster (apart from Dumpling, that is). Time wasting comic shenanigans occur, to no ultimate end, as Blondie carries her two young beasts onto the train whilst Dagwood runs off to purchase tickets. Another train arrives in the train yard, surely an unexpected occurrence to everyone (sarcasm), which causes Dagwood to panic instantly (his standard defense mechanism) and run amok all over the place. Long story short, Dagwood gets on the train with his family, and no real story information is in place.
And so now they’re riding along on the train, taking their sweet time heading out to the farmlands where Blondie can finally start playing cupid. Another little speed bump comes along in the form of the train engineer, who informs them that the train actually does not stop at their destination, merely speeds through. Dagwood engages the engineer in a lengthy conversation about other options, the sort of conversation that doesn’t come across so much as “witty farcical confusion” as it does “the sort of conversation you would actually have with an unhelpful service agent.”
The effect of all this is to get the Bumsteads walking along on foot down a road. This is the big scenario they needed to create for the rest of the plot follow through! People walking. We’re now 45 minutes into this 72 minute film, doing something that could be accomplished in an opening shot!
Along comes a car with a happy young couple, Charlie and Millie (Glenn Ford and Luana Walte who offer the Bumsteads a ride. Glenn Ford is one of those lucky guest stars who would eventually escape the Blondie franchise and have an incredible successful career. Luana Walters’ later roles include “Softball Playerrs),,” “Lodge Clerk,” and “Newspaper Woman.” They’ll take the Bumsteads to their Aunt Hannah’s farm, with a slight detour in the nearest town so they can get married. Oh well, I guess Blondie won’t have to play cupid after all! And now, three quarters of the way through the movie, I’m struggling to understand that title.
But along comes something I’ve heard of, a rumored little creature that’s apparently essential to the creation of good drama – conflict. Yes, at last here it comes, in the form of Millie’s father, Mr. Tucker, armed with a shotgun – not to force the marriage, a shotgun’s typical ceremonial, matrimonial function, but to break it up. Tucker forces Millie out of the judge’s chambers and drives her away in the car, Dagwood and Dumpling trapped in the back seat separated from Blondie and Charlie. Ah, interesting scenarios, how I’d missed you for the past hour!
Well, there’s only about twelve minutes left in the movie, but damn it if they aren’t the draggiest minutes ever, with new plot threads following new plot threads while I constantly check the running time on my BluRay player (an odd choice of technology on which to watch dated old B-movies). First up, Charlie and Blondie borrow the lawyer’s car, a rancid old jalopy that turns off when you turn it on and turns on when you turn it off…or something. This is a potentially interesting set up that they completely fail to milk. And so, using this confusing car with no difficulty, Blondie and Charlie make it to Hannah’s farm just like that, with no jokes about infidelity or the law or any of those other usual franchise elements they could have done had this happened before the final tenth of the movie.
Meanwhile, Tucker has forcefully driven Dagwood and Dumpling (and Millie) to his farm, which happens to be right next door to Hannah’s farm. So that’s an end to that little separation bit. We learn, in some desperate last minute exposition, that Tucker does not approve of Charlie because Charlie built an oil well on Tucker’s farm, a well that never struck oil. I expect oil to be struck eight minutes from now.
One fade out later, everyone except Tucker and Millie is enjoying a fulfilling Fourth of July dinner at Hannah’s farm. Blondie, seeing the five minutes left in the movie (this section happens fast but feels so slow), realizes the time has come to – drum roll, please – play cupid. Therefore she announces to help Charlie elope with Millie, simple as that. Charlie arranges this in secret over the phone. Meanwhile Dumpling gets his hands on the screwy car and engages Dagwood in a silly little slapstick chase all over the farm that I would be a lot more forgiving of if it weren’t time filler inserted into, like, the last three minutes.
Indeed, there’s still enough to wrap up that everything occurs in a wild, hard-to-follow procession, with Charlie lamely hurting himself on one of Daisy’s dog bones (?!), Dagwood somehow wooing Mr. Tucker, Millie and Charlie reuniting, and Blondie giving permission to Dumpling to vanish from her sight right next to the bottomless oil well shaft. This is where Dumpling’s obsession with firecrackers pays off, allowing Dumpling to collect a stick of dynamite. That’s it?! He doesn’t even light it; that job is fulfilled by Blondie, igniting it in an apparently suicidal moment, weeping over her son’s not-even-remotely-unusual interest in explosives. My goodness! Waste half an hour setting up perfectly normal motivations (kid likes bombs), then justify random behavior at the last minute when the script calls for it! It’s like they were making this under a time limit or something…Oh wait, they were! So the dynamite explodes the oil well, which is apparently the action needed to strike oil, since oil then drenches everyone. Therefore every plot is resolved, because jeepers, we only have thirty seconds of movie left! The Bumsteads, for their idiotic part, respond to this oil drenching by lighting a firecracker, which reminds me of the gasoline fight in Zoolander, except not arch. Ka-boom!
With now fifteen seconds left (you can see I was really counting this damn movie down), Mr. Dithers reads a newspaper aloud, which announces to my immeasurable joy that Dagwood, Blondie and Dumpling all died in the explosion. Seriously! There aren’t enough explanation points in the world to express my joy!!! But then the movie cheats us all horribly, panning over to reveal they are alive. That’s the joke? Say they’re dead, then immediately show that they aren’t. That would be like finding out George Bush signed on for a third term! Arrrgh!
I’ve never seen a movie mess up its pacing as badly as this one did. It’s like they got a simple 9:1 ratio reversed, giving us piles of standard nothing at the beginning, and climaxing with a tiny amount of random, jumbled farm stuff. Something could have been made from this exact same plot, if only they’d allowed the farm setting and romantic storyline to play out at a leisurely fashion. Oh whatever, it’s all behind me now, and I only have…three more Blondie movies available to watch. There’s a light at the end of this tunnel!
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. 6 Blondie Has Servant Trouble (1940)
• No. 8 Blondie Goes Latin (1941)
• No. 9 Blondie in Society (1941)
• No. 10 Blondie Goes to College (1942)
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