Horrible movie
I love Jack Benny, but this was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
shareWhy don't you elaborate? I watched it last night on TCM. I've seen far better, but I'd hardly call it even a bad movie!
Whatever you do, DO NOT read this sig--ACKKK!!! TOO LATE!!!
I guess my key complaint is "stupidity." I like silly movies and I'm a huge Green Acres fan, but I did not laugh or even smile once during this movie. I can't believe I continued to watch it because within 15 minutes and several times thereafter, I almost turned it off. I think there was nothing else on TV, so I stuck with it only for Jack Benny, which is the main reason I was watching it in the first place.
I would have elaborated in my initial comment but it just seemed like there was so much about this movie that I disliked, I didn't know where to begin. It just got on my nerves almost from the start for the following reasons:
Connie - i found no redeeming qualities in her at all. How could she take such a big step as buying a house without first discussing it with her husband, especially considering he would still have to work in NYC? She kept her husband in the dark about everything, including the deed. I also didn't find Ann Sheridan's acting to be very good. She was very pretty but there was no charm or classiness to her character.
Hester - I couldn't believe that she would be expected to cook & clean in the condition the house was in on moving day, or that they would expect her to actually prepare a meal on that day. Nobody cooks in their house the day they move in! And how could she do anything? If the house had no water, most likely it had no gas or electricity either, but that was never addressed. What I did like about her is that she appeared justifiably angry/annoyed about the whole situation. I know this was pre-civil rights, but I found that she was treated as very second-class, with some characters even mocking her accent and manner of speech. Connie telling her what the word "antique" meant, when they were looking at the phonograph, was sort of demeaning & unnecessary, and it added nothing to the story, except to set the tone for what was to follow. Even the sister suggesting that Hester go down to the brook for a pail of water to make them iced tea was insulting and offensive to me, as though she were still considered a slave. So sad that this Academy award winner had to follow up her success with merely a caricature of her "Mammy" role.
Prescott - How come they didn't have to drive through the field the first time they saw the house? It was only after they bought it that Prescott showed up to tell them that he owned the road and they couldn't use it. I never heard of someone owning the road. And Prescott! He was simply mean without providing any comic element to his scenes whatsoever. A villain should at least be able to elicit some humor from his evilness, but there was none here from him or the people he was bullying.
The house itself - it was transformed from a broken down hovel to a showplace without the audience ever seeing any of the progress, yet the drilling for water continued as if only a week had passed. Suddenly, the house was gorgeous, yet there was no water! How could that be? And where did they get the money to transform it that way, if they were so unable to come up with $5000 needed to satisfy Prescott? I can't even remember what that $5000 was for!
I know it's a comedy, but there still should be some credibility to the impossible situations in order to make them funny and not just plain stupid, as I found this film. I still enjoyed seeing Jack Benny and I always wished he had made more movies. There are probably other things about this movie I disliked but the common thread is that it never rose above the level of stupidity to actually make it funny. Just my opinion.
Well, thanks for providing something far more substantial.
Yep, it's a comedy and I liked it. It was Benny's picture all the way and he's always worth watching. It seemed to me that he played it quite a bit differently from his trademark miser and that he demostrated much more bitingly sardonic / sarcastic wit than his typical "The Jack Benny Program" character.
The racism elements in the film, alas, were prevalent in Hollywood productions; remember, however, that Benny is quite a bit more curmudgeonly here than usual and I took his mimicry of Hester to be less racist than it was him being smart-alecky with pretty much every character with whom he interacted.
I wondered about the electricity thing, too, since they didn't even have water. But I didn't spend a whole lot of time splitting hairs over the movie's lack of realism.
There is such a thing as private roads, so I didn't find it that unusual that Prescott, who's pretty well off, must have bought the road at some point. The married couple's "new" house hadn't been lived in for many years, so occasions to even go there had been few and far between for quite a long time. And Prescott, noting that his new neighbors had used "his" road the first time the came to their new home, must have been determined to not let it happen again.
Prescott is a curmudgeon, like Benny, but with none of Benny's likeablity. Ugly, hateful and very unneighborly. Maybe he wasn't intended to be funny. I still laughed when he quite literally got mud in his eye from Benny's brat nephew, and chuckled some more with Prescott's subsequent scenes at his neighbors' house.
You're right, Ann Sheridan is eye candy! But you may be a little too harsh with the character she's portraying. This was originally a stage production with the roles reversed: the husband was the one who wanted to move out to the country, whereas "the missus" preferred the city life (shades of "Green Acres!") The reason for the change, from stages to celluloid, is that the Benny publicity crew thought it would be better for the wife to be the steward of the household's finances, since depicting Benny willingly emptying out his bank account to restore the house would have a way of clashing with the Jack Benny persona of the radio series (and later, the TV sitcom).
I'll come back here another time if I can think of more to post. Right now, it's past my bedtime and I'm having a hard time keeping my eyes open to write this. Catch you later!
Whatever you do, DO NOT read this sig--ACKKK!!! TOO LATE!!!
Movies like to make women into the enemies. Like in You can't Take it With You, Mr. Kirby is willing to go along with what the Sycamores are doing, but not his mother because of her social status. Whereas in the original play, which is written by the same men, incidentally, it was Mrs. Kirby who revealed she wasn't happy with the stuffy banker lifestyle, and it was also in the original play for George Washington Slept Here, that it was the HUSBAND'S idea to move everybody out into a broken down house in the middle of nowhere, not the wife's.
The play definitely had a few other things going for it that they couldn't do here, like when the neighbor complains the visiting nephew put a sign up in his front lawn that said NUDIST CAMP! Now that's funny!
Suzito
No I can t shave in the mornin, I brush my teeth in the mornin yuck yuck yuck
In regards to your question about the $5000, the reason they didn't have it was because they had spent all their money on fixing up the house. The $5000 was for the bank because they hadn't finished paying for the house.
shareHester - I couldn't believe that she would be expected to cook & clean in the condition the house was in on moving day, or that they would expect her to actually prepare a meal on that day. Nobody cooks in their house the day they move in! And how could she do anything? If the house had no water, most likely it had no gas or electricity either, but that was never addressed. What I did like about her is that she appeared justifiably angry/annoyed about the whole situation. I know this was pre-civil rights, but I found that she was treated as very second-class, with some characters even mocking her accent and manner of speech. Connie telling her what the word "antique" meant, when they were looking at the phonograph, was sort of demeaning & unnecessary, and it added nothing to the story, except to set the tone for what was to follow. Even the sister suggesting that Hester go down to the brook for a pail of water to make them iced tea was insulting and offensive to me, as though she were still considered a slave. So sad that this Academy award winner had to follow up her success with merely a caricature of her "Mammy" role.WHAT?!
Remember that, for a long time, people didn't go around buying "old stuff", and "antique" and "antiquing" weren't commonplace. I know from my mother that her own family, who barely got by, got rid of older furniture to get "nice things"; many of those pieces would be treasured antiques now. They were not valued by most people. By the Fifties, people were into "modern", Swedish and even "space-age" styles. By the Sixties, some people were starting to be interested in the past, but it was probably nearly the Seventies before I started seeing shops that handled what commonly were called antiques. In the Forties, it probably was an offbeat thing to want old, out-of-style items. Again, "antique" might not have been common use.
BTW: Any employee tends to be considered and treated as second class. To make money to return to college, I was a waitress in the Seventies then later in the Eighties during the Recession. Now, THAT is being treated poorly and offensively! It's foolish to think that employees in any time period have received decent treatment and haven't been taken for granted.
Get real! In today's movies and on TV shows, servants/cooks/etc. are treated the very same way! It doesn't matter which race; it's routine to have people blithely ask for things and expect a lot. What about Daphne on "Frasier" and Karen's maid on "Will & Grace"? I can't begin to count the instances in movies. Isn't there a new series about put-upon maids? So, this is a regular comedic device; it's never going to change. Often, the employees show that they are savvier and sometimes more sensible than their employers.
You need to remember that it was Hattie's role as a neighbor acting as a maid for the Adamses in "Alice Adams" that inspired the Academy to create the Best Supporting Actor/Actress category. She was such a scene stealer in the film that they wished they could have recognized her for it. Then, they had their chance with "GWTW". Then, there's Hattie's remark that she'd rather play a maid than be one; those roles provided much better pay, plus fame for her.
*** The trouble with reality is there is no background music. *** share
"The Hundred-Foot Journey" was the same. The Indians got that broken down restaurant into a nice Indian restaurant without us seeing any work.
shareIf you didn't laugh or smile once during this movie, you have NO sense of humor. You're also an idiot, but anyone who reads your post has already figured that out.
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