Frank Strayer's Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939)

The third in a lively series, Blondie Takes a Vacation is a nice piece of intelligent populism, directed by Frank Strayer with a screenplay by Richard Flourney and with cinematography by stalwart Henry Fruelich.  Of course Blondie is not taking a separate vacation, the whole family is going (I remember not too many years ago when the question --which I never understood --was often poised as to whether spouses should take separate vacations), taking a train to the Lake Hotel in the woods.  On the train they get into an altercation with a man named Morton who takes a dislike to their dog Daisy and when the Bumsteads get to the hotel he turns out to be the manager and refuses to honor their reservation.  So the Bumsteads troop around the lake until they find another hotel to stay at that turns out to be on the verge of closing because Morton has bought their lease.  Blondie and Dagwood feel sorry for the elderly owners of the Westview Inn so they pay off the debts with their last $400 and take over management of the inn.  Donald Meek plays a pyromaniac who has become friendly with Dagwood and decides to burn down the Lake Hotel but before he can do that Baby Dumpling Bumstead sneaks into the hotel's air conditioning with a skunk (which he thinks is a cat), forcing the hotel to close and driving  everyone out of the hotel and into the inn.

As usual in the Blondie series Blondie herself is the organized one while Dagwood takes care of the mechanical stuff, including setting the inn's bus on fire and having to be rescued from a runaway vacuum cleaner by Blondie pulling the plug; Baby Dumpling helps Dagwood find his pants when he accidentally locks them in a closet.  Blondie Takes a Vacation is a low-key populist fable of ordinary people taking on and overcoming moneyed interests, but it also something of a critique of patriarchy.  At the end of the film Dagwood wants to stay and manage the inn but Blondie asserts that it is time to go home and symbolizes her victory by donning a flamboyant hat, a symbolic crown, that Dagwood had mocked at the beginning of the film.






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