This BLONDIE film is full of laughs but mostly takes place away from the Bumstead family home, and J. C. Dithers and the office do not appear in it at all. Most of the film is set beside a lake at a summer holiday hotel. The amazing series of incidents and highly complex twists of plot are every bit as intricate as in the previous film in the series. Daisy the Dog gets more and more endearing, as she learns more and more cute tricks for the camera. At one point she even leaps into the air and flies right past Dagwood and Blondie's heads as if she had been shot out of a cannon. I really don't know how they did that stunt. She also turns backwards somersaults to express her dismay. Baby Dumpling (played by the unforgettable Larry Simms) is getting wiser and wiser as his parents get stupider and stupider, and he sits pontificating like a Taoist sage, expressing his disdain at their childish behaviour and lecturing them about how they should behave. (Remember, he is only four years old!) The results of this are hysterically funny. At the very beginning of the film, he and his friend Alvin from next door exchange ponderous and droll remarks like two old codgers sitting on a porch in the evening chewing their 'baccy', and commenting upon the hopelessness of the world, or I should say at the hopelessness of Dagwood and Blondie, who are in a sense a world of their own, after all. Often in these films, Blondie is the sensible one and it is Dagwood who is the idiot. But in this film, both are idiots. After all, Blondie locks herself in the bedroom when they are supposed to be leaving for holiday and sobs and pouts because Dagwood did not express sufficient enthusiasm for her weird new 'holiday hat'. (To their credit, Daisy raised her ears in horror at the hat and Baby Dumpling did a horrified double-take as if he had become disillusioned in humanity at large.) People who do not know what a skunk is will miss part of the plot of this film. A skunk, for those who do not know, is a small furry black and white animal found in the woods who when disturbed emits a stink so horrible that if one gets in the house you have to burn the carpet and furniture to get rid of the smell. Baby Dumpling does not know what a skunk is, so he plays with them and calls them 'pretty kitties', with malodorous consequences for all. There is a guest appearance in the film of a St. Bernard, and a scene where Baby Dumpling is discovered asleep in the baggage car of the train taking them on holiday with Daisy in his arms and his head resting on the St. Bernard as if it were a huge four-poster bed, all three of them sleeping soundly in an idyllic pose. There is a horrid man in the story, played by Donald MacBride, master of the slow burn, who turns out to be a genuine villain, and it is, you guessed it, not Dagwood or Blondie who gets the best of him, but Baby Dumplng, the four year-old Hercule Poirot of this wonderful comedy. Donald Meek is delightful in a guest appearance character role in the film. The series marches on, and fortunately there are 25 more to go, which means thousands more laughs are on the way. I saw the whole series once years ago, and now am enjoying seeing it again even more than I did the first time. It seems to get funnier with time. That is because it is so genuine, and without affectation. The plots may be incredibly complicated, but the humour is as simple as, well, Dagwood. Really, the Blondie series is a truly great classic series in the history of American situation comedy.
