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| Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, and Hattie McDaniel in George Washington Slept Here |
One of the running gags on Jack Benny's radio and TV shows was about how terrible his movie The Horn Blows at Midnight (Raoul Walsh, 1945) was. But that film, more a box office failure than a bad movie, has more to be said for it than George Washington Slept Here, a retread of one of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's lesser comedies, a play so forgotten -- except by amateur theatrical groups -- that it has never received a Broadway revival. When it came to performing in movies, Benny was always handicapped by his familiar radio personality, the skinflint who, when challenged by a stickup man, "Your money or your life," could be counted on to pause for a well-timed moment and say, "I'm thinking it over!" In adapting Kaufman and Hart's play for the screen, Everett Freeman actually switched the lead characters' roles to accommodate the Benny persona: In the play, the husband was the one eager to renovate a rundown 18th-century farmhouse, and the wife was the one who came up with wisecracking comments whenever the project teetered on disaster. But in the film, Benny is the long-suffering, wisecracking (and a little too frequently pratfalling) victim of his wife's passion for the antique. There's even an interpolated allusion to Benny's radio show when his character comments that something sounds worse than Phil Harris's orchestra -- a reference to the ongoing feud between Benny and his show's bandleader. Unfortunately, the whole film is a rather frantic spin on the familiar "money pit" comedy about building a dream house -- subsequent films like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H.C. Potter, 1948) and The Money Pit (Richard Benjamin, 1986) borrowed heavily from it. This is one of those films in which ordinarily sensible performers are forced to play characters who verge on idiocy -- poor Ann Sheridan, an underrated actress, has to behave like a nitwit in her efforts to keep the renovation happening, and Benny has to pretend to be jealous of her involvement with the antique dealer helping her with the project. Several characters have been lifted from the play -- the bratty Raymond, the preening summer stock actors -- without much justification for their presence in the plot. In short, it's a mess.
