Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation - 1962

Jimmy Stewart (as Mr. Hobbs) drags his family from St. Louis to a rented beach house in California for a vacation centered on family and relaxation. Instead, his daughter (Lauri Peters) won't leave the rather worn-out structure because of embarrassment over her new braces on her teeth, and Hobb's son (played by Michael Burns) is addicted to TV and won't leave the house either. Hobbs himself sets up right outside the front door with a beach umbrella and a book, but his launch of a quiet rest on the California shore is interrupted by the voluptuous Marika (Valerie Varda) who wants to talk over books, and the arrival of Hobbs older children who bring their families, and along with it, their family troubles.

Stewart's Mr. Hobbs is the heroic figure in the film, along with the level-headed Mrs. Hobbs (Maureen O'Hara) and the pair do something that probably stood out in 1962 as much as it would in any other year: they modulate to meet the needs of all their children, whether its the youngest who has to finally face daylight because the TV tube burned out, or the rest who each has a unique problem, from unemployment to sticky relationship issues. And then there's a young grand kid who only has to spot Mr. Hobbs from across the room to then shout "I don't like you!" and then hide.

The styles, music and the era itself are all of course dated to the early 1960s, but the problems of family life seem rather timeless: Mr. Hobbs gets a rare chance to build a relationship with his youngest son who is temporarily cut off from his total absorption into TV, and this situation could just as easily be depicted as video-gaming or any of the other obsessions that permeate contemporary American youth culture. Hobbs goes into the task with energy and stays with it, but the story plot puts the effort into jeopardy, a kind of tension that pops up into every relationship that Mr. and Mrs. Hobb's have with their kids, and that undergirds the rolling buffet of jokes and humor (some of it delivered dead-pan by Jimmy Stewart as a narrative voice).

Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation seems to really do its storytelling on two parallel tracks, one a comedy with funny situations (a recurring sub-story is the delicate plumbing that gushes water at all the wrong times) and various other characters helping to make that humor expand, such as John McGiver showing up to visit as a teetotaling executive who is hiring Hobb's son-in-law, but as we get to know the executive (and his rather odd wife played by Marie Wilson) we find they're raging secret drinkers. That's all for laughs, but the second parallel track of the story is a tense tale of parents fearing their children's failures (and by reflection their own) as the kids, whether "grown" or not, struggle to succeed and deal with the difficulties of life that are not particularly cushioned by the humor, but are realistic and common, and that's a credit to the script from Nunnally Johnson and Edward Streeter to keep the ridiculousness from bleeding too much into the underlying fear of failure that moves like a drip-drip-drip through the rest of the tale.

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Original Page October 20, 2024