‘Mr. Blandings’ Is Now 75. What Can His Dream House Tell Us About Ours?

This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most hair-raising horror films ever to hit the big screen: “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.” Adapted from a popular 1946 novel, it tells the story of Jim and Muriel Blandings (Cary Grant and Myrna Loy), a couple climbing the walls in their cramped Manhattan apartment, who buy an old house in Connecticut that becomes a gateway to misery.

On their journey through renovation hell, the couple and their two young daughters encounter a rapacious real estate agent, a rotting foundation, inept and condescending construction workers, fugitive groundwater and an architect who gives in too readily to their baronial ambitions when they have to demolish the wreck and start afresh. Costs mount. Schedules unravel. Tempers hit the stratosphere.

James Sanders, an architect and the author of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies,” believes the 1948 film maintains its power to trigger anyone who has set out to fix or build a home. But “Mr. Blandings” has earned its place in the cinematic pantheon for another reason.

“It was exactly at this precise time — and captured and epitomized for the ages nowhere better than in this film — that the great American suburban dream of more living space, less density, more open space and greenery took hold in its modern form,” he said.

“Why did cities, and apartments, which just 10 years before represented the epitome of glamour and excitement, suddenly need to be jettisoned for a new vision of American family life?” Mr. Sanders asked.

The New York Times invited him to drill down on that question by revisiting “Mr. Blandings” and the real estate choices it dramatizes. (This conversation has been edited and condensed.)