jjnxn-1 Mr. Hobbs wants to take a nice quiet vacation to the beach for the summer but Mrs. Hobbs insists on taking the whole family, daughters, son-in-law, grandchildren, cook and various drop ins, with them. There goes his peaceful trip. The kind of role that Jimmy Stewart could play in his sleep but he and Maureen O'Hara manage to make the material better than it should be. They keep the whole enterprise moving along with some cute side stories, Fabian is charming as a suitor to their daughter who is going through growing pains not helped by her new braces and the distinctive presences of John McGiver and Marie Wilson contribute a bit of spice in small scenes of a supposedly straight laced couple who hold the key to a new job for Jimmy's son in law, John Saxon-looking particularly handsome here. Harmless fun and if you're a Stewart fan irresistible.

inspectors71 It's the weirdest thing--Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation is supposed to be a mild and funny satire of the harried company man who wants more than anything to preserve his family--as they grow up and grow distant--by bringing them all together for a summer vacation.Jimmy Stewart and Maureen O'Hara are the parents of, possibly, the dullest and most unappealing brood of "kids" I've seen. They make the acres of children in With Six You Get Eggroll and Cheaper By the Dozen look absolutely mesmerizing by comparison.And the parents are no better. O'Hara has very little to do, other than look as if she needs a gig with John Wayne (so that she will have something to do!) and Stewart looks as if he is chewing on bits of beach sand (when Jimmy wasn't funny, he really wasn't!).There's an ugly edge to his lines and his performance. It's almost as if you can see what might have been the real person under the actor. I don't know if Jimmy Stewart was a nice guy or a jerk, but there's a menace to Mr. Hobbs that makes the viewer squirm and sucks the vitality out of what few laughs the movie can deliver.I found the movie tedious and Jimmy's character almost sinister. MHTAV is a contrived and icky mess. But you know it made a gob of money 46 years ago.I taped the movie off AMC and showed it to my family a few weeks ago. Both wife and daughter laughed, a lot.What I took for sinister apparently still sells.

Jackson Booth-Millard I have said this before, but I have almost vowed myself to watch almost all film starring the lead male star, even if their low on star ratings, and I admit one or two of them have failed to get my absolute attention when watching them, and this is one of those. Basically Mr. Roger Hobbs (James Stewart) is asking his secretary to write a (long) letter about a vacation to his wife, and obviously then the film sees this vacation. Roger longed to take his family to the seashore, and when he, wife Peggy (Maureen O'Hara) and kids do get to the sand, problems develop with the house, and the vacation turns out to be a half-good half-bad trip. I can't remember laughing too much, even when I did see Stewart struggling to start some sort of pump motor, and I got confused with what was meant to be going on with him and those visitors. Also starring Fabian as Joe, Lauri Peters as Katey Hobbs, Lili Gentle as Janie, John Saxon as Byron, John McGiver as Mr. Martin Turner, Marie Wilson as Mrs. Emily Turner, Minerva Urecal as Brenda, Hobbs' Maid and Michael Burns as Danny Hobbs. Stewart had a similar look to those in Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much, because of the Fedora hat, that is one of the only memorable things in this film, apart from some tiny moments of mistakes, misunderstandings and chaos, this isn't really a fantastic Stewart film. Okay!

Putzberger . . . not just because that's where the good Mr. Hobbs leads his boisterous brood for the titular vacation, but also since that's what Jimmy Stewart is doing for the entire movie. But as the finest American screen actor of his (and probably any) generation, he'd earned the right to relax his way through a featherweight family comedy. It's not bad, per se, just rather sitcom-esquire, albeit with spicier lines ("let's go get some son on the beach!") and allusions ("isn't that what Professor Humbert said?") that you could get away with in TV shows at the time. And because of Jimmy's ability to balance warmth with hints of menace ("you little creep!" he hisses at his grandson in one funny but slightly uncomfortable scene), this particular vacation has a bit more depth and complexity than you'd expect from a showcase for Fabian.The passe teen idol (payola had just ruined his singing career) shows up to romance Jimmy's youngest daughter, the talented but unmagnetic Lauri Peters (she'd already had a decent Broadway career but would never make it big in Hollywood). In the film's low point, he twinkly young lovers recite a dreadful song over ice-cream sundaes (they really do kind of chant it -- would they have had to pay Fabs more to warble?). In the film's high point, Jimmy is stuck in a steamy bathroom with the dim, slutty wife of his son-in-law's birdwatching boss. It's a moment worthy of a sophisticated 30s comedy starring, well, Jimmy Stewart. The possibility of infidelity is a surprisingly frequent visitor to the Hobbs' vacation house -- the whole family seems to wink at the fact that pompous son-in-law Byron appears to be having it off with a Eurotrash beach bunny. To blunt the movie's sharper edges the filmmakers put Jimmy through a few silly set-pieces, like getting lost in the woods with the birdwatcher and getting lost on a boat with his son. Maureen O'Hara, as the lovely, sensible Mrs. Hobbs, is also around to ease the waters should they grow too troubled. Jimmy Stewart deserved to crown his career with an elegiac masterpiece, maybe about a dying lawman or a beleaguered patriarch. But Clint Eastwood wasn't directing movies in 1962 so Stewart was stuck with lesser John Ford vehicles and profitable pabulum like "Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation." I'm sure he did something nice with the money, maybe a memorial for the son he lost in Vietnam.