Friday, May 15, 2009

Ma and Pa Kettle in Cyberspace

Victoria Balloon described how Betty MacDonald’s novel and Universal Picture’s screen version of The Egg and I inspired the 1950s Ma and Pa Kettle movie series. Victoria picks up where she left off and provides an engaging behind the scenes look at this pop culture phenomenon.

In 1945 Betty Mac Donald’s “The Egg and I” was a wildly successful book, and in 1947 Universal Studios turned it into a successful film starring Claudette Colbert and Fred Mac Murray. While these two veteran actors brought a lighthearted comedic touch to their roles, it was a pair of secondary characters that became the favorites. Although Ma and Pa Kettle were only onscreen for 21 minutes, Marjorie Main’s gravel-voiced hollering and Percy Kilbride’s laconic replies made an indelible impression on urban and rural audiences alike. Main was nominated for Best Supporting Actress; Universal Studios and associate producer Leonard Goldstein sensed a goldmine.

There were eight films that Main and Kilbride made together as Ma and Pa Kettle, including The Egg and I. They were upper-end B films, taking on average three weeks to make for $400,000 or less. The first three films made Universal $8 million, and the entire run made $35 million. Leonard Goldstein produced all but one of the subsequent films. It is said that the Ma and Pa Kettle films along with Francis the talking mule brought Universal back from the brink of ruin, and though the critics panned the Kettle films, audiences in both the city and the country laughed. Goldstein remarked wryly, “Nobody likes my pictures but the public.”

The films built on one another as a sort of feature length serial. In Ma and Pa Kettle (1949) Pa enters a contest to win a free tobacco pouch and instead wins a futuristic Dream House with limitless technological comforts. The laughs center around Ma and Pa trying to figure out all the modern gadgets, while eldest Kettle Tom (Richard Long) has an on again off again romance with reporter Kim Parker (Meg Randall).

Pa no sooner gets the house figured out than he wins the Bubble-Ola Cola jingle contest and a trip to New York City. When Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950) they visit newlyweds Tom and Kim, who are having a few marital difficulties. A bank robber tries to dupe Pa into delivering stolen money to a gang in the city, but instead learns that there is no force more powerful than the destructive force of the Kettle Children.

With the help of Ma and Pa, Tom and Kim solve their differences, and in Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm (1951), the first Kettle grandchild is born! Kim’s parents arrive from Boston to stay at the house, but Mrs. Parker’s controlling ways drive the Kettles back to their old place — which might have untold amounts of uranium on the property! Swindlers are foiled and snooty in-laws are won over by the folksy truths and innate goodness of the Kettle clan. Watch Ma & Pa spin their wheels racing a train in this zany clip.

Having successfully married off the first son, Ma turns to the second child, Rosie, in Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair (1952). In order to send her to college, Ma hopes to win prize money for her jams and quilt at the fair, but in the kind of mix ups that could only happen to the Kettles, she ends up entering their old horse in a harness race. In order to save the town from the possibility of immense gambling debts, Ma throws the race and… Well, it’s better if the Kettles leave town till things blow over.

As it turns out, some friends of Mr. and Mrs. Parker had to cancel their vacation plans, sending Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation (1953) to Paris! Pa tries to “borrow” some pipe tobacco and instead gets involved with spies and murder. A true patriot, Pa is willing to help break up the international spy ring, but it’s Ma who shows us how to use an ash tray on the back of someone’s head.

It’s the third son, Elwin, who needs to go to college this time in Ma and Pa Kettle at Home (1954). Elwin writes a marvelous essay about modern farming techniques, and it could land him a scholarship. The problem is, in order to award the final prize, the essay judges have to spend a week on the farm! Pa “borrows” from his neighbors to try to spruce up the place, but it’s the Kettle family’s Christmas spirit that teaches cranky neighbor John Maddocks and the judges what makes a farm a Home.

In Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955) we see where Elwin got his talent for embellishment. Pa’s been sending letters to his cousin in Hawaii telling him that he’s a big banking executive, so when Rodney Kettle’s pineapple farm runs into difficulties, it’s only natural that he ask “P.A. Kettle” to come to Waikiki and save the business. It’s possible that Pa has met his match this time — Papa Lotus (Charles Lung) may be even lazier than he is! Fortunately Mama Lotus (Hilo Hattie) and the 12 Lotus children team up with Ma Kettle to save Pa from rival corporate thugs. Pineapple will never taste the same.

During this time Universal cartoons under the direction of Walter Lantz even introduced a brief series of animated “Maw and Paw” cartoons (1953-55). The first is an unabashed knock-off of the Ma and Pa Kettle movie: Milford the Pig (billed as “The Smart One”) oinks the answer to a radio show question and the family wins a modern car. The car’s gadgets give them no end of trouble until they run it into a tree, whereupon it is changed into a broken-down model-T, and the family is content. While the cartoons were never as popular as the films, audiences would have immediately recognized their source material.

The Ma and Pa Kettle films possess continuity in part because several of the supporting characters – Birdie Hicks and her perpetually unwell mother, fast talking salesman Billy Reed and several of the Kettle children — were introduced in The Egg and I and played by the same actors throughout the different films. However, the film depictions of these characters are very different from Betty MacDonald’s original versions. In her novel the Kettles are a composite of families MacDonald met during her time on the Olympic peninsula, and her descriptions are not flattering. On Ma Kettle:

Her whole front was dirty and spotted and she wiped her hands continually on one or other of her stomachs. She had also a disconcerting habit of reaching up under her dress and adjusting something in the vicinity of her navel and of reaching down the front of her dress and adjusting her large breasts. These adjustments were not, I learned later, confined to either the privacy of the house or a female gathering — they were made anywhere — any time. “I itch — so I scratch — so what!” was Mrs. Kettle's motto. (p. 114)

And on Pa Kettle’s method of “borrowing”:

Mr. Kettle broke the silence “Thingth ith putty tough thith year. [We learned the hard way that this was his stock approach to borrowing.] Yeth thir. Tough! The boys WON’T HELP MAW AND ME [his voice seemed to break bounds and rose and fell like the crescendos of a siren] and we can’t do it all alone and I GOT TWO THICK COWTH AND WE wondered if you folkth would give uth a hand becauth the boyth are working in the campth in the woodth logging and I CAN’T PLAOW ALONE AND THE OLD lady wondered if when you come down YOU WOULD BRING a little kerothine and a little pullet masth, ten cupth of FLOUR AND A FEW RAITHINS if you got ‘em.” (p. 118)





In the film versions, Ma and Pa’s oldest children are always well-groomed, intelligent and grammatical, but with the exception of Elwin (“A lank-haired mechanical genius”) and one of the Kettle’s daughters, Tits (“Even though Mrs. Kettle had already explained that the name Tits was short for sister, I found it impossible to hear the name without flinching”) MacDonald’s book dismisses the rest of the Kettles as “shiftless, ignorant and non-progressive but not important.” (p. 116) Clearly Ma and Pa Kettle became beloved characters not through MacDonald’s writing, but through the talents of the two wonderful character actors who portrayed them: Marjorie Man and Percy Kilbride.

When Marjorie Main began her career in theater, she changed her name from Mary Tomlinson to avoid embarrassing her father, who was a minister. She worked the Chautauqua and Orpheum vaudeville circuits and debuted on Broadway in 1916. She stopped performing for a time when in 1921 she married Dr. Stanley LeFevre Krebs, a doctor of psychology, but with his permission she later returned to the stage and began to do film. In 1935 Dr. Krebs died, and it was one of her particular quirks that she never stopped communicating with Dr. Krebs, even after his death. She would speak — and listen to his replies — sometimes in the middle of filming a scene.

She never remarried, and several authors in recent biographies have said that later in her life she had a long-term relationship with actress Spring Byington.

Main’s first film was A House Divided (1931), but her breakthrough films came from her re-creation of two of her Broadway roles: that of Baby Face Martin’s mother in Dead End (1937) and the down-to-earth landlady Lucy in The Women (1939).

Hoping to recapture the chemistry between Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, MGM paired Beery with Main in a string of 1940s comedies, beginning with Barnacle Bill. During this time Main played character roles in both big and small pictures, often as the mother of villains (Dark Command), matrons (The Harvey Girls), and housemaids (Meet Me in St. Louis).

Before The Egg and I, Main and Kilbride had never worked together. Some mistakenly include Feudin', Fussin' and A-Fightin' from 1948 as a Kettle movie, but though both Main and Kilbride were in it, they did not actually play Ma and Pa Kettle. Eventually Main came to admire him greatly. "I consider Percy the best dead-pan actor in the business," she declared, "And a complete gentleman."

But for a man who played hundreds of roles in film, stock productions, and on Broadway, there isn’t a lot of biographical information on Percy Killbride. He was born in San Francisco to Irish-immigrant parents and was in theater since the age of eleven, beginning as an usher. His San Francisco theater career was put on hold by World War I; Kilbride was a Private in the army and served in France. His Broadway debut was in 1928 with The Buzzard, with his film debut as Jakey in White Woman five years later (1933). Like Pa Kettle, Percy Kilbride was a quiet, unassuming man. Unlike Pa Kettle, Kilbride dressed impeccably.

In 1942 when Warner Brothers wanted to do a film version of the popular play George Washington Slept Here, they cast Jack Benny as the caretaker, Mr. Kimber. Benny went to New York to see the play for himself and was bowled over by Kilbride’s understated comic performance. Benny insisted Kilbride play the role of Mr. Kimber in the film version (which worked out well for him, because Benny got the lead). Several takes were ruined because Benny could not stop laughing at Kilbride’s deadpan delivery. At 54, Kilbride’s film career began in earnest; he too became a character actor, playing the closed mouthed (Keeper of the Flame), plain country type (State Fair).

MacDonald’s book takes place on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, but aside from a brief scene of a stationmaster reading The Seattle Times and fleeting references to Cape Flattery, The Egg and I and to a greater degree, the Kettle films, seem to unfold in a Rural America that is vaguely New England (Kilbride’s accent) vaguely Western (there are Indians) and vaguely Southern (the Kettle’s ramshackle home). This is undoubtedly intentional on the part of Universal. The Kettle films were part of a long line of hillbilly-themed entertainment that began in the late 1920s and became popularized in the 1930s. The term “hillbilly” is of uncertain origin, but one theory is that it was a combination of the Scotch-Irish “hill-folk” and “billy,” a term meaning “fellow” or “guy.”

As the American frontier pushed westward after the Civil War, the Appalachian region remained largely unchanged, rural and isolated because of its rough terrain. Short-stories and features in popular magazines like Scribner’s and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine depicted the region and its inhabitants as part of a backwards “otherness” existing in nineteenth-century America while the rest of the nation embraced modern industrialization. The famous feud of the Hatfields versus the McCoys in 1880 fueled the idea of quick-tempered mountain men, and by the 1930s the stereotypes of a people alternately atavistic and ridiculous were cemented into popular culture with Paul Webb’s illustrations in Esquire magazine.

Why were hillbillies and hillbilly culture so popular with Depression-Era audiences? Very possibly because the overwhelming feature of 1930s America was unemployment. As one scholar puts it: “The early 1930s forced middle-class urban Americans to consider seriously the unthinkable possibility that the whole damn shooting match of the American economic system itself was about to land them back in Rural Subsistence Hell.” Most Americans left farming a generation ago; the prospect of being driven back to it by economic hardship was gloomy indeed.

Depression audiences loved any entertainments that allowed them to escape fear through laughter, and caricatures and stereotypes of many groups, including hillbillies, were abundant. Urban audiences could take smug pleasure in laughing at hillbillies as “other;” rural folks could laugh at them as somebody even dumber than they were often portrayed. Both urban and rural audiences could feel better about the economic system that had them at their mercy; so long as somebody was beneath them, they must be moving up.

The 1930s had a whole host of entertainments featuring backwoods humor. Radio shows like Lum and Abner and The Grand Ole Opry began nationwide broadcasting in 1932. Comic strips such as Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner and Billy De Beck’s Snuffy Smith appeared in 1934. There were animated hillbilly cartoons such as Friz Freeling’s When I Yoo Hoo (1936), Tex Avery’s A Feud There Was (1938) and Bob Clampett’s Naughty Neighbors (1939). Even Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop managed some down-home clogging in Musical Mountaineers (1939).

But after World War II the stereotype of the inbred, feral, regressive hillbilly was seen as more offensive. Many people from Appalachian left the region for Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern cities to work in wartime factories; the stereotypes of the quick tempered, drunken, lascivious ne’er do well of sub-human intelligence were not appreciated.

Though the films retained some stereotypes (naiveté, disregard for strict hygiene, and an aversion to physical labor) Ma and Pa Kettle were less about hillbilly caricature and more a commentary on post-war values, emphasizing the importance of large, nuclear families and sacrifice for one’s children (even if Ma can’t keep their names straight). With humor combining ridicule and empathy, audiences could laugh at the bumbling pair out of place in modern cities like Paris and New York, and even their own Dream Home.

Though Ma and Pa were slovenly, lethargic and completely without middle class proprieties, they appealed to a post-War America also increasingly uncomfortable with the pace of modern life. Producer Goldstein reflected, “Maybe people feel a little superior and maybe at the same time they recognize a lot of things about themselves,” and Kilbride himself said, “Anybody, even the lowliest bum, can feel superior to the Kettles.” Even now we can laugh at and enjoy these films because we see that the Kettles are basically good people. They love their kids and each other, and no matter how ridiculous the scrapes they get into because of their naïve outlook on life, it is that same unmodernized goodness that sees them through to triumph.

However, the comedic premise of the Kettles can only go so far. Once Universal sent Ma and Pa to Hawaii, where else could they go? After Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki, Percy Kilbride retired, possibly because of early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. There were two Kettle movies without Kilbride: The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956) (with Arthur Hunnicutt as Pa’s brother Sedgewick Kettle) and The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm (1957) (with Parker Fennelly as Pa Kettle) but without Kilbride, neither one can truly be called a Ma and Pa Kettle film.

The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm was the final feature for Marjorie Main. She made a few television appearances, enjoyed riding in the Hollywood Christmas parade, and died in 1975 at 85. In 1964 Kilbride and friend actor Ralf Belmont were crossing a street in Hollywood when both were struck by a speeding car. Belmont was killed instantly, but Kilbride survived. Brain surgery could not save him; he died weeks later of pneumonia and his injuries at age 76.

While it is fascinating to study how images of rural life and the hillbilly came to be a part of American popular culture, ultimately one cannot dissect what an audience of a particular time and place calls comedy. the 1960s television series Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies were direct descendants of The Egg and I and the Ma and Pa Kettle films , and they also relied on the comedy of the “fish out of water” — either putting the country folk into a mansion, or putting the naïve city dweller back on the farm.

The appeal of the “fish out of water” comedy, and ultimately the Kettles, lies partly in the story, but in large part lies in the incredible talents of Main and Kilbride, who brought the characters to life. Simply put, when MacDonald’s version of Ma Kettle scratches herself, it’s disgusting; when Marjorie Main’s version does it, it’s funny.

Now that’s comedy, folks.
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For Further Reading:
Anthony Harkins, “Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon.” Oxford University Press US, 2005. Tim Hollis, “Ain't That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century.” Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008. Jerry Wayne Williamson, "Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies.” UNC Press, 1995.
Betty MacDonald’s book, “The Egg and I” is a bitingly witty and entertaining read; however, published in 1945, it does contain all the racial prejudices of its day. It can be found at Amazon.com, or even at your local library (All quotes were taken from the original 1945 edition).

Period movie reviews are always interesting. Read what the critics at the New York Times thought of Ma and Pa Kettle, Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm, and Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair. Notice that at one of the movie openings Percy Kilbride performed live onstage! The Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle Volumes 1 and 2 can be purchased online at Turner Classic Movies.

Watch this wonderful bit of down-home logic as Ma and Pa Kettle show Billy Reed how to do math in Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm (1951)

Friday, May 1, 2009

The Egg and I: Which Came First?

First was the real life experience, then the book, magazine serialization and movie version followed by literary and movie spin-offs. The Egg and I has a rich amusing back story and contributor Victoria Balloon takes us behind the scenes.

Today’s movie audiences have rediscovered The Egg and I (1947), a movie based on the hugely successful autobiographical story of Betty MacDonald published just two years previously.

In this charming film starry-eyed former GI Bob MacDonald (Fred MacMurray) and his thoroughly urban bride (Claudette Colbert) go to the country to live an idealized version of raising chickens only to discover that life on the farm ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The story unfolds as a series of vignettes based on Bob’s dream of owning a chicken farm while his wife Betty gamely copes with the situations she finds herself in — up to a point. Neighboring chicken rancher Harriet Putnam (Louise Allbritton) possesses an authority with animals and an ability to handle farm life that Betty lacks, eventually becoming a rival for Bob’s affections. Though she did not exist in MacDonald’s book, her presence in the film provides the unifying thread and moves the plot forward.

(Unfortunately, the relationship between MacDonald and her husband did not end as well in life as it did in the movie; after four years without plumbing or electricity, the real Betty MacDonald took her two daughters and divorced her husband. A decade later she married Donald C. MacDonald and moved to Vashon Island in Puget Sound.)

Claudette Colbert is well-known to audiences as a star of both film and Broadway in works ranging from screwball comedy to drama. She made her Broadway debut in 1923 with The Wild Westcotts and her first film when a theatrical producer recommended her for a role in Frank Capra’s only critical and financial disaster, For the Love of Mike. A silent film from 1927, it is now believed to be lost.

Appearing with Fredric March in Manslaughter in 1930 and as Poppeia two years later in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross began her reputation as a talented actress, and winning an Oscar for her role in It Happened One Night sealed it. In a career spanning over 50 years she was nominated for two more Academy Awards; all told she made over 80 films and television specials.

Fred MacMurray is most easily remembered for his roles in Disney classics such as The Shaggy Dog as well as his long running role as widower Steve Douglas in My Three Sons. He began his acting career on Broadway, appearing in the 1930 hit production of Three's a Crowd with Sydney Greenstreet and Clifton Webb.

MacMurray’s films are not as well-remembered as Colbert’s, and this is unfortunate. Like director Mitchell Leisen, with whom he made nine films at Paramount Studios, MacMurray’s work in the 30s seems to be largely forgotten by critics.

During this time MacMurray was in good films playing against excellent actresses — Hands Across the Table with Carole Lombard and Alice Adams with Katherine Hepburn. However, his most interesting roles came later when he was cast against type, such as amoral insurance agent Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and philandering executive Jeff D. Sheldrake in The Apartment (both films directed by Billy Wilder). In his 50 year career he made over 95 films and TV specials.

The Egg and I holds up so well today because of the easy chemistry between stars MacMurray and Colbert; the pair made eight films together, beginning with The Gilded Lilly in 1935 and ending with The Last Family Honeymoon in 1949. However, audiences today love the film not so much because of the appeal of MacMurray and Colbert, but because of the chemistry between another pair: Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main, in the first onscreen appearance of that down-home couple, Ma and Pa Kettle.

With so much going for the film it’s difficult to understand why it was not well-reviewed when it was released. Indeed, the New York Times movie review on April 25, 1947 isn’t shy about listing the film’s faults:

For the nearest this watered-down rewrite gets to the solid soil is the dirt on the farm sets constructed on a studio soundstage. And the nearest it comes to realizing any of the diary's observation and wit is in a few farcified re-creations of some of its milder episodes.

That may be because the film's authors, Chester Erskine and Fred F. Finklehoffe, were too much intimidated by the cleanly Production Code to attempt a legitimate reflection of the racier substance of the book. But we rather have a suspicion that they were a little more concerned with making a quaint and cozy cut-up for the reliable women's trade.

Just what exactly was in a book about chicken farming that wouldn’t get by the Hollywood Production Code? As it turns out, plenty, which may in part be why the book was such a huge success.

While family and friends enjoyed MacDonald’s wry telling of her misadventures, the book never would have happened were it not for MacDonald’s sister, Mary Bard Jensen. While at a party, Jensen told an agent for a publishing company that her sister was writing a book, and MacDonald created the proposal for "The Egg and I" to save her sister embarrassment. The agent liked what he saw and a manuscript followed. Though at first rejected, the manuscript was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and eventually published by J. B. Lippencott in 1945.

The book did extremely well, selling 3 million copies in hardback with editions in 32 languages, and made the MacDonald clan instant celebrities; in 1946 they appeared in a Life magazine spread. Ironically, the MacDonalds used the proceeds from "The Egg and I" to make improvements on their farm, building a barn and… a chicken coop. Extra eggs were later sold on Vashon Island and at Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

MacDonald continued to write about her life, following "The Egg and I" with "The Plague and I" (1948) and "Onions in the Stew" (1954). However she may be best remembered as the author of such children’s classics as "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" (1947) and "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm" (1954).

Published just after the end of World War II, Americans were ready for a laugh, and MacDonald’s book was well-received because of her self-deprecating humor and acidly-funny prose. Her experiences take place on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, and she broods on the rains the region is known for, saying “Along about November I began to forget when it hadn't been raining and became as one with all the characters in all of the novels about rainy seasons, who rush around banging their heads against the walls, drinking water glasses of straight whiskey and moaning, 'The rain! The rain! My God, the rain!” (p. 66)

Despite being well up in the mountains and many of the farms in the area without electricity or plumbing, wives were still expected to keep house as well as any woman with modern conveniences. Farm women were up and ready at 4 A.M. — a practice MacDonald could never get used to. One morning she had her nightgown still on at 8:30 A.M. when an unexpected visitor arrived:

I tried to sidle into the bedroom and slip on a housedress… but the puppy chose that moment to be sick and instead of throwing up in one place became hysterical and ran around and around the kitchen belching forth at intervals… [It] didn’t improve the situation any, especially as Sport, our large Chesapeake retriever, managed to squeeze past me when I opened up the door to put the mop bucket out, and bounded in to a first one then the other large muddy paw on Mrs. Wiggins’ starched lap. She screamed as though he had amputated her leg at the hip, which of course waked the baby… As I bathed the baby, Mrs. Wiggins handed me flat knife-edged statements, as though she were dealing cards, on how by seven o’clock that morning she had fed and cared for her chickens, milked five cows, strained and separated the milk, cleaned out the milkhouse, cooked breakfast, set the bread, folded down the ironing and baked a cake. It took all of the self-control I had to keep from screaming, “SO WHAT!” (p. 136)

It quickly becomes apparent why the book needed to be watered down if it were to be made as a film. MacDonald is a product of her times, and her descriptions of Northwest Coast Native Americans are by today’s standards racist: “The coast Indian is squat, bowlegged, swarthy, flat-faced, broad-nosed, dirty, diseased, ignorant and tricky. There were few exceptions among the many we knew.” (p. 210) Her accounts of their drunkenness and wife-beating could never be dealt with under the Production Code. Hollywood instead chose to make the characters of Geoduck and Crowbar into the stereotype of all things white America believed about “Indians,” and the result is pure farce.

Also at issue were MacDonald’s descriptions of her neighbors and the language that they used:

Mrs. Kettle began most of her sentences with Jeeeeesus Key-rist and had a stock disposal for everything of which she did not approve, or any nicety of life which she did not possess. “Ah she’s so high and mighty with her ‘lectricity,” Mrs. Kettle sneered. “She don’t bother me none—I just told her to take her old vacuum cleaner and stuff it.” Only Mrs. Kettle described in exact detail how this feat was to be accomplished. (p. 115)


While MacDonald does indeed have real affection for Ma Kettle, her husband describes Pa Kettle as “a lazy, lisping sonofabitch.” (p. 116) In the film a wildfire begins when Pa Kettle’s whiskey still explodes. In the book Pa Kettle deliberately sets the fire to avoid having to clean up the manure he has piled high against his barn. The sharp depictions of her neighbors actually caused the family which the Kettles were based on to file two lawsuits; the first was settled out of court, the second decided in favor of MacDonald and her publisher. In order to make the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle sympathetic and funny, they had to be watered down. The success of the film versions of Ma and Pa Kettle lies mainly with the wonderful portrayals by Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride. This role garnered Main an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The film version of "The Egg and I" for all that it may be “watered down” from the book, still had enormous popular appeal. It spawned a short-lived television comedy serial and was the first of eight Ma and Pa Kettle films. The Egg and I contains themes that film and the new medium of television would continue to explore: GIs returning from World War II to live lives they dreamed of in foxholes and nuclear families without material wealth focused on being together and helping one another. A generation later televisions shows like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies poked fun not only at our rural pasts, but also at our obsessions for modernity and “having it all.”

Technological change advanced rapidly after World War II, and while the American public was content to settle down to stability, it was at times bewildered by modern conveniences and countless choices increasingly available in bulging supermarkets. Ma and Pa Kettle might marvel in the modern, but they are not ashamed of their lack of it; they just carry on blithely in their own way. Audiences might laugh at the countrified manners and rural life of the Kettles… but in the midst of post-war pressure to “keep up with the Joneses,” they might also yearn for their independent ease.

Betty MacDonald’s prose still reads well even if her views on race do not. "The Egg and I" is certainly worth a read, and can be found on Amazon, or even at your local library (All quotes were taken from the original 1945 edition).
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Here you can watch the trailer for the re-release of The Egg & I ~~~