Ma and Pa Kettle

The Further Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle almost seamlessly picks up where The Egg and I left off. For the first solo adventure of the Kettles a new writing team and director is introduced. Leonard Goldstein, associate producer of The Egg and I, was producer of The Further Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle. With many of the characters played by the same actors and actresses the focus from the MacDonalds to the Kettles works very well. There is a reference to Ma beating Birdie Hicks for first prize at the fair for her quilt, an import scene in The Egg and I. The prize money from the quilt contest was to be used to send Tom Kettle to college. In this movie Tom is returning home as a college graduate.

There are two plots intertwined in this movie. One is the comedy of the simple mountain family moving into a state of the art modern house. The other is a light morality play on how environment affects children as they grow up.

Pa Kettle (Percy Kilbride) wanted a free tobacco pouch for entering a contest, and ended up winning a house. His disappointment at not getting the free tobacco pouch is played for laughs quite a bit. When Pa plays with dynamite he is totally oblivious to the explosion. Kilbride never flinched in the scene as the debris from the explosion fell around him. He played the part to perfection. In his autobiography, Jack Benny mentioned how impressed he was with Percy Kilbride's deadpan delivery. Kilbride took that comedic device to a high level of perfection.

Ma (Marjorie Main) and Pa move into the new house with modern conveniences that confuse Ma and Pa almost as much as they help them. Ma adapts far more quickly than Pa. Included with the modern conveniences is a television, a very new household item in 1949. Moving walls, hidden beds, and plumbing fixtures are used as comic props, but the attention is on Ma and Pa, never the props themselves.

Tom Kettle (Richard Long) meets Kim Parker (Meg Randall), a magazine writer who feels that hygiene and environment are essential for children to realize success as adults. Tom is a bright, self-made man who contradicts the theory that success can only come from a pristine environment. This subject is briefly discussed in a couple of scenes, but left to subside. It was also the only serious discussion in this otherwise whimsical movie.

Seeing the Kettles moving out of their run-down old house to move to a new house would almost be a disaster if it were not for the characters staying true to themselves. Ma was the practical one, just as she had been in the The Egg and I. Pa was the fish out of water that provided the best comedy. He never felt at home in the new house, but the actual location of a comfortable bed would never be of concern to him.

When you watch Ma and Pa Kettle, you get what you expect - lazy Pa, all-enduring Ma, raising 15 kids, who, except for oldest son and college graduate Tom (Richard Long - yes, that Richard Long from Big Valley) are mostly just there for the sake of chaos. But the gags can be a good laugh as Pa wins a new modern house in a contest and the Kettles move from the rundown farm to the high-tech home of the future. The beds in the new house that fold into the wall unexpectedly, the closet in the old house where everything falls out when you open the door, Pa's clothes all shrinking when he gets stuck in the clothes dryer, and my favorite - Pa flopping up and down in his chair to turn on the radio (which somehow is always playing "Hold That Tiger.").

A love interest for Tom (Meg Randall), a magazine writer who wants to write about the Kettles, exposes some of Tom's embarrassment about his family and their poverty as he has moved on to higher education and sophistication, but love will win out and so will the Kettles just being who they are. This is not a deep thinking movie and not even high comedy, but it's fun.

After cracking up "The Egg and I" (1947), scene-stealers Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride went on a roll for Universal International. Beginning in their own movie series, "Ma and Pa Kettle" are about to be thrown out of their untidy abode. The family is saved when Mr. Kilbride wins a tobacco company contest, with the slogan "For smokin' or chewin' King Henry's most fittin', it smells awful good and it's dandy for spittin!" The Kettles move into their grand prize, a "prefabricated model house of the future." The ABC (good name for a TV station) television cameras document their amusing arrival.

Returning from college, handsome Richard Long (as Tom) re-joins his backwoodsy family. Along the way, he finds love with pretty Meg Randall (as Kim Parker), who is writing a series of magazine articles on the Kettles and their fifteen frightening "childrun". The plot thickens when family nemesis Esther Dale (as Birdie) discovers Kilbride may have plagiarized his winning slogan. Thanks to its appealing old cast, the film is a winner, too. Lovely old Ida Moore (as Emily) and "Albert" make a point with charm (on the train); and, the entire effort works as a satire on the effects of modernization on society.

******* Ma and Pa Kettle (4/1/49) Charles Lamont ~ Marjorie Main, Percy Kilbride, Richard Long, Meg Randall

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF MA AND PA KETTLE (originally titled simply MA AND PA KETTLE during original release, apparently "Further" was a reissue title or for television) launches the popular movie series starring the scene-stealing characters from the 1947 Claudette Colbert/Fred MacMurray blockbuster THE EGG AND I, Ma and Pa Kettle (Colbert and MacMurray's characters are never mentioned in any of the MPK films). Often mistakenly thought to be set in the rural South, the Kettle movies are actually if discreetly set in rural Washington state(note the local paper shown is from Seattle) so technically the Kettles are not hillbillies as is usually presumed (the later film THE KETTLES OF THE OZARKS to the contrary, in which their location was indeed shifted to the South.)

The local community is in an uproar over the state of the dilapidated Kettle home and vote to condemn it and force the Kettles to move (poetic license as the Kettles clearly live outside of city limits in a secluded area and a dump like theirs would hardly have been an uncommon site in a rural community in the 1940's.) Ready for a fight, Ma arms her brood with slingshots and peashooters and she herself totes a more menacing shotgun but the matter is instantly settled when Pa turns out to have won grand prize in a slogan contest for a tobacco company, a fully furnished modern home (remarkably one which just so happens to have been built in their own county and one close enough to hear dynamite explosions at the Kettle fortress). The community now raises the Kettles to local heroes, inciting the wrath of local shrew Birdie Hicks (played by the wonderful Esther Dale) who is out to prove Pa didn't concoct the slogan himself.

Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as sensational as the Kettles. Ms. Main, on the eve of 60, plays mom to a brood of school-aged kids but her performance is so perfect it seems a minor quibble. Kilbride manages to make a lazy, self-centered character appealing, no small feat either. Dashing young Richard Long as the oldest son is extremely appealing as the lone sensitive, intelligent Kettle and the cast is dotted with many delightful character actors in support, including several who were also in THE EGG AND I, notably Ms. Dale as mean old bat Birdie Hicks and the delightfully impish Ida Moore as Emily. I particularly enjoyed elderly character actress Isabel O'Madigan as Birdie's parrot of a mother. Ms. O'Madigan was a supporting player in films of the 1910's, retiring late in the decade only to return as a bit player in the late 1940's. The only talkies she was billed in were her two stints as Mrs. Hicks and this was her final film, passing away in early 1951 at age 79.

"The modern home" segment has some good sight gags that still hold up today and it's interesting how "modern" or even space-age this home seems to 21st century audiences, including a wide-screen television decades before they were actually produced on the general market. Also a fun bit of trivia is seeing the Kettles interviewed by a fictional TV network "ABC Television" several years before there actually was such a network.

Ma and Pa Kettle, much like Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, pump out pretty much the same jokes in this film as all there others, and that's ok.

They are so charming.

I don't think too many of the current generation will stumble across them, which is a shame :)