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Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main |
MA AND PA KETTLE (aka
The Further Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle/1949). Director: Charles Lamont.
"
I still wish you'd fix the roof of the hen house. Would you like to sit in the broiling sun and have to lay eggs besides?" -- Ma to Pa.
Lovable hillbillies Ma and Pa Kettle (Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main), who first appeared in
The Egg and I as supporting characters, are in danger of being thrown out of their messy and cluttered house along with their sixteen children. Fortunately, Pa wins a tobacco slogan contest and he and his brood become the proud possessors of a new ultra-modern home. All Pa really wanted was a new pouch for his tobacco, and he isn't crazy about all of the new-fangled inventions in his swanky domicile. Then the jealous termagant Birdie (Esther Dale) and her mother (Isabel O'Madigan) maintain that Pa stole the slogan from somebody else ...
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The Kettle children minus Tom |
It's amazing that Pa has so many children when he hardly seems to have the energy to get out of bed -- maybe that's his problem! Along with Kilbride and Main, we have Dale and O'Madigan, as well as Richard Long [
House on Haunted Hill] as eldest son Tom Kettle (who's invented a new incubator) , as holdovers from
The Egg and I, and there's also a guest appearance by Ida Moore, reprising her role as a rather dotty old lady. (One could argue that it's not in the best of taste to present a lonely old woman who talks to her late husband in front of people as if he were still alive and make a joke of it.) Still,
Ma and Pa Kettle is an amusing enough picture with excellent performances. Meg Randall [
Without Warning!] plays a pretty writer who becomes Tom's love interest. There were no less than six sequels to this film, making it a fairly successful movie series of the forties and fifties.
Verdict: The two leads are funny characters and actors, and Main is especially winsome. **3/4.
2 comments:
These serial films used to be on Saturday mornings after cartoons....we'd have one season of Shirley Temples, then a season of Charlie Chans, then Ma and Pa Kettles. Marjorie Main was the queen of all character actresses at MGM, I am so glad she got to headline her own film series.
Have not seen these for years and need to now!
-Chris
I think this one is readily available but the others are hard to find. May be an out of print box set of them all. I first saw all of the films you mention on Saturday morning TV as well, or else the afternoon movie. Marjorie Main was great, and a better, more versatile actress than many people realized.
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