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| Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride |
MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO TOWN (1950). Director: Charles Lamont.
Pa Kettle (Percy Kilbride) wins another contest for a soda with the prize being an all-expenses paid trip to New York City! At first Pa and Ma Kettle (Marjorie Main) have trouble coming up with a babysitter for their fifteen rambunctious children, but along comes "Shotgun" Mike (Charles McGraw), a thief hiding out in town. Ma at least has some reservations about leaving the children with a complete stranger (although they prove to be more than he can handle), but she thinks he has a kind face, and off they go to Manhattan. There they encounter more problems with Mike's cronies, and discover some marital woes for son Tom (Richard Long) and daughter-in-law Kim (Meg Randall).
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| Richard Long and Meg Randall |
Ma and Pa Kettle were introduced in
The Egg and I and proved so popular that they got their own feature,
Ma and Pa Kettle. This led into several sequels, of which this is the first.
Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town is not only consistently cute and amusing, with great performances from Main and Kilbride and good work from the rest of the cast, but it avoids the cliche of New Yorkers being portrayed as horrible city slickers taking advantage of the Kettles; in fact, the pair actually like New York and the people who live there (although, of course, they're just as glad to get home). Ma and Pa exhibit sheer delight in seeing Manhattan from a cab as they stand up in a hole in the taxi's ceiling, and there's a great bit with Pa dropping a cup of water from the top of the RCA building and encountering that same water later on.
Verdict: Very cute picture. ***.
Gloriously funny. These were shown on Sunday mornings when I was a kid--they would go through all the Shirley Temples, then move on to the Kettles, then onto the Charlie Chans, and so on...
ReplyDeleteHas been a while. My other fave Marjorie films are of course The Women and Meet Me In St Louis....
-C
Main was a true original -- there was simply no one like her. She was most frequently cast in her loud and boisterous roles, but she had more range than that, although she rarely got an opportunity to show it. In any case, in whatever she was in, she was always marvelous!
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