The Egg and I (1947)

Directed by Chester Erskine

Time for a comedy for our Film of the Week! For a while after World War II, when a lot of soldier boys were going back to the farm they missed or they dreamed of carving out for themselves, there were a lot of comedies set out in the country. They were mostly good-humored, with some merry laughter at the supposedly simple ways down on the farm, and some merrier laughter at the really simple ways of city folk once they show up at a farm. On television, you had The Real McCoys, with a family transplanted from West Virginia out to California, led by the whistle-voiced old grandpa Amos (Walter Brennan), and all their misadventures, or The Beverly Hillbillies, one of those zany comedies that boldly marches right over the border of plausibility — with transplanted log-cabin Tennesseans, suddenly rich from an accidental oil strike, moving out to California with their rickety old truck and their shotguns and their down-home naivete and generosity and (in skinny little old Granny of happy memory) fire-sparking readiness to fight, especially with Yankees. Or it was The Andy Griffith Show, with the town of Mayberry, NC, where Otis the town drunk can expect a decent bed in the sheriff’s jail, and Barney the deputy is allowed only one bullet for his pistol, but he’s got to keep it in his pocket, and Floyd the barber spreads all the chatter a town needs to keep up its social life, and Barney and the sheriff Andy have to pretend to like Aunt Bee’s pickles, which requires a lot of pretending!

City people laughing at farmers, and farmers laughing at city people — that’s not as old as the hills, but as old as cities, anyhow. What happens when farmers go to the city is one thing. How about when city people try their hands at farming? Long before the absurd Oliver Wendell Douglas left his law practice in New York to go to Hooterville (and nobody knows what part of the country Hooterville is in) to get misty-eyed over some scraggly ears of corn, in that maddest of all mad sitcoms, Green Acres, we had our Film of the Week, The Egg and I, starring two of our favorites, Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as a young married couple, Bob and Betty MacDonald, who are starting out on a brave enterprise: they’re going to run a chicken farm. He’s all enthusiastic about it, and she, well, she goes along and tries very hard, and of course the house he buys is about as ramshackle as the one that Mr. Douglas in Green Acres bought from Mr. Haney the comical con-man and peddler. Eggs! There’s a fortune in them!

Sure, we’ve got to have bumps on the road — and pretty big bumps they are. Betty’s not exactly delighted at having to deal with ornery animals, the brave hunting dog and guard dog Bob buys is afraid of his own shadow, there’s a swanky divorcee who’s got a place down the road and she seems to have her eye on Bob, and you never know when a big storm is going to break out, or a fire, what with all that hay and other sorts of tinder in a barn. And then there are the neighbors! They are — in fact — Ma and Pa Kettle, and their eleven — “Or is it twelve?” Ma asks — children. Or maybe there are fifteen — who knows? Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride delighted the audiences so much that Universal Studios turned them into a regular franchise, making nine Ma and Pa Kettle movies, and they needed them, too, because those crazy comedies, with the big-boned and hoarse Ma and the lazy slow-drawling Pa, saved Universal from going bankrupt.

So then, if you like the Ma and Pa Kettle movies, which my father loved, here’s where those worthy characters first show up, in The Egg and I. But that’s not to say that they carry the film. Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert were terrific comic actors, and Fred, believe it or not, actually did run a substantial farm and vineyard in northern California, and it’s still going strong, as you can see. But then, a lot of those Hollywood people in those days had ranches or farms. You might say, “Well, I’m not surprised that Joel McCrea had a ranch, what with his doing all those westerns.” How about Claude Rains, working a 340-acre farm in Pennsylvania for 15 years, up to his ankles in mud and delighting in it?

A few years ago, I was riding in a car through central Illinois, and my host pointed my attention to vast fields of soybeans, nothing but soybeans as far as the eye could see, and he said, “Most of the time, it’s corporations that run these soybean farms, and nobody even really lives there.” What a thing. Give me Old MacDonald’s farm any day.

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