Post by Kaz ~;~ on Jul 20, 2010 5:28:38 GMT -5
Ma and Pa Kettle::
Original film posterMa and Pa Kettle are comic characters who first appeared in the 1945 best-selling novel The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald about life on a chicken farm. She based them on real-life farming neighbors in Washington state, U.S.A. In 1947, Universal Pictures adapted it into a film starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, with Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as the Kettles. After positive audience reaction, Ma and Pa Kettle and their fifteen children became the subject a series of their own very popular comic films.
Premise::
Pa (Franklin Kettle, played by Percy Kilbride) is a gentle, slow-speaking, slow-thinking and lazy man. His only talents appear to be avoiding work and winning contests. Ma (Phoebe Kettle, played by Marjorie Main) is a robust country woman with a potato sack figure, raucous, more ambitious and smarter than Pa, but not by much, and can easily be fooled. She is content with her role as mother to fifteen rambunctious, mischievous children on their ramshackle farm in rural Cape Flattery, Washington state. Because she has so many children, Ma Kettle sometimes gets their names confused. A misspelled sign "Be-ware of childrun" is posted in front of the farmhouse to warn unwanted visitors of hurled rocks, projectiles from slingshots, pea shooters and other missiles from the rowdy and unpredictable Kettle brood.
In the first film of the series, Ma and Pa Kettle, the family moves into a modern home with numerous electronic gadgets that Pa has won in a tobacco slogan writing contest.[1] As the series continued, various reasons were devised to have the family relocate to the "old place", sometimes for extended periods of time.
Much of the comedy is cornball humor arising from preposterous situations, such as Pa being mistaken for a wealthy industrialist ("P.A. Kettle" in Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki, 1955) or being jailed after he accidentally causes race horses to eat feed laced with concrete (Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair, 1952).
Films::
Ma and Pa Kettle first appeared in supporting roles as neighbors in The Egg and I (1947), starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as a refined city couple who move to a rural chicken farm. Marjorie Main, a notorious scene stealer and veteran character actress played a hardy country woman in dozens of films, so was a natural for the role of Ma Kettle. Main was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. After the success of The Egg and I, she and Percy Kilbride starred in their own series of Ma and Pa Kettle movies, which became box-office bonanzas for Universal Pictures.
Kilbride retired after making Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki due to an automobile accident, and the Pa Kettle character did not appear in The Kettles in the Ozarks. Arthur Hunnicutt played Pa's brother Sedgewick Kettle in that movie and in The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm, the last Kettle movie, Parker Fennelly played Pa Kettle.
======================
The ten Kettle films are:
1. The Egg and I - 1947
2. Ma and Pa Kettle - 1949
3. Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town - 1950
4. Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm - 1951
5. Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair - 1952
6. Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation - 1953
7. Ma and Pa Kettle at Home - 1954
8. Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki - 1955
9. The Kettles in the Ozarks - 1956
10. The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm - 1957
