When I was growing up, about 100 years ago, I used to watch UHF channels. A lot. And UHF, during my formative years, had lots of old, inexpensive content. Things like the Dead End Kids. Charlie Chan. Blondie & Dagwood movies. And Ma and Pa Kettle movies.
And I never watched them.
What a waste because I just watched the first of the SERIES, and it was pretty good. But let’s start with a little of the backstory.
Ma and Pa Kettle premiered in the Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert film, The Egg and I, which I really need to catch, too! Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride played Ma & Pa with Marjorie Main walking away with an Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actress. The film did well and the characters were so well received, they decided to focus on these side characters in a spinoff. The result, Ma & Pa Kettle (1949), is the film I will review in a moment…but it led to 9 Kettle films. They made a total of $35 million for the then-struggling studio.
At the time, horror films like Universal was best meant for, were losing favor and their huge success and low productions costs helped Universal when it really needed to find its feet. Many say the Kettle films literally saved Universal Studios.
Ma & Pa Kettle, for the unaware, was a film series about a backwoods squatter family in rural Cape Flattery, Washington. It featured fantastic character actors (including its stars) including lots of corny comedy.
In this first film, Pa wins a contest for a sales slogan (which was a big thing in the 50’s) and wins, get this, a dream house. Ma happily accepts the new “house of the future” but Pa can’t figure out the push button world. Some of the funniest parts, for a modern viewer, is seeing the 1950 view of the future.
It is fun to watch Ma and Pa interact as Ma forgets the names of her 15 children, Pa avoid any type of work that exists, and the dubious hygiene practices of everyone on screen. It feels very familiar like watching many of the other rural humor vehicles of the time.
As you might recall in the early 60s, not long after these films tore through the box office, had dozens of rural comedies led by Desilu productions like The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and the Beverly Hillbillies. I often wonder if rural comedy was a fad for a specific time, or if this humor lit upon a yearning in the country at the time…to go back to a simpler time.
Getting back to the film, it actually ages quite well…but….the B story, a hackneyed romance with the oldest Kettle son, is cringe worthy and frankly just awful. I think it is worth a viewing, if only to see where some really old jokes you have known forever, got their start.