2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A delight., June 23, 2010
This review is from: The Egg and I [VHS] (VHS Tape)
The Egg and I (Chester Erskine, 1947)
The Egg and I, by far Chester Erskine's most-remembered film sixty years after its release, is paradoxically remembered more for two pieces of trivia that have nothing at all to do with the film: its contemporary popularity produced two huge spinoffs. First, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride reprised their roles as Ma and Pa Kettle in a series of movies that lasted from 1949 through 1957. Second came the TV series Green Acres, which thirty-five years after its debut is still in syndication on television. (Less well-known but equally as memorable: Betty MacDonald, who wrote the original memoir upon which the film is based, followed it up with a sequel, The Plague and I, about a year she spent in a sanitarium with tuberculosis in the thirties.) Amidst all that, the original movie kind of got lost, at least in relation to the Kettles and Zsa Zsa Gabor. It richly deserves a rediscovery (as do a few of Erskine's other screwball comedies).
Fred MacMurray (Double Indemnity) and Caludette Colbert (It Happened One Night) star as Bob and Betty MacDonald, city slickers who relocate to the country after Bob, on a whim, buys a chicken farm. The film recounts the couple's trails and (often hilarious) tribulations trying to get the place up and running, but pays equal time to their neighbors, who welcome the MacDonalds to country life with open arms. Some, in fact, a little too open; Betty begins to suspect that Bob may be falling under the wiles of Harriet Putnam (Son of Dracula's Louise Allbritton), a gentlewoman-farmer from up the road.
As expected, MacMurray and Colbert are wonderful doing what they do, but the entire cast comports itself with the ability one would expect from a top-quality movie (including, obviously, Main and Kilbride; Main, in fact, landed the movie's only Oscar nomination). Not at all what anyone expected from what was supposed to be a minor comedy film. A few minor characters may offend modern sensibilities (especially Geoduck and Crowbar, a pair of local Native American fishmongers), but after all these years, the film is still a delight from beginning to end. Highly recommended. ****
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