The Egg and I (1947)

Toronto Film Society presented The Egg and I (1947) on Monday, August 19, 1985 in a double bill with The Facts of Life as part of the Season 38 Summer Series, Programme 6.

Production Company: Universal.  Producer & Director: Chester Erskine.  Screenplay: Chester Erskine and Fred Kinklehoffe, based on the novel by Betty Macdonald.  Art Director: Bernard Herzbrun.  Photography: Milton Krasner.  Editor: Russell Schoengarth.  Sound: Charles Felstead.  Music: Frank Skinner.

Cast:  Claudette Colbert (Betty MacDonald), Fred MacMurray (Bob MacDonald), Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle), Percy Kilbride (Pa Kettel), Louise Allbritton (Harriet Putnam), Richard Long (Tom Kettle), Billy Housse (Billy Reed), Ida Moore (Old Lady), Donald MacBride (Mr. Henty), Samuel S. Hinds (Sheriff), Esther Dale (Mrs. Hicks), Elizabeth Risdon (Betty’s Mother), John Burks (Golduck), Vic Potel (Crowbar), Fuzzy Knight (Cab Driver), Isabel O’Madigan (Mrs. Hicks’ Mother), Dorothy Vaughan (Maid), Sam MacDaniel (Waiter), Jesse Graves (Porter), Herbert Heywood (Mailman), Joe Bernard (Pettigrew), Ralph Littlefield (Photographer), Jack Baxley (Judge), Carl Bennett (Attendant), Howard Mitchell (Announcer), George Lloyd (Farm Hand), Robert Cherry, Joe Hiser, Joe Recht, Sammy Schultz, Joe Ploski (Goons), Hector V. Sarno (Burlaga), Lou Mason (Bergheimer), Judith Bryant, Gloria Moore, Eugene Persson, Diane Florentine, George McDonald, Colleen Alpaugh, Teddy Infuhr, Robert Winane, Diane Graeff, Kathleen Mackey, Robert Beyers (Kettle Children).

The Egg and I was the sixth film Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray made together and only one more was to follow, Family Honeymoon (1948).  The “partnership” began in 1935 with The Gilded Lily.  Colbert was then an established star at Paramount with such films to her credit as The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Cleopatra and Imitation of Life (1934) and, of course, It Happened One Night, also 1934, for which she won her Academy Award.  (Myrna Loy was the first choice for that role.  Lucky Claudette!  Later on, she lost out on two big pictures, State of the Union, where her co-star was to be Gary Cooper, and All About Eve in the starring role of Margo Channing.  Lucky Bette!)  Anyway, among those tested for the below-the-title, co-star role in The Gilded Lily was Fred MacMurray, a former saxophonist-vocalist-Broadway performer.  He’d begun his movie career as an extra in Girls Gone Wild (1929) but his feature film debut was in Friends of Mr. Sweeney (1934) starring Charlie Ruggles.  Colbert’s chic presence and impeccable timing and MacMurray’s middle-to-low-brow, good-natured  male  made a winning combination and The Gilded Lily was a romantic lark of a film.

Following this came another comedy, The Bride Came Home (1935) reuniting the talent quartet of producer-director Wesley Ruggles, (Charlie’s brother), scenarist Claude Binyon and the two stars.  Flippant and laugh provoking, but followed by Maid of Salem (1937), not at all funny, about witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.  Never a popular subject with Hollywood filmmakers, it was an area of American colonial history most Americans wished to forget.

Then came No Time for Love (1943), shown at TFS’s Annual Meeting this year, directed by the incomparable Mitchell Leisen.  Conflicting working schedules were blamed for six years elapsing since the two stars last appeared together.  They had almost been paired in Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940) and were actually set to do Leisen’s Take a Letter, Darling (1942), but at the last minute Paramount persuaded Colbert to take over the role intended for Carole Lombard in Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story.  Leisen, who had handled Colbert so beautifully in Midnight (1939) and Arise, My Love (1940) now had the opportunity to match her once again with MacMurray in No Time for Love.  The project was scripted by her past cooperative scenarist, Claude Binyon and Charles Lang, Jr., who would photograph eight of Colbert’s films, was behind the camera again, knowing well that the demanding star would only be lensed from face left or occasionally from front face.

Mitchell Leisen produced and directed the next Colbert-MacMurray picture, Practically Yours (1945) but times and tastes were changing and both stars were a bit past the light romantic-comedy period.  Nevertheless the move was a box office success.

Next followed tonight’s film The Egg and I, based on a big bestselling book about a city couple who try to start a chicken farm.  At this time the careers of both stars were definitely at a low point.  The Egg and I was that fluke success that made a bundle for Universal and revitalized the careers of both its stars–as well as engendering the Ma and Pa Kettle series, a pair of rural wonders played by Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride.  (A “Loving Couple Bonus” in the film!)

In his 1974 book Hollywood’s Great Love Teams, James Robert Parish makes the following observations on the film:

Obviously, in translating The Egg and I to the screen, it was necessary to remove most of the authoress’ racier sequences.  Nevertheless, it was a pity that much of the book’s earthy tang was distilled, that a phony romantic triangle was inserted for conventional audience appeal, and that technical customs of the time allowed the outdoorsy film to be filmed on obvious soundstage sets.  As Bosley Crowther (New York Times) pointed out, “…a good opportunity was here lost to do a delightful satire upon the movement back to the farm.”

Most of the oncamera misadventures fall, of course, to Colbert, because it is supposed to be always funnier to watch a well-bred miss run amuck in the backyard.  Thus we have her tangling with a tricky kitchen stove, falling down in a muddy pigpen, dropping into the rain barrel off the roof, or coping with a weird assortment of characters who insist upon dancing with her at the community supper….If Colbert is a bit too arch in these farce scenes, and too proficiently slick in her motherhood sequences, she certainly comes alive in her encouragement speech when she tells the disheartened MacMurray that if San Francisco and Chicago can be rebuilt, so can their destroyed little chicken farm.

Colbert made 65 films beginning with For the Love of Mike (1927) and ending with Parrish (1961).  She has since appeared on the stage several times and is currently on Broadway with Rex Harrison and Lynn Redgrave, at age 79!  Fred MacMurray has made 84 films, from Girls Gone Wild (1929) to The Swarm (1978).  He also had a very successful television series, My Three Sons, which ran for 12 years.  Although both Colbert and MacMurray appeared with the leading stars of Hollywood, together, their complementary personalities made them one of the memorable “love teams” of the movies.

Notes by Barry Chapman