The Adventures of Ma & Pa Kettle, Vol. 1 (The Egg and I / Ma and Pa Kettle / Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town / Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm)

I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle, Vol. 1 so far.

I was very disappointed with this product. The disc would not play on "The Egg and I". I am going to return it.

This DVD contains the first four Ma and Pa Kettle movies from the 40s and 50s. Ma (Marjorie Main), the screeching but loving matriarch and Pa (Percy Kilbride), the lazy father of 15, are first introduced in The Egg and I which stars Fred MacMurray and Claudet Colbert as newlywed city folk who buy a run-down farm next door to the Kettles. If you liked "Green Acres," you'll love this movie.

The Kettles next star in their own movie, The Further Adventures of Ma & Pa Kettle in which Pa wins a model home of the future and they leave their ramshackle farm for a while.

The third entry is Ma & Pa Kettle Go to Town - the town being New York City. Pa enters another contest and wins the trip, where they get mixed up with gangsters.

Last is Ma & Pa Kettle Back on the Farm in which the Kettles become grandparents.

I saw these movies as a child and while they aren't quite the knee-slappers I remember, they're all good, clean fun for the whole family. The humor comes from down-home goodness rather than funny dialogue; slacker Pa and workhorse Ma cope with whatever comes their way with good 'ole horsesense. They sure don't make'em like this anymore. Now I'm ready to see the next four movies in Volume 2!

These have to be some of the best movies ever made. They are not slick and glitzy but they are so funny and so down to earth. The acting is
not what it is today but it is full of love and heart like they aren't
always today. Love the line about how they were going to celebrate with the hard cider. True classics these 4 movies. Also like that you get four movies on one disc. My favorite has to be "Back on the Farm".

As a boy, more than a half century ago, I liked Ma and Pa Kettle movies. I thought they were actually funny. Today I see them as real clinkers, movies with just one joke: lazy Pa and tough Ma living happily in squalor with 15 kids. Every bit of humor, such as it is, was based upon that, somewhat akin to the banal humor of the Beverly Hillbillies.

"The Egg and I," the movie that introduced movie goers to the antics of the Kettle Klan, was a big hit in its day. Today the hit is more like a thud. There is a series of episodes that add up to not much of anything. Fred McMurray and Claudette Colbert play city folks trying their hand at hard scrabble chicken farming. All the humor comes from their fish out of water adventures. There's a sequence of pathos that appears to have been thrown in late to round it out. The writing is bad and the acting is worse. All in all, the movie is not remotely convincing. Green Acres tried to revive the premise in after years and was just as silly.

The only reason to watch any of this is for the nostalgia. The movies elicit the smell of popcorn and the sticky floor of a movie theater decades ago. But I can't imagine young people buying into any of it.