The Egg and I

Cleopatra the pig has a string attached to its hind leg, probably pulled by its handler off screen.

When I was a child(I am now 38) I read the Mrs Piggle wiggle books which were for children...but I always did see that the author was best known for the Egg and I.

Claudette Colbert and Fred McMurray played newlyweds who end up on a farm, Betty and Mr. McDonald.

Let me pose a question to anyone who's seen both this film and the 1942 flick "George Washington Slept Here" with Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan. Who would you say had the more ramshackle house that the leading couple moved into to chase a dream?

Fred MacMurray & Claudett Colbert star in a romantic comedy which is pretty well done. More important in the long term was the supporting cast which they had - especially Percy Kilbride & Marjorie Main.

Amusing, if highly contrived, adaptation of the then recent wildly popular book of the same title. This was by no means the first screen pairing of the long established leading Hollywood actors Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert.

I absolutely loved this movie. The theme is still such a popular one used today.

One of the problems with benign Golden Age Hollywood offerings is that sometimes their notions of gender politics are (considerably) pretty retrogressive, which inexorably takes the shine off its crowd-pleasing charm in this day and age. Chester Erskine's THE EGG AND I, adapted from author Betty MacDonald's titular novel, a memoir of her own life experience as a young wife on a chicken farm, stars Colbert as Betty herself and MacMurray as her nondescript hubby Bob, who, in the beginning, casually throws a bombshell to Betty that he has quitted his job in the city and buys a farm to restart their life in the countryside by raising chickens, which smacks of a repugnant whiff of male chauvinism, a wife doesn't need to be apprised on the said matter, it is a decision solely to be made by the breadwinner.

How often have you heard the term, "The book was better than the movie"? Well, you'll hear it again from me, since Betty MacDonald's book was much more than the conventional slapstick comedy it has been turned into, using only the cleanest episodes from the racy novel to appear in this sanitized screen version where even the studio stage mud looks sparkling clean.

I stumbled upon 'The Egg and I' while trying to find some of the old 'Ma & Pa Kettle' movies. It was great to find out that 'The Egg and I' was the first movie that used Ma and Pa Kettle as characters.