Ma and Pa Kettle

"Excerpt from Back on the Farm (1951) Ma and Pa Kettle teach their own brand of math."
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I remember watching these films as a kid on the weekends with my mom and dad. "Ma and Pa" along with "Laurel and Hardy" where classic examples of the naive fool that makes the "situation comedy" so appealing. These golden classics paved the way for future characters the likes of "Jack Tripper" of "Threes Company" and "Joey" of Friends.

Ma and Pa Kettle were the featured characters in a series of popular light comedic movies in the 1940s and 1950s. The movies revolved around the absurd misadventures of the Kettle clan, a large but loving family of country hicks.

Pa (Percy Kilbride) was a gentle but slow-speaking, slow-thinking and lazy man. His only talents appeared to be avoiding work and winning contests. Ma (Marjorie Main) was larger, raucous, more ambitious and smarter than Pa, but not by much, and could easily be fooled. She was content with her role as mother to a small army of children on the Kettle's ramshackle farm. (Later in the series the Kettles moved into a modern home that Pa won.)

Much of the humor came from the preposterous situations the Kettles found themselves in, such as Pa being mistaken for a wealthy industrialist or being jailed after he accidentally set a series of events in motion that resulted in race horses at the fair eating feed laced with concrete.

The Kettles first appeared in supporting roles in The Egg and I, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert. After that they starred in a series of their own movies. Main was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1948 for her role in The Egg and I.

Kilbride retired after making the "Waikiki" movie; the Pa Kettle character did not appear in The Kettles in the Ozarks. In The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm, the last Kettle movie, Parker Fennelly played Pa Kettle.

The eight Kettle films starting Kilbride and Main are The Egg and I - 1947,Ma and Pa Kettle - 1949, Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town - 1950, Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm - 1951, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair - 1952, Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation - 1953, Ma and Pa Kettle at Home - 1954, Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki - 1955, The Kettles in the Ozarks - 1956 and The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm - 1957
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Percy Kilbride (July 16, 1888 - December 11, 1964), born in San Francisco, California, was a popular character actor. Despite being raised in a big city, he made a career of playing country hicks, most memorably as lazy Pa Kettle in the Ma and Pa Kettle movie series.

Kilbride began working in theater at the age of 12 and eventually became an actor on Broadway. Ironically in light of his most familiar roles, he first played an 18th-century French dandy in A Tale of Two Cities.

His film debut was as Jakey in White Woman in 1933. He left Broadway for good in 1942.

In 1947 he and Marjorie Main played the supporting parts of Ma and Pa Kettle in The Egg and I, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert. Those were followed by the popular Ma and Pa Kettle series with Kilbride and Main playing the main characters, during which time he also played in other movies.

Kilbride retired after making the 1955 film Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki He did, however, take a small role in Son of Flubber in 1963.

He died in Los Angeles, California, after having been struck by a car while walking near his home with a friend.
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Marjorie Main was born in Acton, Indiana as Mary Tomlinson. She attended Franklin College, in Franklin, Indiana and adopted a stage name to avoid embarrassing her father, who was a minister. She worked in vaudeville on the Chautauqua and Orpheum circuits, and debuted on Broadway in 1916. Her first film was A House Divided in 1931.

Marjorie Main began playing upper class dowagers, but was ultimately typecast in abrasive, domineering, salty roles: her distinct voice was like chalk upon a blackboard. She repeated her stage role in Dead End in the movie version of 1937, and was subsequently cast repeatedly as the mother of gangsters. She again transferred a strong stage performance, as a dude ranch operator in The Women, to film in 1939. She made six comedies with Wallace Beery in the 1940s.

She played Ma Kettle in The Egg and I in 1947 opposite Percy Kilbride as Pa Kettle. She was nominated for an Academy Award for the role, and repeated it in nine more films.

Later,
Kenaz