The Egg and I (1947)

The Egg and I (1947)

Another one of those formulaic, harmless "Couple Undertakes a Project" comedies.

In this case, a WWII veteran returns home to his new bride (Fred MacMurray, Claudette Colbert) with a dream of leaving his city-based employment, moving to the country, and starting a chicken farm.

The comedy primarily focuses on his fish-out-of-water city-bred wife, who is shocked by the condition of the run-down farm her husband bought, and reluctantly adapts to the primitive country life.

Naturally, he loves everything about it.

However, amidst the mishaps such as dealing with a nearly alive monstrosity of an old-fashioned wood stove, foreseeing a falling tree that will crush the newly-built chicken coop but being ignored, and more, the true conflict arises when a flirtatious neighbor (Louise Allbritton) with her own high-tech farm visits the couple.

Despite the attractive neighbor's efforts to seduce the husband, he remains a clueless, chicken-obsessed man. (A scene where he begins to list the joys of chicken farming may have directly inspired the famous "shrimp recipes" scene in Forrest Gump.)

Meanwhile, his wife becomes increasingly jealous until one day she can't bear it anymore and decides to quit the farm and move back with her mother.

The eventual revelation that brings them back together will surprise no one.

The conservative moral of the story is that wives should trust their husbands no matter what.

More culturally important is the introduction of the neighboring Kettles (Marjorie Main, Percy Kilbride): a rough, hard-working pioneer woman, her lazy husband, and their numerous tribe of children whose exact number and names remain uncertain.

The Kettle's origins can likely be traced back to the comic pages. These characters later inspired their own franchise of movies and were featured in animated shorts by Walter Lantz. They must have served as an original source for The Beverly Hillbillies, at least partially.

An odd and out-of-place scene (which would have made more sense to precede the wife's last-minute change of mind) involves a madwoman who tells the story of a giant chicken, seemingly accompanied by the ghost of her husband. While it would be easy to dismiss this as fantasy, the camera (similar to scenes in Harvey and Oh, God!) presents the invisible dead husband's point of view as he rises from a table.

A comfortable and undemanding comedy.