Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation (1953)

 Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation (1953)

Finding a misplaced disc this weekend, we were able to screen our last remaining film, and finally close the last chapter of our Ma and Pa Kettle viewing experience.

It’s a bit odd coming back to the series after this short a hiatus and finding much comfort in the experience. This factor may very well be the basis of the near-inexplicable, near-universal appeal of these two characters.

I believe I had commented that Marjorie Main could easily be credited for carrying the series, especially after Percy McBride had left it and having it all somehow still work, so it was especially odd seeing how in this chapter McBride is given quite a bit to do.

After being invited to Paris by their in-laws, the Kettles find themselves involved in European espionage, a development with threatens to turn their vacation into a bona fide Hitchcockian suspense adventure.

That would have been interesting.

Unfortunately, the scriptwriters were much less ambitious than this, (though I still believe it could have been pulled off had they gone for it; comedy and suspense going well hand-in-hand,) and we find that the McGuffin is immediately, safely, handed to the authorities, and the plot’s focus instead reset to using Pa as bait to catch the evil spies, with Pa intended to pass a counterfeit envelope and the suspicious villains, sensing danger and suspecting foul play, repeatedly refusing to take it.

Of interest to some:

The Universal Studios back lot is used to represent Paris; there are good Can-can and Apache Dance musical numbers, (also seen in somewhat recent screenings of Cantinflas and Charlie Chan features); some gags resemble material used in I Love Lucy’s later visit to Europe, (in the past, I have seen this classic sitcom liberally ‘borrow’ from many theatrical sources,) but also much earlier stuff dating back to Hal Roach’s Our Gang; and, of course, we get the typical jokes about Parisian culture, though maybe the mention of escargot and crepe suzettes wasn’t quite as cliched then as it was after Julia Child’s introduction of French cuisine to the American public.

The film’s strangest component might be a bit involving post cards which predates nearly the exact same gag (other than context) used by Luis Buñuel in The Phantom of Liberty where a man in a playground gives a little girl postcards ("Show them to your friends but not to adults!") and, when her parents confiscate the cards, we find they are simply views of historical landmarks.