The Egg and I (1947)

(On Cable TV, August 2020) The dream of moving from the city to the bucolic countryside “to raise chicken or something” has long been a horrifying illusion, and there are decades of Hollywood movies to make the point. One of the funniest remains The Egg and I, featuring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as two city mice grappling with the not-so-much-fun reality of becoming chicken-and-egg farmers on a dilapidated property. It is, from a certain perspective, a horror movie – the newlywed bride (Colbert) barely has a say as she’s whisked off to rural depths, forced to slave away to support her husband’s crazy scheme, rebuffed in her basic desires and suffers the further indignity of thinking that her husband is being seduced by a local poultry queen. But it’s also very, very funny (plus, she gets what she wants in the end) – Colbert’s near-hysterical reactions are the perfect complement to MacMurray’s infuriatingly goofy charm and the film is further bolstered by strong performances from Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as “Ma and Pa Kettle” (a spinoff series would lead to nine more films for their characters). The episodic comedy-of-error can be repetitive at times (and there’s definitely a limit to the amount of humour you can wring out of poor Colbert being ignored and humiliated) but The Egg and I eventually succeeds by going back to the basics. After all, it is a “city mouse gets humbled by the country” kind of thing – the dated humour may be more visible now, but the underpinning of the subgenre always leads to an improvement by the end.