Yours, Mine & Ours

By classic Hollywood thinking, the formula should be absolutely infallible: if one kid is cute, it follows that 18 kids have to be 18 times cuter. The new math of Yours, Mine and Ours proves nearly the opposite.

A Navy officer (Henry Fonda), who has recently lost his wife, returns to shore duty to take care of his ten momless moppets. Trying to run a family like a taut ship, he first finds the kids mutinous—just like Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. But then, shopping at a supermarket, he runs into an attractive widow (Lucille Ball). She too is a casualty of—and contributor to—the population explosion, with eight unmanageable offspring of her own.

After a short courtship, the bereaved merge forces, causing the predictable problems: lineups for the bathroom, family jealousies, identity crises when her kids have to change their last names to match their new stepfather's. Just as predictably, in the final footage the frowns turn into smiles that collectively display something like 500 teeth.

Overweight and festooned with stale situations and weary wisecracks, Yours, Mine and Ours relies for its levity on two unassailable assets: Fonda and Ball. At 62, Fonda can still leave a line wry and dry. At 56, Ball commands a solid slapstick style that none of her younger rivals can match. Her squint-eyed search for a false eyelash that has managed to wander to her forehead, for example, is converted into the kind of classic comedy chase that has been absent from films for too long. And they are ably backed by a surprisingly supple comedian named Van Johnson, who seems to be searching for—and finding —a new turn to his long career. Together, the old pros take the surplus corn and, like the manufacturers of all that breakfast food they buy, turn it into something with snap, crackle and popularity.