Yours, Mine and Ours (1968)
Directed and co-written by the Academy Award nominated screenwriter Melville Shavelson, who used several TV writers (a couple from I Love Lucy) to adapt Helen Eileen Beardsley's autobiographical Who Gets the Drumsticks?, this average family comedy stars Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. Ball plays Helen, a Navy (nurse) widow with eight children who meets Naval Officer Frank Beardsley, a widower with ten children; naturally, the two fall in love and marry! The movie's premise would be too incredible to believe, almost like Cheaper By The Dozen (1950) on steroids, if it weren't based on a true story. If you've seen the "Cheaper" film, or watched TV's The Brady Bunch, you've seen the inherent conflicts in this type of family situation: kids who think the new parent favors his or her own kids, and an efficiently designed home ‘system’ required for survival and/or identification for all the siblings. This film adds a couple you may not have seen: multiple grocery cart shopping, and the home cooked meal experience - including a ‘center of the table’ spinning food wheel (another scene resembles one from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)), and a school lunch assembly line.
In addition to Ball and Fonda, Van Johnson plays a Naval Officer peer of Fonda's character who plays matchmaker for his and Ball's character. Tom Bosley plays the incredulous family doctor; Louise Troy & Sidney Miller play ‘first’ dates for each of the leads who are naturally scared off by the prospects of becoming an instant parent to at least 8 children. There's also a bit of subterfuge by Fonda's kids when he's dating Ball and she comes to dinner; she gets drunk (though it's not too funny). Nancy Howard and Walter Brooke play Fonda's kin who take the two youngest children while the Naval Officer reestablishes his relationships with his older eight after ‘retiring’ from ship to shore duty. The kids are largely played by unrecognizable (or infrequent) actors with the exception of the eldest male Mike, played by Tim Matheson (before he'd changed his name from Matthieson), Morgan Brittany (as Suzanne Cupito), a four year old Tracy Nelson, and Eric Shea ("He likes it. Hey Mickey!"), whose character not only has a ridiculous run-in with Sister schoolteacher (Mary Gregory), but is also the reason the family calls Bosley's character. In the end, Mike is drafted.
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