Navy widow Helen North Beardsley (Lucille Ball) is moving her eight kids to San Francisco. Naval officer Frank Beardsley (Henry Fonda) is returning home to an unhappy family of ten kids who hate him for failing to care for their late mother. He is so overwhelmed that his two youngest have to go live with his brother's family. He needs help after various short term housekeepers keep leaving.

The date is the first bit of funny comedy. The drunken first meeting with the kids could have been funnier but somehow it's not. Lucy knows how to drunk comedy but it's not funny. I don't buy that she couldn't taste the heightened alcohol in her drink. I don't like her drunken lines. It should be funnier. I do like the six months line to button the scene. That is the way this goes. It's mildly amusing at times and then it's not and then it is. More could be done to individualize a few of the kids. A couple of kids need to be leading characters. They become a mob which is exactly the joke and again it's only funny intermittently. It's fine for a family friendly film.

"Yours, Mine and Ours" is a highly fictionalized story of a real life family, the Beardsleys. What makes them unusual is that the marriage began with 18 kids...and eventually they added on to this brood. But when my daughter did some research, she found that the real Beardsley family was NOT as loving and sweet as they seemed in the film and the film was in many ways fiction. Read up on them...they are NOT the big, happy family they seem to be by the end of the story.

So, if you can ignore that the film is highly fictionalized and the idea of having 18 plus kids, the story itself is just okay. And, in many ways it plays more like a kooky Disney film than anything else. I noticed many folks gave this one scores of 9 and 10 in their reviews and I frankly cannot understand this. It's reasonably entertaining but no more....and I suspect some of these scores represent the reviewers love of Lucille Ball more than anything else. And, while she did fine in the film, she did seem a bit too old (57 at the time the movie was made) to have children that young.

By the way, as I watched the film, this same daughter was NOT thrilled by the story and yelled at the screen that Mr. And Mrs. Beardsley should find a new hobby!

Originally when Lucille Ball wanted to film this story, she had that noted television father Fred MacMurray in mind for the role of the Navy widower with 10 kids. That would have been an interesting project had that team come about. Lucy and Fred worked, but one time on the Lucy/Desi Comedy hour, but never on the big screen. When Fred proved unavailable, Lucy went and got Henry Fonda her co-star years ago in The Big Street.

I'm told that in The Films of Henry Fonda, he welcomed the idea of doing Your's, Mine and Our's. He had done a bunch of westerns around this time of varying kind and looked for a change of pace. The last family type film Fonda had done was Spencer's Mountain which got less than overwhelming reviews.

But with television's number one comedy star both starring and producing there was certainly guaranteed box office. To Lucy's credit she did not hog the whole film and allowed Fonda his comedy moments.

You also won't be seeing any outrageous Lucy type moments either in the film. Partially that was a bow towards her age and, but more it was a realization that such things as the chocolate factory or stomping the grapes just didn't go in this film.

The film was based on a true story although it was set and written in the early Sixties of the Kennedy years. I'm sure in producer Lucille Ball's mind a few years wouldn't really make a difference. But in point of fact in America of the Sixties it was a night and day type difference. I'm sure many in the audience were asking whether this really was reflective of 1968.

Van Johnson as Fonda's naval buddy and Tom Bosley as an overworked doctor contribute their bits in her. It's not a bad film over all, but isn't a great effort for either of its stars.