Yours, Mine and Ours (1968 film)

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Yours, Mine and Ours
Directed by	Melville Shavelson
Produced by	Robert F. Blumofe
Written by	Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Davis
Starring	Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date(s)	24 April, 1968 (USA)
Running time	111 min.
Language	English
Budget	~ US$2,500,000
IMDb profile

Yours, Mine and Ours is a 1968 film, starring Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball and Van Johnson, based loosely on the story of Frank and Helen Beardsley, which later became Helen Beardsley's book, Who Gets the Drumstick?.

Contents 1 Plot 1.1 Similarities To and Departures From Real Life 2 Reception 3 2005 remake 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Plot

In the film, Fonda's character, Frank Beardsley, is a Navy warrant officer, while Ball's character, Helen North, is a nurse. Frank meets Helen when she takes care of his sick daughter. They immediately hit it off and go on a date, all the while both of them shying away from admitting their respective secrets; Frank has ten children and Helen has eight, from previous marriages that ended in death for both their spouses.

Although they fight it, their attraction is undeniable, and they quickly marry. After some initial tension, the eighteen children bond and make one large blended family.

Further tension develops between young Philip North and his teacher at the parochial school that he attends, because his teacher insists that he use his "legal" name (which remains North even though his mother married a man named Beardsley). This prompts Frank and Helen to discuss cross-adopting one another's children. At first the children (except for Philip) are aghast at the notion of "reburying" their respective deceased biological parents. Yet the subsequent birth of Joseph John Beardsley finally unites the children, and they agree unanimously to the adoption.

The film ends with Michael Beardsley, the eldest, going off to Camp Pendleton to begin his stint in the United States Marine Corps.

[edit] Similarities To and Departures From Real Life

This film departs in many critical ways from the actual lives of Frank and Helen Beardsley and their children. The names of Frank and Helen Beardsley and their children are real. The career of Richard North is also described accurately, but briefly: specifically, he was a navigator on the crew of an A-3 Skywarrior which went down in a routine training flight, exactly as the script says. Frank Beardsley is described correctly as a Navy warrant officer. The "loan-out" of the two youngest Beardsley daughters is also real, and indeed Michael, Charles ("Rusty"), and Gregory Beardsley were determined to see their father marry Helen North as a means of rectifying this situation. Finally, Michael Beardsley did indeed serve a term in the Marines, as did his brother Rusty.

The similarities, however, end at this point. The critical differences, which one may observe by comparing this movie to Helen Beardsley's book Who Gets the Drumstick?,^[1] include the following:

• The film changes the ages and birth order of many of the children. As a corollary to this, the film places some of the children, most notably Colleen and Philip North, into situations having no historical warrant.
• Contrary to the depiction in the film, Helen North and Frank Beardsley began their relationship by corresponding with one another in sympathy for similar losses that each had recently sustained: he of his wife and she of her husband. Furthermore, each knew exactly how many children the other had before their first meeting. Indeed, Frank and Helen did not meet by accident in a Navy commissary. Rather, Frank's sister told Helen about Frank's situation, and Helen wrote to Frank to offer her sympathy. (Similarly, on their first date, Helen made no attempt to hide her children from Frank.)
• Frank Beardsley was a yeoman (that is, a clerk) in the Navy and afterwards the personnel officer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He played no role in the development of the Fresnel lens glide-slope indicator, or "meatball," which the Navy uses to assist pilots in landing on aircraft carrier decks.
• There is no historical warrant for the existence of Frank's "friend" CWO Darrell Henderson USN, the character portrayed by Van Johnson. In the film, CWO Henderson draws Frank and Helen together. Helen Beardsley says in Who Gets the Drumstick? that her own sister and brother played this role.
• The North and Beardsley children received the prospect of Helen and Frank's marriage with enthusiasm and without reservation. Indeed, when Helen visited Frank at his house for the first time, she took her five oldest children in tow. They met some of their Beardsley counterparts and immediately became friends. From the moment that the prospect of Frank and Helen's marriage became real, the children all began regarding Frank and Helen as their parents and even brought pressure to bear on them to celebrate the marriage as soon as possible.
• The "drunken dinner scene" in which Mike, Rusty, and Greg Beardsley serve Helen North a double (or perhaps triple) screwdriver with Scotch and gin, is utterly without foundation. The scene is, however, reminiscent of the episode titled Lucy Does a TV Commercial in Lucille Ball's television show I Love Lucy in which she over-rehearses a television commercial for a vitamin elixir with a very high alcohol content. This is probably no accident, since Madelyn Pugh (Davis) and Bob Carroll, the two head writers for I Love Lucy, wrote the script for this film.
• The blended family did not move into a neutral home. Instead, Frank Beardsley had bedrooms and bathrooms added to his existing home, and Helen North sold her home and moved into his. (However, the leaking-roof scene has a basis in an incident occurring to Helen North while she still lived on Whidbey Island; that incident prompted her to move to California.)
• The North boy who was determined to be bad because "the good die young" was actually Nicholas North, not Philip. Likewise, it was Nicholas who first noticed that his teachers commanded him to continue to use the North name after his mother's marriage, even though at the time he preferred the Beardsley name. (However, the near-riot in the film, that a schoolteacher incites in her classroom over the naming issue, is also totally unfounded.)
• The children never objected to the massive cross-adoption by Frank and Helen of one another's biological children. The chief objectors fell into two groups: Richard North's brother and some of his other relatives, who objected to the "erasure" of Mr. North's name; and a large number of readers of a major magazine (which Helen Beardsley never named) who objected in principle to the adoption when that magazine mistakenly reported it as an accomplished fact. However, Frank and Helen ultimately ignored those objections in the face of more pressing and important consequences of their having married without initially adopting one another's children.

As much as this film departed from the Beardsleys' actual life, the remake departed even more significantly.

[edit] Reception

The film received lukewarm critical reviews. Despite this, it became a hit, probably on the strength of Lucille Ball's name and performance (which many of her fans regard as a classic). Frank Beardsley later commented that his family enjoyed the film as general entertainment, and acknowledged that perhaps the scriptwriters felt that their screenplay was "a better story" than the truth.^[2]

The success of the movie partly inspired network approval of the television series The Brady Bunch (the original script for the series pilot was written well before this movie became a reality).

Among the child actors cast as Fonda's and Ball's children in the film, several went on to greater success, including Tim Matheson (billed here as Tim Matthieson), Morgan Brittany (billed here as Suzanne Cupito), and Tracy Nelson.

The actor who played the oldest of the Beardsley children, Tim Matheson, and the actress who played the oldest of the North children, future soap opera actress Jennifer Leak, married in real life, although they later divorced.

[edit] 2005 remake

Main article: Yours, Mine and Ours (2005 film)

[edit] References

1. ^ Helen Beardsley, Who Gets the Drumstick?, New York: Random House, 1965, 215 pp.
2. ^ Fred Sorri, "Famous Carmel Family Operating Nut House," Monterey Peninsula Herald, April 1, 1968.

[edit] External links

• Yours, Mine and Ours at the Internet Movie Database
• "Official" site of the actual family of Frank and Helen Beardsley, a valuable reference that includes key differences between Helen Beardsley's biography and the films.