Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) on Netflix

NR19681h 51mComedy Family

Frank Beardsley, a Navy chief warrant officer, and Helen North, the base nurse, take to each other at once. Neither admits to ten children at home, or eight.

Netflix3.2/5
IMDb7.1/1011,199 votes
Rotten Tomatoes57%

Trailer

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Plot summary

Helen North, a widowed nurse, moves to San Francisco with her children to work at the Alameda naval base. Frank Beardsley, a chief warrant officer newly assigned there, is raising ten children on his own. They meet by chance at the commissary, and again when Frank brings his teenage daughter to the dispensary, where Helen says the girl is growing up in a crowded home that lacks a mother's hand. The two begin dating. Each keeps a secret: Helen has eight children, Frank has ten, all from marriages that ended with a spouse's death. Learning the truth, they try to set their attraction aside. Frank's fellow officer Darrell Harrison, who knows Helen too, arranges blind dates for both of them at the same Japanese restaurant, and they leave together.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Yours, Mine and Ours (1968)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Production suffered multiple interruptions. It began in December 1962, was halted in 1963 after the box-office failure of Ball's comedy Critic's Choice with Bob Hope, and she rejected a script by Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll for overly resembling an I Love Lucy episode, commissioning Leonard Spigelgass to rewrite it.
A long line of actors came under consideration for the role of Frank Beardsley, including Desi Arnaz, James Stewart, Fred MacMurray, Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and John Wayne, before Henry Fonda accepted, and indeed asked for, the role in a 1967 telephone conversation with Robert F. Blumofe.
It was a massive commercial success, earning nearly $26 million at the box office, about $182 million adjusted for inflation, on a tight budget of $2.5 million, plus over $11 million in rentals.
One account says Ball recalled in 1961 that Desilu Productions first bought the rights to the Beardsley-North story in 1959, before Helen Beardsley published her biography, though that is unlikely since Frank and Helen Beardsley married on September 6, 1961.
Frank Beardsley stated his family enjoyed the film as general entertainment, and acknowledged that perhaps the scriptwriters felt their screenplay was "a better story" than the truth.