In this writer’s opinion, 1968’s best comedy is the funny and sweet With Six You Get Eggroll. The film stars Doris Day as a widow with three sons who unexpectedly finds love again after she meets a widower (Brian Keith). The catch? He has a teenage daughter of his own, and none of the kids are too keen on their parents finding love again. Despite this, Day and Keith’s characters elope, and embark on a hilarious comedy of misadventures that will bring both of their brooding broods together.
As scenes from the film like the one above illustrate, With Six You Get Eggroll is a movie very much of its time. Not that you should consider it dated by any means. Like that of the similarly themed movie Yours, Mine and Ours and TV classic The Brady Bunch, this movie reflects the changing family structure of the 1960s away from the traditional nuclear family model to a more contemporary one. Its attempts to utilize counterculture (again, the hippies) may have seemed square to some cynical audience members when the movie first hit theaters, but now these sequences are absolutely charming. The film earned over $10,000,000 at the box office and was a huge success. That’s easy to understand. Because as 1960s comedies go, With Six You Get Eggroll is both nourishing and delicious. Who’s up for another helping?