I Remember Mama

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Director George Stevens' big, sentimental rendering of John Van Druten's stage hit is a classic nostalgia piece. Of course, as Yogi Berra might have said (but probably didn't), "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be." The "mama" in "I Remember Mama" would now be the age of a great, great grandmamma or someone even older. You see, more time has passed since the making of this movie than passed from its period setting of 1910 to its release in 1948. Think of that.

But no matter. We still get the idea, and it's still grand, nostalgic moviemaking. Van Druten based his stage play on Kathryn Forbes' book "Mama's Bank Account," which continues to be read and enjoyed by thousands of people today. DeWitt Bodeen adapted the movie's script from the play. And George Stevens took on the directorial chores as his first movie after the War. According to his son, George Stevens, Jr., his father was looking for a change from the lighter-weight material he had been doing, things like "Gunga Din," "Penny Serenade," "The Talk of the Town," and "The More the Merrier." the movie version of "I Remember Mama" gave him a chance to tackle a more realistic yet still hopeful and inspiring story. The director would go on to make equally big, serious things like "A Place in the Sun," "Shane," "Giant," "The Diary of Anne Frank," and "The Greatest Story Ever Told," but none of them may have a place in the heart quite like "Mama."

"I Remember Mama" is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you. It starts slowly, and for the first ten or fifteen minutes you wonder if anything is going to happen at all. Then, you start warming to it, getting to know and admire the characters and their situations. And before long, you're sharing their dreams and their joys and their heartbreaks.

"Is good, yes?" --Mama

The story takes place in the early part of the twentieth century, 1910, in San Francisco, where an immigrant Norwegian family, the Hansons (mother, father, four girls, and a boy) have taken up residence on Larkin Street. Their story is told by one of the daughters, Katrin Hanson (Barbara Bel Geddes), who has just written a book about her family and is proofing it as she narrates in flashback.

The movie is just as much about Katrin as it is about her mother; they are both central figures in the story. If the father tends to disappear into the woodwork, it isn't because he's not a strong and noble character, but because Katrin remembers her mother best and feels closest to her. Martha, the mother, is played by Irene Dunne, a wonderfully human character who is looked up to by her children as being able to do anything.

The experiences of the Hansons are probably close enough to the experiences of most immigrant families in America for the last two centuries to appeal to anyone even remotely close to the situation. Like the characters in the movie, my own maternal grandparents immigrated to America from Norway at the beginning the twentieth century (and my paternal grandparents from Sicily at around the same time), so the film is of more than a passing interest to me personally. Yet even if a viewer's lineage runs back two thousand years through Native Americans, the personal stories contained in "I Remember Mama" are so universal, they should entertain and inspire almost anyone.

This is a movie of individual character studies, starting with Mama and Katrin, of course, both of them trying so hard to succeed in their new home, but of other family members as well. A standout is Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka), the oldest member of the family and thus its titular head. He's a big, loud, gruff fellow with a big, black, bristly mustache, a man who frightens everyone. Everyone but his niece Martha; she stands up to him, as she stands up to every difficulty; and, of course, Uncle Chris turns out to be a lovable rogue after all.

Phillip Dorn plays the father, Lars, a simple carpenter with great aspirations for his children. Ellen Corby is yet another standout as Martha's spinster sister, Trina, who at age forty-two has decided to get married. Her fiancée is a timid little Chaplinesque man, Peter Thorkleson, played by Edgar Bergen (of Charlie McCarthy fame but in one of his straight roles without the dummy). The actors are too numerous to mention, but one other character of special merit is Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Jonathan Hyde, a boarder at the Hanson house who reads to the family from the classics each night and inspires Katrin in particular to appreciate literature and take up writing as a profession.

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