George Stevens (1948)
I didn’t realise that I was watching Ellen Corby but the presence of the future Grandma Walton in I Remember Mama is apt in retrospect. For much of the film – adapted by DeWitt Bodeen from John van Druten’s Broadway hit (which was based on Kathryn Forbes’s autobiographical novel Mama’s Bank Account) – everything works out fine. It works out fine even when your experience of family recollection movies leads you to expect the odd tragedy: the Hanson family’s youngest daughter Dagmar is seriously ill with a mastoid but pulls through; the family cat (Uncle Elizabeth) is sick – the administration of chloroform helps it not on the way to eternal sleep but to a miraculous recovery. Glad as I was to see this, the Hansons’ virtuous resilience gets pretty wearing – especially in a crisis surrounding a high school graduation gift for the narrator-protagonist Katrin. Mama and Papa Hanson and their family contemporaries are Norwegian immigrants in San Francisco in the early years of the last century. The tensions within the family – between Katrin and another sister, Christine; among Mama and her sisters – are laid out obviously. The comedy of the domestic routines is innocuous but strenuous. As Uncle Chris Halvorsen, the head of the family, Oscar Homolka is definitely continental European (Austrian-born, Homolka was often assumed to be Russian) but he isn’t remotely Scandinavian. His characterisation is laboriously colourful (unlike the others in the cast, he’d already played the role on stage) and makes the heavy going heavier. The score by Roy Webb keeps telling you that the story being told is moving but you don’t feel it – not, that is, until the film’s last half-hour.
That traumatic graduation night is a turning point for Katrin and for I Remember Mama as a whole. Her father allows his eldest daughter a cup of coffee to prove she’s an adult (it seems that kids aren’t allowed the drink) – Katrin’s so upset by the events of the evening that she takes only a mouthful or two before running upstairs in tears. When the voice of her older self then announces on the soundtrack that ‘There’s a time to be born and a time to grow up … and a time to die too’, you expect what follows – given what’s gone before – to be a token recognition of death. It turns out to be a lengthy but wonderfully rich sequence at the deathbed of Uncle Chris (a heavy drinker). Oscar Homolka, although still pretty lively for a dying man, is relatively subdued and redeems himself here. But what’s impressive is that you really do seem to be seeing the scene through the retrospective eyes of the older Katrin – whose narration is telling the story of her girlhood and of how she got published by recalling that girlhood in writing. George Stevens captures the heat of Uncle Chris’s room and on the porch outside in a way that’s dramatically atmospheric but almost documentary. The sequence is wonderfully lit by Nicholas Musuraca. From this point onwards, everything in the film seems right, including the domestic comedy. Light-hearted details of family housework back at the Hansons’ home – a window that won’t shut, Katrin’s brother Nels’s initiation into pipe-smoking – are juxtaposed with the heroine’s coping with the serious business of having a short story rejected.
The quality of what happens in the home straight obliterates the well-behaved benignity of what precedes it. By the end, it’s hard to believe that you were grateful – simply because there was so little other friction in evidence – for Christine’s exasperated envy of Katrin. The finale also ties together what was laid out early on, particularly Mama’s careful approach to money. To be fair to Stevens, his direction is very skilful throughout: even in a particularly contrived sequence when Mama pretends to be a ward orderly so she can stay with Dagmar while the little girl’s in hospital. The acting is strong throughout – and the eccentrically passionate Ellen Corby is one of the best performers. Given Irene Dunne’s capacity for grand condescension, she’s extraordinarily good as the noble mother – her Scandinavian accent is convincingly absorbed. And given what a pain Katrin might be, Barbara Bel Geddes is amazingly likeable – she’s genuinely sensitive and her emotions seem truly felt. Philip Dorn is good as Papa; the other kids are played by Peggy McIntyre (Christine), June Hedin (Dagmar) and Steve Brown in the role of Nels. You can’t help wishing, though, that the actor who played the role on stage – his Broadway debut – had reprised it on screen. His name was Marlon Brando. Florence Bates makes a welcome appearance as the successful lady writer-gastronome whose encouragement to Katrin (via Mama) helps deliver the happy ending. As a lodger who never pays his rent, Cedric Hardwicke reads to the family from classics of English literature. (When he makes a quick exit, he leaves them his wonderful library, along with a dud cheque.) Hardwicke reads so marvellously it’s hard to believe in him as the actor manqué his character’s meant to be.
18 January 2013
