I Remember Mama

A film about a Norwegian immigrant family living in San Francisco. The narrator is Katrin, the eldest daughter. She wants to be a writer and what she tells is her own childhood; the film begins at a writing desk and turns back from there. The year is the early 1920s. The father is a carpenter, the mother runs the house and four children are growing up. Every Saturday evening the accounts are done at the kitchen table: rent, food, school. Every time, the mother says the same sentence, that they will not touch the money in the bank. There are relatives around the family. An uncle is bad-tempered and frightening, and turns up at every crisis. An aunt cannot marry, and a lodger reads books and is fed in return. What is at the centre is not a great event but the household economy and how the mother manages it. The truth about the bank account comes out at the end of the narrative. The source is Kathryn Forbes's book, which had become a stage play in between. Irene Dunne plays the mother, Barbara Bel Geddes plays Katrin and Oskar Homolka the uncle. Ellen Corby is in the cast. George Stevens directed. The film took four acting nominations at the Academy Awards at once. A warm production for anyone who likes family stories and classic Hollywood drama. For a viewer expecting pace, it proceeds in episodes and builds no plot.