Exclusive“I Remember Mama” (1948): First Family Story

Take the child as a child With the hand under the chin And the wings to the air With laughter and joy Take the child as a child With the hand under the chin And the wings to the air With laughter and joy Five times, I said wonderingly. Five times, and all you went through raising us. It was good, Mama said. How can you say that? Why, I can remember times, Mama. It was good, Mama repeated firmly. All of it. Is finished? Yes, it's finished. The end. What's to name it a story? Mama's bank account. But I say you should write about your Papa. I know you did, and I tried, but I just couldn't. But why? Your Papa's a fine man. I know he is, but when I look back on my childhood, first and foremost, I remember Mama. I'm Tiffany Brannan. I'm Rebecca Brannan. Welcome to Real Thoughts on Cinema. Most movie adaptations of books not only make the necessary cuts of extraneous details and even certain plot elements that aren't really important to the main theme, but significantly change the elements that they choose to include. Yeah, that's true, and it's a shame because certainly some cuts need to be made to any literary work just for the sake of brevity, but the things that you do include, you should try to do them as accurately as possible, not just change them for the sake of changing them. Definitely. And while in general I think production was done so much better in the classic era, it's as much true of classic films as of modern ones. When they're adapting books, they tend to just kind of take it in new directions sometimes, very different from the source material. Certainly since movies were shorter then and they tended to be more formulaic, there was a certain way they made films, so they would sort of cut up the material to fit that formula. But I think they were usually more careful about really keeping the spirit. A more modern adaptation of the same work might be more accurate to the letter, but spiritually it's very different. The mood is very different. Another category is a lot of classic films were adapted from books which aren't classic titles. Most people today wouldn't even recognize the titles. That's true. But they were contemporary books, which many times were bestsellers or award winners or even just popular works of the day. And the movie might have gone on to become one of the most famous, but the book, no one really knows and possibly you can't even get anymore except to use copy. That's true. A great example of this is our movie today, I Remember Mama from 1948. Now, we're not approaching this film as a literary film, I'd say. We've done that a few times, but this one I really think should be considered as a great heartwarming family film because it talks about a great example of a virtuous, wonderful mother. And how any really good mother creates sort of a special world for her children. Yes. This film was an RKO radio picture and it was directed by George Stevens. It starred Irene Dunn as Mama and Barbara Bel Geddes played her main daughter. The rest of the cast are more character actors like Oscar Homolka and Ellen Corby and it was adapted from the 1944 Broadway play of the same name. The story follows the adventures, really, of this Norwegian-American family in San Francisco led by the mother and how she helps her children and her whole family through the different difficulties of life from very dramatic ones like her young daughter, the youngest, Dagmar, having to be taken to the hospital for an operation to smaller things like when her daughter is graduating and she wants a special present and it just really focuses on the selflessness of a loving mother caring for her family. The main daughter, Catherine, throughout has an ambition to become a writer and when she finally finds her writing voice and sells a successful story, it's by writing about her family and particularly her mother and how she is sort of the first thing she remembers about her childhood and how she always kept the family going, particularly by always reassuring them when she was counting out the money carefully that they never had to worry because she had her bank account downtown to back them up. Now this movie was adapted from a book, right? Right, Mom's Bank Account. And I know you read that book long before we watched the movie. Yes, it's really interesting. My introduction to it was in our homeschooling course that we took, Christian Liberty Academy, they gave us themes in literature and there were these several volumes of books that had excerpts and short stories in them that you would read and then do reports on and one of them was an excerpt from this book called Mama and the Doctor's Wife. Interestingly, an episode that was not included in the movie. Oh yes. Then quite a few years later, I read the book. I don't remember where we got the book. I think one of our aunts sent it to us. Okay, because I remember just suddenly you had a used copy of it. having this old hardbound copy of the book and I read it and I really loved it a lot and then I remember mentioning it to our grandmother and she remembered that there was this movie made of it and also a subsequent television series. That's right. And when I watched the film the first time, I think the book was fresher in my mind so I was noticing, oh, these are the things that were different but when we watched it again recently, it had been a long time since I'd read the book and I was immediately struck by this was really accurate and then I read the book again and I was like, there are a lot of things that weren't included but we were talking about the spirit. The spirit was really captured and I want to say the movie has even more heart than the book. Maybe there's just something about watching a film. Yeah. You feel the emotions more strongly but the book is very sweet and very heartwarming. I never was, I would say moved by the book and I cried a couple of times when we were watching the movie recently. It's really touching. Now this book was published in 1943 written by Catherine Forbes. That was her pen name. Her maiden name was Catherine Anderson and then she's also sometimes known as Catherine McLean. That was her married name. Now this is considered semi-autobiographical and most people agree that she based it more on the life of her maternal grandmother than on her own childhood. Interesting. Because she herself wasn't that recently descended from immigrants. She did have an immigrant family but her parents were both born in the United States. Okay. So it's a few generations back. Also the street which she describes in the book was not the street where she lived and the house which she described, many people have tried to research and figure out what house she was describing. Some of it she probably did just make up but most of it I think was taken from stories her mother told her, her grandmother, her distant aunts and uncles. They were all experiences which she used to write this very moving book and within a year it became a very successful Broadway play that a lot of studios wanted to adopt into a movie. So the main character of the book, Catherine, is really more like her mother. Yeah. In her own childhood. That's very interesting. But the fact, interestingly, I'd say that the play and then the movie was more accurate to life in the fact that it focuses on her becoming a writer which obviously Catherine Forbes did because it's this writing the story about her mother. That's right. The character of Catherine in the book just is a teacher at the end. She at one point looks into doing writing but it's really more as a get-rich-quick scheme than anything else she sees an ad in the magazine for. Oh, for $7 you can get the secrets to writing and all famous novelists use this. And that was expanded in the play and then the book. So do you know a lot about the play? I'm very familiar with the book but not so much with the play. It was very similar. Many of the same cast members were in it. Okay. Most notably the actor who played Uncle Chris, Oscar Homolka, who would go on to be one of the actors nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the movie. So he reprised his role. Most of the other people were new but it was very similar. Very similar to the movie. That really was what the new adaptation was. Obviously they could expand the world of the story a little bit more in the movie. They did actually film the movie on location in San Francisco. You can tell. Yes. But bringing it to the screen was a challenge in finding the right actress in particular to play Mama. Right. That's a very difficult part cast in a way and of course it went to Irene Dunn who was brilliant. And I think it's interesting seeing her in this time period playing a mother character because even though she was older at the time she was still playing leading ladies, wasn't she? She looked very young. She was 50 at this point but she looked great. She lived a very wholesome life. She herself was a very good Christian, a very strong woman of virtue so she wasn't like a wild actress. She had very strict rules with herself. She wouldn't start too early or go too late because she believed in getting enough sleep and taking care of herself. She's wearing a little less makeup or simpler makeup in the way she's costumed. It's not going to be that she's not wearing makeup. That probably isn't true but she definitely is wearing less makeup. I don't think there's any classic film where an actress is not wearing makeup at all. She's wearing makeup to look a certain way and she wore padding to look heavier, to look more maternal. Now before she was given the role Greta Garbo was one of the main forerunners for it. Really? Yes. Well, she was Scandinavian. I can't quite picture that. She was just such a glamorous woman. She had the right accent. She had been retired from the screen for six years by the time this movie came out. She hadn't made a film since Two-Faced Woman and she never would make another film. Although many attempts were made to get her out of retirement she never came out of retirement. And George Cukor was put on the project at one point as the director because he was one of her favorite directors. They thought maybe he could persuade her. He was sort of a woman's director since it is a very female-driven picture. I could see that. Around the same time she was also offered a part in a Hitchcock film, The Paradine Case. I didn't know that. She turned them both down saying no murderesses and no mamas. Neither one of them were things that she wanted as part of her reputation. So she turned them both down. A Greek actress was also considered and they seriously thought about changing the nationality to Greek rather than Norwegian. But ultimately they decided to cast Irene Dunne and she studied with a Norwegian coach for several months to master that accent. I don't consider myself at all an expert on the intricacies of Scandinavian accents but it's very convincing from as far as I can tell. She was good with accents. She did a southern accent in several of her earlier films. When we're talking about movies of this era of course we always have to talk about the Motion Picture Production Code which was in place at the time. From 1934 to 1954 it was enforced by Joseph I. Breen, head of the Production Code Administration or PCA. And this isn't exactly a story just from reading the book that needs a lot of Breening as it was called. But there are certain things that have to be handled in any film. You really just have to be careful about the handling of it. I was thinking not remembering the book that well that the character of Jesse or Yessi as they call her Uncle Chris' wife at first they're implying they're living together but then it's revealed she's actually his wife. And I thought that seems like a code change. I realized that character isn't even in the book. I assume she's from the play but probably. It could have been a code change from the play. Perhaps she was actually his mistress or what have you. But just the handling of the situation it just feels it's a very good strong kind of code moment I want to say. And I think that even in stories like this where they didn't necessarily have to tell them to do the right thing it reflects what this era was all about. About the strong family values. A virtuous mother. Children learning the difference between right and wrong. A strong loving father. And I think it's a great example. So often in modern entertainment we see the family unit is not presented in a very traditional way. Absolutely. And they tend to make the father look like a goofball while the mother is running the scene. But here you see a clear example where the mother obviously has a stronger personality than the father. And he defers to her in many situations. But she still is a very traditional mother. Right. And he is the one who works and he still is the head of the household. But she really runs the house. Because she's the one who's there all the time. And he respects and honors her wisdom. She's sort of like the woman described in Proverbs about who takes care of her family and what a virtuous woman should be. And we see that in the way this character is written and how much she sacrifices for her family and loves them and gives advice to her sisters and helps her uncle. She's just a good example to everyone. And this was nominated for several Academy Awards, right? Yes, it was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Actress for Irene Dunn, Best Supporting Actress for Barbara Bel Geddes, Best Supporting Actor for Oscar Homolka, who played Uncle Chris, Best Supporting Actress for Ellen Corby, and Best Director for George Stevens. Did it win anything? No, it didn't. That's unfortunate. And it actually lost money, even though it was very successful, because they spent a lot of money making it. The location footage, right? Yeah. I was curious, do you have any idea how they made it look so historical? If they were filming on location? There are many areas of San Francisco that even today still have these Victorian houses. And considering that this was made in 1948, set in 1910, it really wasn't that long ago. Yes, that's true. So they probably blocked off a couple of streets and brought in some horse-drawn carriages. And the natural landscapes, they had old houses, so it didn't need to be changed that much. I really think it's wonderful that they did go the extra mile to do that, even though they lost money, because the book, aside from being focused on her mother, is sort of a love letter to San Francisco. Her mother loves that city so much. It's just, she's taken it to her heart as soon as she stepped off the boat. I think this is a great story about immigrants, too. Yes. And going back to Joseph Breen, he was a second-generation Irishman himself, and he really cared about the reputation of Irish people in America and how they're being accepted and how they could be great citizens. And I think similar struggles were faced by Norwegian people. Definitely. And I think that's more in the book than in the movie. You don't really see any prejudice against them for being immigrants. No, there's actually, when, there's a part that was not included at all where they move to a different neighborhood and the girls go to this all-girls school and it's very upper crust. Yes. And there's a lot of snobbery versus their kind of lower class, and they're being foreign. Yes. It's a bit of racism, I suppose you could say. And, yeah, that wasn't touched on, but as a result, they just focused on, instead, how important it is that they have this pride in being American citizens. Yes. They still respect their heritage, they love the old country, but they love the new country, too. They're very proud to be Americans. How do you think this film could be accepted or viewed by people who aren't as familiar with old movies? I think the values and the sort of core principles of the film are just so timeless that I think that is relatable. Sadly, as we were saying, there aren't very many families now that are like the families seen in this movie. So, I don't know, it might be a little sad for some modern viewers. Not for us, because it's a lot like our actual home life, but I just think they could still see something in it that can speak to everyone. Even if you haven't experienced something like that personally, it's sort of a desire, I think, everyone has. And it is a nostalgic story, even when it was written, and when it was made into a film. It was set in a bygone era. Of course, we've talked about this a lot, but any time something is a period piece, it's a little easier to accept because they weren't taking as much for granted about how society was at the time as one that was in contemporary times. It's meant to be very sentimental, and they do a great job of creating that atmosphere of 1910 with the hairstyles and the costuming. I'm replicating one of the costumes which Mama wears in the film. She always wears shirtwaists in the sort of Victorian style, even though it's the early teens, and long skirts, simple fashion, but very feminine. And her hair is always in a braid, the very Scandinavian style, wrapped around her head and a little bun in the back. And her most notable element of her fashion is a beautiful silver brooch, which she wears in the first part of the film, and which is an important story element as she ends up giving it to her daughter. My outfit represents Catherine's first costume in the very opening of the movie when she's finishing writing her novel and then recalling her childhood. It's a simple white shirtwaist and a shorter black skirt since it's a slightly later time period by that point, black stockings, heavier black shoes with a couple of little black ribbon accents, and the beautiful pin which she got from her mother. It is a very emotional film. It really makes you feel a lot of different feelings. There are some really funny moments, there are some cute moments, some heartwarming moments, some moments which are so sentimental and tender that it brings tears to your eyes. There aren't a lot of really honest-to-goodness sad parts. That's an interesting point. Yeah, usually when there's a bad situation, it turns out well. Uncle Chris does die. That's quite sad. But it's a very peaceful death, and he's lived a good life. It's a very meaningful death scene for him, a very, I think, touching look at the peaceful going into the next world. His character was definitely expanded more in the book. They showed a little bit more of his gruff when he has the soft heart. Yeah. The element about his having spent all his money helping children who were lame in some way and helping them all walk again, that is from the book, but I think they actually flesh out his character more because in the book, he's one chapter. That's an interesting thing in the book. Each incident happens in its own sequence, in chapters. It's more episodic. Yes, in the film, rather. A lot of things happen at once, and that's very true to life. Sometimes everything happens at once. It's not just like, and each thing happened. Yes, because it's more her recollection. She's like, I remember when this happened, I remember when that happened. And I would say the film seems sort of like it's quite texturally accurate to the first four chapters, I would say, and then some later ones, like about the cat or about her graduation present. But really, those first four chapters, about the bank account and about Dagmar going to the hospital, it's very, very close to it. And then they just simplified it by keeping it. They stay in that one house. The family's staying more all together. If they'd adapted everything that happens in the book, I think they would have had two, maybe three actors for each of the children because they grow up during it. I think they're younger when it starts, and then it goes into the oldest brother, Nels, becoming a doctor and her sister, Christine, getting married. The last chapter's about Christine having a baby. So Mama actually has another child, a fifth child, a little girl, Kachen. They do show the children growing over the course of, I think it's about three years. Yes. And Barbara Bel Geddes was 25 at the time, but they do a good job of making her look young. Yeah, she really does. It's amazing when she puts her hair up, it's like, oh, she's a woman. Yes. And the other sister, too, Christine. The theme always remains very strong, about Mama really protecting her children, but also making sure they're not too sheltered, that they know how to go on and become adults and find their own way in the world, and that she, after Uncle Chris dies, she tells Kachen, I want you to come and look at him so you see what death looks like so you don't have to be afraid of it. That's a very important lesson. A lot of people want to acknowledge some of the harsher things in life, and she really wants her children to understand everything about life. It's interesting that the title of the film and the play is I Remember Mama, and the title of the book is Mama's Bank Account. Right. But the bank account is more prevalent throughout the story of the film than in the book. Yes, and at the beginning, when she's writing the end of her novel, the bit that they're using there, it's not exactly accurate to the text of the book, but the part it's most like is actually the first section of the first chapter, which is called Mama and Her Bank Account, and with the revelation about the truth about the bank account at the end of that chapter. But they made that, they put that at the end. Yeah, that's sort of the conclusion, when they realize all these years they thought she had a bank account downtown, so if anything really happened and they really needed money, there was always that money there, but they just didn't want to touch it. They were saving it, and then they realized there was no bank account downtown. All they had was the money in her little bank. She says it's not good for little ones to be afraid, to not feel secure. So it's the one time Mama told a lie. So they always felt that they had something to fall back on. They didn't have to be afraid of poverty, because they are quite... Yeah, they are quite poor. Quite hard up, yeah. They don't have, especially for how many of them there are, they don't have a lot of money, and Mama's always saying she's going to buy herself a winter coat, and she never does, of course, because there's always something else she thinks is more important. So it ends on a really... The film ends on a really beautiful note with the book and... Catherine publishing her first story. So I love how they honored the book and brought in some other elements to really make a great story, and it's just over two hours, so it's a really in-depth, involved, but beautiful movie, which I think anyone who wants to see a touching family story, and families could enjoy watching this too. Absolutely. It's really just a touching, beautiful movie for anyone to enjoy. Watch this. If you watch it by yourself, you'll want to go and hug your mother. Yes. And the great thing is, you can find this movie very easily. You can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video or rent it. It's also on several other streaming services like YouTube and Google Play, and you can buy it on DVD as well if you still have a DVD collection, because it's been remastered very nicely and released by Warner Archives. The musical genre is one that's always thought of as being very light-hearted, but join us next time as we talk about a very unusual musical in which music serves as a backdrop to a very human story, once again about relationships, in which a young man, with the help of another loving mother and his friends, learns the importance of honoring his commitments and staying true to those he loves. Thank you for watching. Goodbye.