Film Forum

U.S., 1948
Directed by George Stevens
With Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Oscar Homolka
Based on the play by John Van Druten 
Approx. 134 min. 4K DCP. 

“A leisurely, kitchen-life chronicle of a tribe of Norse-American San Franciscans, in & around 1910. There is much less plot than incident, and the quality of the incidents increases in proportion to their deceptive simplicity. Mama (Irene Dunne), who is very much the boss in her home, carefully allocates her husband's weekly pay. Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), who wants to grow up to be a writer, listens enraptured while the family's roomer, a worn-out old actor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), reads aloud from Dickens and Shakespeare. Mama's painfully timid old-maid sister (Ellen Corby), who wants to marry an equally timid undertaker (Edgar Bergen), seeks Mama's moral support. Little Dagmar is operated on for mastoiditis (by Dr. Rudy Vallee, with a beard). The bellowing Head of the Family, Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka), who loves to scare and scandalize all the relatives he dislikes, dies, with a drinker's gasp of satisfaction, after tossing off his last neat drink. Mama, by swapping recipes, wheedles a successful authoress (Florence Bates) into reading Katrin's stories and passing on the secret of literary success (write about what you know); Katrin grows up, to write the stories that tell the whole movie in flashbacks.” – James Agee, TIME

Reviews

“Stevens beautifully employs the closeup to dramatize intimacy and to evoke time past: the world was different then, and we see it differently because of his cinematography.” 
–  Hilton Als, The New Yorker.