Word: druten
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...Remember Mama (RKO Radio), an adaptation of John van Druten's stage hit, turns out much better than most such translations. A deeply domesticated "family" movie, Mama is 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...
Amazingly enough, the movie manages to retain most of the playful charm of a weekend love affair that earned the stage version a five-year run. For this feat, author John Van Druten, who was on hand in Hollywood, is presumably responsible...
...Druten, carried by the nearby Johnston office, had to change his tactics. Instead of inexorably propelling Parker and Reagan into bed, he has to keep them out of it. When Reagan, a buck-sergeant on week-end furlough, retires on Miss Parker's living room couch, the camera carefully records the tightly closed bedroom door that separates the lovers. In the play, the curtain fell as the two embraced. But the idea is the same and most people will probably catch...
...this exchange of tattle for titillation were the whole truth, only half the battle need be lost; for Playwright John van Druten's soldier is an engaging character and his girl is rather an original one. But since these characters have been deprived of their chief motives, their honesty, and their essential innocence, they are also deprived of most of their reality and all their charm...
Playwright Van Druten, who wrote the movie adaptation, may have tried hard to keep his tongue in his cheek, but it's a safe bet that he also ground it between his molars. Ronald Reagan, none too shrewdly cast, plays, of necessity, as if he were trying to tone down an off-color joke for a child of eight. Eleanor Parker's imitation of Margaret Sullavan, the Broadway original, is painfully scrupulous, from the hair on out. But it is hard to believe that Sergeant Reagan could long endure the retarded maiden she portrays, much less find...