Word: katrin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...chronicle of a Norwegian-American family in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Mama is unfolded retrospectively (from a corner of the stage) by daughter Katrin, now a successful writer. The kitchen-for-parlor home life that Katrin looks back on is dominated by firm, frugal, warmhearted Mama (extremely well played by Mady Christians) who, to give her children a feeling of security, pretends that the family has a flourishing bank account. Domestic fireworks are provided by hard-drinking, softhearted Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka); domestic dissonances by Mama's prying married sisters. The adolescent Katrin composes excruciating short stories...
...Most of all," says daughter Katrin, "I remember Mama," Mama is kind, firm, and resourceful, and has four children to look after. There are Katrin, the oldest, who wants to be a writer; Christine, blonde, the prettiest member of the clan; Nels, the young man of the house; and Dagmar, the precocious, animal-loving seven-year-old girl. Naturally, Mama doesn't want her children to fear poverty, so she invents a neat little myth about a bank account. But of course, no one ever "goes to the bank" because Mama always figures a way out of every emergency...