Better with Age

George Stevens’s greatness as a filmmaker is in part attributable to his ability to clear sentimentality out of the way and focus on the emotional realism of his characters’ lives. After directing Katharine Hepburn in the 1935 adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s underrated, if a trifle treacly, novel “Alice Adams,” Stevens went to work, in 1948, on “I Remember Mama.” The piece began as a novel. Written by Kathryn Forbes and published in 1943, “Mama’s Bank Account” describes how a family of Norwegian immigrants, the Hansons, make a life for themselves and their first-generation Norwegian-American children in San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Filled with evocative characters—Forbes wrote a great deal for radio, and her ear for dialogue is sweet and snappy—the book’s occasional sentimental strain wasn’t done away with in John Van Druten’s 1944 stage adaptation. (Playing Nels, the Hansons’ only boy, was a young actor named Marlon Brando.) But what family story isn’t without its sentiment? In the black-and-white film of “I Remember Mama,” 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.