Great Flick, But Should A Griefstricken Seven-Year-Old Watch It ?
The film is awesome, but do people agree with me that it's the wrong film to show to a seven-year-old child whose mother died recently?
In 1976, when my family checked out 16 millimeter films from the public library, my mother insisted that a neighboring family's seven-year-old daughter watch this film just four months after her mother died from cancer. The father and older daughter, then a few days away from her 14th birthday, watched it, too. The mother was 39 years old when she died.
Before they arrived at our house, the father evidently was not familiar with the film. He was old enough to have seen movies in 1948, but he had no sisters, and we can assume the film was more popular with females than males in 1948. Our friend might have thought it was a slapstick comedy, so he saw no reason for his daughters to skip it. They were learning to get out of the house as they coped with their shattering grief. I operated the movie projector. Within 15 minutes of the movie starting, I felt terrible for the seven-year-old girl sitting on the floor looking up at our portable screen. She had lost her own mother four months earlier. I felt even worse when Mama (Irene Dunne) sneaks into the hospital in the middle of the night to sing a lullaby to her little daughter and the other kids. Just when I thought my sadness about our seven-year-old friend could not get worse, there came the scene when Uncle Chris dies onscreen. Dear Lord. It's an unusually realistic death scene for Hollywood in 1948.
Our friendship with this neighbor family started to dry up after we showed them I Remember Mama. Does anyone want to know the father's name? He has an Imdb page, but it reveals nothing about him as a person. He's a Washington, DC - based expert on Islamic terrorism and the childhood of Saddam Hussein. He does sound bites for A & E Biography and CNN. He worked for the CIA at the time he and his griefstricken daughters visited our house to see this movie in 1976. He retired from the CIA ten years later and became a political science / psychiatry professor at George Washington University.
In 1996 my family sold the house where this CIA official / professor and his daughters had seen Mama twenty years earlier. They still live in the DC area. We live hundreds of miles away. We have occasional telephone contact with the older daughter who was almost 14 when she watched Mama with us, but we've totally lost touch with her father and younger sister. We can read about the father online.
To recap, does the above story make my mother seem stupid? It was she, and only she, who insisted that our neighbors see this film during an era when it was rarely shown on commercial television, there was no home video market, and they would have missed the entire movie had we minded our own business. The obvious question is, did my mother remember seeing the film before I set it up on our 16 millimeter projector ? Yes, she did. She also said she was an ardent fan of the Mama TV series that ran on CBS from 1949 to 1957. She gasped when I showed her a still photograph of it from a coffee table book on TV history. She recognized Dick Van Patten, who played Nels in the CBS series, when he became the father on Eight Is Enough in 1977.