If this movie were called anything else at all, it would be recalled much more fondly. Anything. The Hansons of San Francisco. The Norwegians. Parental Sacrifice. Heck, Child Sacrifice would do better. It’s a shame, because this is one of the very best films of George Stevens’ oeuvre, the first movie he made when he returned to Hollywood after World War II.

Maybe I’m overstating the case about how this movie would be treated if the title were different, because I can see how even audiences of the late ’40s would reject it. I Remember Mama is unabashedly sentimental, replete with the kind of feelings that the irony-pilled and the teenaged alike will reject. Perhaps we’ve begun to turn a corner back to the place where earnestness is appreciated or even admired, or it could be that I’m over thirty.

The most honest feelings in the movie belong to Barbara Bel Geddes, who is not quite in the Stranger Things cast hell of also being over thirty while playing a teenager. (Bel Geddes was merely in her mid-twenties. Normal!) Katrin has the little pretensions of a recognizable teen, even though her teenage years took place before women had the right to vote in America. She sees herself as a star in the making, whether that’s in her writing or in her acting at school. There’s preening in her, and dramatics. In other words, she’s comfortable. This is a fabulous accomplishment. The Hanson family is not one of those immigrant families that strikes it rich with some fortunate endeavor. They have a boarder who sneaks out in the middle of the night, leaving behind his library rather than providing the payment the family needs to carry on. In one of the first scenes of the film, everyone in the family, and not just the adults, chips in to make sure that a son can keep going to school. Despite these hardships, Katrin has the freedom to be a brat. Credit for that freedom belongs, to some extent, to her father, but it’s not called I Remember Papa.

Irene Dunne’s stardom in the 1930s owes a great deal to looking younger than her age, and when I Remember Mama was released, Dunne was fifty years old. She looks younger, as beautiful as ever, but there’s a gravitas of middle age that comes into the performance. You believe in Marta Hanson as a woman who has the cumulative years of motherhood within her. One is not a mother for eighteen years when she has an eighteen-year-old and three other children. She is a mother for the combined ages of all of the children, having put in the woman-hours for each one of them. That kind of time and exertion does things to people. It makes them exhausted, or it makes them saintly. There are all of the sacrifices that Marta makes for her children, the household as a whole, even the family who live outside of the house. These are the meat of the film. No example moves me as much as the section in the film where one of the children ends up in the hospital. Marta is assured that the child will receive the care she needs, but she cannot bear to let Dagmar out of her sight. I Remember Mama doesn’t seem like a movie that would involve some cloak-and-dagger escapades, but how Marta gets into the hospital so she can stay with Dagmar proves that an adoring mother may also be, in some small way, a ninja.