TCM remembers Mama: Mothers have their movie day again

On a day meant for celebrating moms, virtually everyone gets in the spirit.

That includes Turner Classic Movies, which typically marks Mother’s Day with attractions centered on maternal characters. The channel holds to that tradition on Sunday, May

12, with a double feature highly appropriate for the occasion. While the daytime lineup is marked by titles including the Doris Day vehicle “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960), Oscar winner Joan Crawford’s “Mildred Pierce” (1945) and the Lana Turner remake of “Imitation of Life” (1959), TCM’s “official” double feature for the holiday comes that night.

First up is the drama “I Remember Mama” (1948), with Irene Dunne as the family matriarch. TCM regularly, and expectedly, shows that film on Mother’s Day — and it will be followed by another picture very popular on that outlet, the original version of the comedy “Yours, Mine and Ours” (1968), with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda as a widow and widower who marry and merge their large families.

Dunne earned the last of her five Oscar nominations for best actress for “I Remember Mama,” about a Norwegian family living in San Francisco in the early 1900s. The story is largely an extended flashback related by the eldest daughter, who is writing her autobiography (and is played by Barbara Bel Geddes, later Miss Ellie on TV’s “Dallas”). She recalls various trials and tribulations of her relatives, discovering that her literary future may lie with writing about the people and subjects she knows best.

Based on John Van Druten’s play (which, in turn, was inspired by Kathryn Forbes’ novel “Mama’s Bank Account”) and directed by George Stevens, “I Remember Mama” also features Oscar Homolka (“The Seven Year Itch,” 1955), Philip Dorn (“Random Harvest,” 1942), Golden Globe winner Ellen Corby (who played the grandmother on “The Waltons” in later years), Edgar Bergen (“Fun and Fancy Free,” 1947) and singer Rudy Vallée (“The Palm Beach Story,” 1942). A television series spinoff titled “Mama,” with Peggy Wood (“The Sound of Music,” 1965) in the title role, aired on CBS from 1949 to 1957 … and prompted a re-release of “I Remember Mama” in 1956.

“Yours, Mine and Ours” marked a reunion of Ball and Fonda, who had acted together in the 1942 drama “The Big Street.” Though there’s a serious undercurrent about their fact-inspired characters losing their spouses, humor is the major theme of their reteaming, with Fonda as Navy officer Frank Beardsley, newly returned to his resentful children — all 10 of them. He meets and falls for a nurse (Ball) who has eight kids of her own, and they take a big gamble by marrying and bringing their offspring together under the same roof.

If the premise sounds familiar, the sitcom “The Brady Bunch” premiered on ABC the following year. The Doris Day-Brian Keith movie comedy “With Six You Get Eggroll,” also released in 1968, had a similar plot as well.

Whether for tears or laughs, Turner Classic Movies always remembers mothers, and it certainly will on Mother’s Day again this year.