Monthly Archives: November 2016

  • Imitation of Life (1934)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John M Stahl (1934)

    Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life explores issues of race and class in America in the early twentieth century.  Hurst tells the story, spanning around fifteen years, of the relationship between a white and a black woman, and between each woman and her only child.  The father of the black woman’s daughter was African-American but unusually light-skinned.  From a young age, the daughter resents her ‘blackness’ and the mother from whom she inherited it, and attempts to pass herself off as white.  The novel has spawned two cinema adaptations.  The first appeared in the year following the book’s publication; the second, and better known, in 1959.  Both screen versions of Imitation of Life are included in BFI’s ‘Black Star’ programme, which ‘celebrates black screen talent’ and runs throughout this November and December.  I saw the two films in chronological order, a few days apart.  (Things got off to an inauspicious start.  I arrived at NFT3 for the first screening to hear a BFI usherperson assuring other people going in, ‘We’ve got the right film.  It’s just we’ve got the wrong programme notes – they’re for the 1959 Imitation of Life.  It’s confusing, you see, because they both have the same title …‘)

    The widowed Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) makes ends meet peddling the maple syrup that her late, unlamented husband used to sell.  She agrees to give Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) board and lodging in exchange for Delilah’s keeping house and looking after Bea’s three-year-old daughter Jessie (Juanita Quigley), alongside Delilah’s own child Peola (Sebie Hendricks).  Delilah cooks for the household and her speciality is breakfast pancakes:  one morning, she whispers in Bea’s ear the secret recipe for these.  This is the starting point of Bea’s hugely successful business career.  She rents, for a song, a storefront on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and opens an eatery there, selling pancakes that Delilah cooks in full view of the busy street outside.  Within a few years, ‘Aunt Delilah’s’ pancake mix has become a market leader.  (It’s advertised with a beaming black cook’s face similar to the one on packets of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, which started real life in Missouri in the 1890s).  In pursuing her business venture, Bea doesn’t ruthlessly exploit Delilah and is anxious that she gets her fair share of the profits (or twenty per cent anyway).  Delilah, when Bea tells her she could easily afford to buy her own place with the money they’ve made, insists on continuing to keep house for her friend.

    It seems remarkable now that a story with race themes of this kind reached the screen at all in mid-1930s Hollywood.  In the early stages, the director John M Stahl, working with a screenplay by William J Hurlbut, maintains a well-judged balance between the development of Bea’s business career and of the material’s racial aspects.  As the film goes on, however, it gives greater attention to Bea’s romance with Steve Archer (Warren William), and the difficulties that arise when the eighteen-year-old Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) also falls in love with Steve, than it does to Delilah’s problems with her daughter.  Nineteen-year-old Peola (Fredi Washington) abandons, as well as her mother, her education in a ‘Negro college’ and goes to work as a cashier in a whites-only restaurant.  Delilah, accompanied by Bea, seeks her out there and, in doing so, exposes Peola’s ethnicity to her employers.  Peola angrily tells her mother she never wants to see her again – the culmination of a series of rejections that begins when Delilah turns up at Peola’s grade school and the teacher informs Delilah there are ‘no coloured children’ in the class.  The puzzled mother then catches sight of her daughter, who is trying to hide her face behind a schoolbook.  The two sides of Imitation of Life’s storyline share a common theme of maternal self-sacrifice for the sake of a daughter (anticipating a Hollywood melodrama sub-genre that remained popular for some years, with Stella Dallas (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1945) among its exemplars) – but considerably more screen time is devoted to Bea and Jessie than to Delilah and Peola.  A 2016 audience can understand this imbalance as a commercial imperative of the era in which the film was made.  We still can’t help resenting, though, the relegation of the socioracial issues to a virtual sub-plot – and the clichéd, sentimental treatment of what remains of them.  Delilah, her heart broken by Peola, takes to her deathbed:  a crossin’-Jordan soundtrack sets in very early.

    The main direction taken by the narrative is, as well as morally problematic, disappointing in other ways.  The children are fast friends until Jessie (now played by Marilyn Knowlden) upsets Peola (Dorothy Black) by reminding her that she’s black.  After this, there’s little interaction between the pair for the rest of the film – though no suggestion either that the eight-year-old Jessie’s slur (as nine-year-old Peola perceived it) caused a rift that never healed.  After her first, somewhat unhappy marriage, Bea is reluctant to be distracted from her business career by romantic involvements, in spite of Delilah’s encouragement to get herself a second husband.  It’s an unsolved mystery of this movie as to how Steve Archer brings about a change of heart on Bea’s part.  Steve is an ichthyologist: it sounds like the occupation of the would-be straight-man lead in a screwball comedy but Warren William, though mildly droll, is no Henry Fonda, Cary Grant or Joel McCrea.  What’s more, William was considerably older than Claudette Colbert and looks it.  In Hurst’s novel, Bea falls in love with a man eight years her junior – someone, in other words, just about halfway in age between her and her daughter.  In the film, Jessie’s crush on the distinctly middle-aged Warren William is rather bizarre.

    Peola and Jessie may not be written as merely selfish ingrates but the young actresses playing them are both, in their different ways, unsympathetic – so that the mother-daughter  relationships lack emotional complexity.  As Peola, Fredi Washington is very beautiful but forbiddingly tense.  Although Rochelle Hudson was still a teenager at the time, she gives Jessie’s naïve effervescence a forced, arch quality that you might expect from someone playing a character much younger than her own age.  (To be fair to Washington and Hudson, these unappealing traits do give the older Peola and Jessie a continuity with their younger versions in the film!)  Like most African-American performers of her generation, Louise Beavers had built a career in Hollywood playing mammies:  this role of a lifetime for Beavers is given greater poignancy by the fact that it’s still a servant role – partly because Delilah is determined it continues that way.  Louise Beavers is strong and affecting but thank goodness for Claudette Colbert, who holds Imitation of Life together.  As well as being the picture’s star, Colbert is the most versatile, amusing and persuasive performer in it.  Her charm and naturalness give a rhythm to the early domestic scenes that gains our interest and sympathy – and helps retain them even when the film starts to falter.  The late-evening conversations between Bea and Delilah, when their children are in bed, have an easy, believable intimacy that’s very engaging.  Bea’s canny negotiations over the Boardwalk space with a painter (Henry Armetta), a furniture man (Alan Hale) and so on are enjoyable, even though they’re also, in retrospect, an early warning of how much time will be devoted to Bea the entrepreneur.  The actors in these cameos are fine but this isn’t a movie with strong parts for or performances from the men.  The main male character after Stephen is Bea’s business manager.  He’s played by Ned Sparks, whose eccentric facial and vocal mannerisms soon become routine.

    Delilah is anxious that the pancake profits Bea invests on her behalf will be enough to pay for a good send-off.   She needn’t have worried:  a cast of thousands lines the streets to witness a procession that verges on a state funeral.  It’s the setting for the melodramatic climax of the story, as Peola suddenly reappears, fights her way through the crowds, and sobs remorsefully over Delilah’s coffin that she’s killed her own mother.  Unfortunately, the way the film tells the story, it’s hard to do anything but agree.  Even more unfortunately, this climax is followed by the anti-climax of resolving the Bea-Steve-Jessie love triangle (and resolving it tentatively and sketchily).  Yet although John M Stahl’s Imitation of Life has major shortcomings, I soon discovered that I preferred it to Douglas Sirk’s famous remake.

    1 November 2016

  • American Honey

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrea Arnold (2016)

    In his interview with Andrea Arnold in Sight & Sound (October 2016), Simran Hans writes as follows:

    ‘Each film is kind of where my psyche is at the time, and often through each film I’m trying to work something out that I don’t fully understand,’ she tells me, but snaps shut when I press her on what she was trying to figure out while making American Honey.  ‘I kind of know the answer to that but it’s so personal that I don’t know that I can actually say it,’ she says …

    Arnold takes plenty of time to work out whatever she’s working out in American Honey:  the film, at 163 minutes, is by some way the longest of her four features to date.  (They’ve been getting progressively longer but her third feature, the adaptation of Wuthering Heights, was a good half-hour shorter than this new one.)  American Honey is a rare spectacle but Arnold doesn’t tell us much more on screen than she does in interview.  This, in combination with the greatly excessive length, makes the movie frustrating and a bit tiring to sit through.

    Somewhere in Oklahoma, a teenage girl called Star (Sasha Lane) is in Walmart with two young children when she first sets eyes on Jake (Shia LaBeouf).  He invites Star to join his ‘mag crew’:  they travel from town to town, peddling magazine subscriptions from door to door.  It’s not an irresistible offer and Star doesn’t accept immediately – but she is immediately taken by Jake’s edgy come-on and her life as it is hasn’t much to recommend it.  In the opening scene of American Honey, Star and the two kids are seen retrieving a shrink-wrapped chicken from a dumpster.  After the Walmart sequence, we see her at home being pawed by an older man, who may or may not be her father.   Her young charges certainly aren’t Star’s kids:  she returns them to their mother (who could also be Star’s mother) once she decides to go on the road with Jake and his colleagues.

    Andrea Arnold goes along with them wholeheartedly.  She is enraptured not only by American landscapes that she’s experiencing for the first time but also by the travelling cast of youngsters, most of whom have never acted in a film before.  The newcomers include Sasha Lane, whom Arnold found ‘on a beach in Panama during spring break’, only a fortnight before the film went into production. (Arnold then tells Simran Hans in the S&S interview, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you what she was doing when I saw her’:  American Honey really is a top-secret movie.)   It’s not surprising that Lane caught Arnold’s eye.  This twenty-year-old has an unusual beauty – big dark eyes, a thick, truculent upper lip that gives her a look that’s often challenging and sometimes vulnerable.  Sasha Lane is a strong screen presence but it’s asking too much to expect her to carry this long film:  a tyro actress, she doesn’t shape her performance and the director doesn’t help her in this.  Andrea Arnold is so smitten with Lane and others as camera subjects that she seems to content just to watch.  Her laissez-faire direction makes the acting of the more experienced members of the cast – Shia LaBeouf especially but also Riley Keough, as jealous, manipulative Krystal, who heads up the mag crew – look like overacting.   Of the other first-timers, McCaul Lombardi makes the best impression, in the role of the sparky exhibitionist Corey.

    Arnold’s script was inspired by an account that she read in the New York Times of kids living and working as the characters in American Honey do.  Door-to-door selling isn’t, however, naturally conducive to exciting screen action: after Jake’s and Star’s opening pitch together, when he’s showing her the ropes, the film concentrates largely on the group dynamics and pecking order, on the erratic relationship between Star and Jake, and on Star’s brief encounters with a succession of other men.  Arnold has an eye for arresting compositions but isn’t so good at placing them in believable contexts.  The opening pitch is made at a house whose front door is opened by a pre-adolescent girl.  She obviously likes the look of Jake.  Her mother comes to the door to find out what’s going on and tells her to go back inside – to the friends that the girl has round.  Her daughter promptly obeys.  The mother (well played by Laura Kirk) is made fun of as a self-righteous Christian:  the fun consists in Jake stealing from under her nose, and in the daughter and her friends dancing provocatively in the garden, as the mother yells at them in vain to stop.  The dancing makes for a fine, comical image but it sharply contradicts, without explanation, the daughter’s doing as her mother tells her earlier in the scene.  Besides, the Christian mother is too narrow-minded and too houseproud to have let a pair looking like Jake and Star over the threshold in the first place.  (A female dance – this time cross-generational – was also a standout moment in Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank:  it made its point over-explicitly but at least it made sense.)

    A more extended bit involves three Stetson-wearing, white-shirted, middle-aged men.  They stop in their car just as Star is running away from Jake, after the pair have had a falling out.  She accepts a lift from the cowboys and they take her back to a ranch.  While they prepare a barbecue, Star drinks mezcal.  She plunges into a swimming pool and gets one of the cowboys in the water too.  Jake turns up with a gun to break up the party and steal the men’s car.  This entire episode holds your attention:  Arnold and her cinematographer Robbie Ryan keep up a flow of absorbing things to look at.  The actors playing the Stetsons are good too but the writing of their roles is perfunctory.  What is their motivation in picking Star up?  They don’t obviously intend any harm.  Richard Brody in the New Yorker says they get Star drunk but that’s misleading:  she’s eager to drink and one of the men expresses concern at how much mezcal she’s downing.  Star’s subsequent scenes in a passenger seat – first with a pleasant family-man trucker who gives her a lift, later with an oil-rig worker who pays her for sex – carry more tension and clearer meanings.  But the cowboys seem to be in the film purely as facilitators of Arnold’s image-making.

    Richard Brody is right enough when he takes Andrea Arnold to task for not giving the young characters of the story sufficient voice and for thereby perpetuating the:

    ‘… cliché that afflicts many movies about poor people … they’re depicted as being poor in language, poor in thought – as if people who don’t have money talk about their lives any less, or any less well, than people who do.’

    As Brody says, Arnold opts in place of spoken words for sung ones:  she pours pop and rock songs onto the soundtrack.   When she talks vaguely in the S&S interview about ‘these kids coming from these fairly difficult backgrounds’, I assume Arnold’s referring to the kids she read about in the New York Times piece that was her starting point.  She gives no idea in the film of how her characters have been marginalised, of whether this was the result of different factors in different cases.

    Whatever those three aging cowboys may have had in mind, they observe Star’s behaviour at the ranch as if she was a curious new species.  Sasha Lane does have an intriguing animal quality about her and the natural life of the landscapes through which the story moves is a powerful motif.  A bear and a turtle both make important appearances; Jake does strategically-timed wolf impressions; but it’s the insect population that takes the lead.  Star has a striking compassion for the bugs:  not only would she not hurt a fly, she actually saves the life of a wasp.  (Wasp was the title of Andrea Arnold’s first film, which won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short for 2005.)  On the debit side, Star swallows the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle.

    Robbie Ryan’s lighting gives the often-changing locale a consistent lustre and dynamism.  Perhaps there’s more shaky hand-held camerawork than is necessary but the visuals are certainly American Honey‘s most eloquent feature. Arnold is so enthralled by the people and places she’s shooting that she gives an exultant charge to everything in the film:  even that shrink-wrapped chicken has a weird vitality.  In the closing minutes, Star walks into a lake and disappears under the water.  She’s had such an up-and-down time over the previous two-and-a-half hours that you wouldn’t be astonished if she drowned herself – not least because this would be a way of Andrea Arnold finishing off the movie, which has been threatening never to finish.  But – as in Red Road and Fish Tank – Arnold steps back from letting the worst happen.  This seems less of an evasion than it was in the earlier pictures, thanks to American Honey‘s persistent joy-of-being-alive-and-young quality.  Star emerges from the lake and we’re meant to conclude that she’s come of age.  This was not a suicide but a baptism.

    23 October 2016

Posts navigation