Film review

Douglas Sirk (1959)

According to the Wikipedia entry on Douglas Sirk, the critical reappraisal of his work that gathered momentum during the 1970s saw his Hollywood melodramas as ‘masterpieces of irony’ and ‘an oblique criticism of American society hidden beneath a banal facade of plotting conventional for the era’.  The theory has endured but I’ve always struggled with it – and never more so than in the case of Sirk’s final film, Imitation of Life.  The main racial theme of Fannie Hurst’s novel is hardly subtextual and it gets more attention in Sirk’s interpretation than it did in the 1934 film of the book.  (Point of interest:  Imitation of Life wasn’t the first 1950s movie by auteur Sirk to follow a 1930s version of the same material by journeyman director John M Stahl.  He also directed Magnificent Obsession, which Sirk remade in 1954.)

In other respects, Sirk and his screenwriters, Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, make various changes to Fannie Hurst’s novel and/or to its first adaptation for the screen.  The action is updated to the late 1940s and 1950s.  The setting is New York instead of Atlantic City.   Most of the main characters’ names have changed.  The protagonist, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), becomes a famous actress rather than a successful businesswoman, and is a largely absentee mother to her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee).  Her African-American housekeeper Annie (Juanita Moore) isn’t, unlike Delilah in the 1934 film, the secret of Lora’s professional success.  When Annie’s light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) tries to make it in white society, she does so not as a humble cashier but as a dancer in a New York dive and then (once Annie has discovered her there and Sarah Jane goes West to get away from her mother) as a showgirl in Los Angeles.  The white woman’s suitor (John Gavin) now takes photographs instead of studying fish although he’s still called Steve Archer.  The casting includes one especially striking and seemingly retrogressive difference from the earlier film.  Fredi Washington, the racially dissatisfied Peola in John M Stahl’s version, was African-American; Susan Kohner, who plays Sarah Jane, is white.

These changes recast several of the central relationships and the dramatic scheme of Imitation of Life.  Instead of two essentially admirable mothers with differently problematic offspring, there’s one self-giving mother and one self-centred one – Lora’s career comes before her daughter.  As a result, Annie, although her own child abandons her, is something of a surrogate mother to Susie.  When Annie dies and the prodigal daughter Sarah Jane suddenly returns to weep and prostrate herself on the coffin, Lora experiences a cortege conversion of her own – to motherhood.  She embraces both Susie and Sarah Jane; Steve’s face registers, with relief, that Lora has learned the error of her ways.  There’s no sense of partnership between her and Annie as there was between their counterparts in 1934: Sirk’s pair are always mistress and maid.  (Annie’s duties are wide-ranging:  in one scene, we see her as Lora’s dresser for a Broadway play; in the next, she’s responsible for the catering at Lora’s at-home after-show party.)  Sirk’s Imitation of Life is conventionally censorious – and almost prudish – about the wrong-headedness of show business.  The film’s lampoon of the all-is-vanity theatre world – personified by the egomaniac, Pulitzer Prize-hungry playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) – is crudely clichéd.  Lora can’t be a good mother as well as a great actress.  Sarah Jane’s refusal to accept who-she-really-is is emphasised by her making a spectacle of herself in the corrupt milieus of the seedy night club and the tawdry chorus line.

The stage and screen star who loves herself too much to love anyone else was a very familiar figure by 1959 – too familiar to have much satiric charge, ‘ironic’ or otherwise; Lana Turner’s limitations as an actress have the effect of reinforcing Lora’s shallowness and of making one indifferent to her fate.  Juanita Hall plays Annie well but the relationship between her and Lora is thin, compared with the one between Louise Beavers’s Delilah and Claudette Colbert’s Bea in the first movie.  A few elements of Sirk’s changes to the Stahl set-up yield improvements.  Although Sarah Jane’s story is garishly overdone, Susan Kohner gets across a sense of the girl’s divided feelings and of the desperation in Sarah Jane’s determination to reject allegiance to her mother.  The character of Steve is feebly functional – although he’s meant to be a professionally successful photographer, he’s far from busy and always on hand to help out.  It’s unclear at the end where Steve has got to in his sedulous courtship of Lora.  At least, though, John Gavin is both handsome and young enough to persuade us that Lora continues to be attracted to Steve and that her teenage daughter is crazy for him.  It makes sense that Susie’s assertions of adulthood underline her childish needs:  Sandra Dee is alarmingly sparky in the role but her hyperactivity supplies an almost welcome contrast to Lana Turner’s waxen glamour.

There was plenty of laughter in NFT1 at the corniest, most overwrought moments of this Imitation of Life and plenty of clapping at the end. This may have been applause for the film as the ‘trash masterpiece’ it’s often been described as.  It’s equally possible, however, that people in the audience had taken note of the excerpt from Sam Staggs’s Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life (2009), which was used for the BFI programme note (they had the right one available this time).  Staggs’s thesis is that Sirk’s film is ‘really two pictures conjoined as celluloid Siamese twins’.  There’s ‘the white movie’, which ‘labours under every false emotion concocted for screenland drama … Laughter permitted’.   Then there’s ‘the dark side’, which ‘resembles a work by Verdi or Puccini’.  The ‘blond side of the picture [serves] as the booster rocket to shoot the black side to transcendence’.  I simply don’t get this:  the ‘black’ story seems to me overblown in the same way as the ‘white’ one.  The climactic funeral in Sirk’s film is an even bigger deal than it was in the Stahl movie.  The solo that Mahalia Jackson sings as part of the church service for Annie does, for a few minutes, elevate proceedings to a genuinely tragic level but the subsequent histrionics in the hearse are rendered all the more banal as a consequence.  For me, the differing emotional effects of the two parts of the picture amounted to impatience with the lacquered mechanics of the ‘white’ story, anger that the socially urgent themes of the ‘black’ one get the same luxuriant melodramatic treatment.

7 November 2016

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