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