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
