newcritics

Two nights ago, sitting in a small outdoor park hidden in the Wall Street area within view of New York Harbor, we saw Imitation of Life, a 1959 movie directed by Douglas Sirk.

Film experts like The Self-Styled Siren and NCYweboy can tell you all about the cinematography and the way different scenes work. But the movie’s social meaning was so clear that even I got it. Set in 1950s USA, the story shows the intertwined lives of a single white woman and her daughter with a black woman and her daughter, who looks white. To my mind, false black/white dichotomy distorts this country as hideously now as then, or almost. In any case, Imitation of Life was the top-grossing movie in 1959.

Manny loves this movie but considers it a “soap opera” with deeper significance. My friend asked her English boyfriend if he considered it a “chick flick,” but he wouldn’t commit to that, even though the movie’s leading man waits a lifetime for the heroine to cap off her career before marrying him.

Imitation of Life is an epic saga in which the two mothers and daughters start out sharing a small walk-up apartment, where the black woman serves as maid and beacon of hope, caring for them all. The friendship between Lana Turner, (Lora, an aspiring actress with a little blonde daughter), and Juanita Moore (Annie, a saintly black woman with the little dark-haired girl who looks white), begins in a chance meeting at Coney Island. Neither woman has employment—Lora has arrived in NYC with big hopes and just enough money for a walk-up apartment. She addresses envelopes for pennies while waiting for her big break.

With Annie answering the telephone and cajoling the milk-man to wait a week for payment, Lori’s prospects improve. When she tells a playwright during an audition that his comedy is better than the lame scene she was assigned, he calls her back, having found his muse.

Lora is persistently romanced by a young photographer named Steve (John Gavin), who has sold photographs he took of little Susie and Sarah Jane at the beach, thereby securing a job as art director for a major beer brand. He asks Lori to marry him within weeks. She refuses, preferring the theatre to a housewife’s life. Fast forward then: Lora establishes a magnificent career as a glamorous actress. (This is, afterall, Lana Turner.)

Annie manages their fabulous new home, and raises both Susie and Sarah Jane, who insists whenever her mother’s not present, that she’s “white, white, white.”

From the beginning, Sarah Jane is determined to gain acceptance as a white girl in a white world. Lori consoles Annie, implying the girl will grow out of it. Annie knows better, saying, “How do you tell a child she was born to be hurt?”

Soon, six-year old Susie is sixteen years old and played by Sandra Dee, and eight-year old Sarah Jane is eighteen-year old Susan Kohner, whose secret white boyfriend, Troy Donahue, beats her upon discovering she’s “passing” for white.

Steve, who has risen to executive level while cooling his heels waiting for Lora’s career as an actress to wind down, rescues Sarah Jane when she runs away to become a chorus girl.

But Sarah Jane runs away again. The next time Annie finds her—again in a chorus line of white girls—she pretends she’s the glamorous girl’s “Mammy,” preserving her daughter’s masquerade. It’s clear from Annie’s devastated expression and her defeated posture that the woman who had always buoyed and mothered everyone, is now dying of heartbreak.

Thanks to Lora’s success, they’re living in a resplendent 1950s house in Connecticut, complete with thoroughbred horses. While Lora makes movies around the world, Annie takes to her sickbed.

But when Lora returns from a jaunt in Italy, Annie from her bed reveals trouble in the family—Susie has a crush on Steve.

This perplexes Lora so much that, while pouting, she tells Annie this is a “real problem”—nothing like Sarah Jane running away from her heritage. (A line that earned the black and white audience’s biggest laugh.)

Annie dies soon after, and her wish for a grand funeral (in what looks like Harlem) is honored. Mahalia Jackson sings “Trouble of the World” so gloriously, I often strive to hear it replay in my mind. Many years ago, I saw this movie in an-about-to-close, great old theatre that showcased Mahalia Jackson’s magnificent voice. The small park near Wall Street, with less than great audio equipment, didn’t do justice to the performance. But it couldn’t diminish it either.

As pallbearers take Annie’s coffin to a horse-drawn hearse, Sarah Jane arrives in tears, ripping open the back of her mama’s hearse, sobbing that it is all her fault. John Gavin and Lana Turner gently pull her away and comfort her in the limousine while Sandra Dee sheds delicate tears.

Susan Kohner, the grown-up Sarah Jane, was nominated for best supporting actress. And Juanita Moore, the angelic Annie, was nominated for best actress.

Prior to the movie, New York City’s River-to-River Festival showed a short, current film. Twelve African-American boys and girls about five years old were offered a choice of an American Girl-style white baby doll or a very slightly darker skinned one. All but one boy preferred the white doll. Upon off-screen questioning, the children, except for one boy, said the white doll was “good” and the darker doll “bad.”

Every dark child pointed to his or her chest as being like the dark (bad) doll. If there weren’t thousands of others reasons I’m voting for Obama in November, this alone would convince me. We certainly do need change. Vote for Obama.

(Cross-posted here)