The Portuguese Cinematheque is currently running Saturday double features, coupling even or odd film couples. A couple of weeks ago it showed the two Imitations of Life, Stahl´s 1934 one and Sirk´s 1959 one. Today the first.
Imitation of Life was the 27th feature film, 19th surviving, 6th sound, and 1st post-code (meaning, in case you don’t know, in which case for this reason alone you should thank yourself for reading The MacMahonian, post-entry into force of the Hays Code, which did for film in the US what Prohibition had done to alcohol, plunging Hollywood into an era of regressive puritanism compensated by elliptic perversion which became one of the defining features of its classic style) of John M Stahl, a Baku-born Jewish émigré, who shared with countless other émigrés the lion´s share in making Tinseltown great again and again. Since we´re in educational mode and in case you´re interested, the seminal work on this remains John Russell Taylor´s Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950 (1983). Stahl was second only to Douglas Sirk as melodrama stylist in American film history.
Imitation of Life tell the story of young white widow Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert, characteristically sprightly) trying to make ends meet for herself and her little daughter Jessie, and in the process semi-accidentally taking in black housekeeper Delilah (Louise Beaver, in the first major role awarded to a black woman in Hollywood, except for all-black efforts like King Vidor´s 1929 Hallelujah) and her mixed-race fair skinned daughter Peola, only to discover Delilah has an uncanny talent for baking delicious pancakes, which go wonderfully with the maple syrup of dear departed Mr Pullman´s company Bea had been unsuccessfully trying to continue to manage, inspiring Bea to take the unconceivable, but ultimately rewarded, commercial risk of opening a pancake franchise, using Delilah´s name but relieving her from the burdens of ownership or management, leading the four women straight to the then much fantasized Easy Street, living the good life and socializing with swells, naturally with each one in its rightful racial place, a particular stress factor for Peola, who is made to feel in her bones that being black is a social construct more than a skin colour, and understandably repudiates the whole business to her mother´s stoic, loving and accepting but (spoiler alert) ultimately unbearable distress, the prodigal daughter retuning sadly late. Meanwhile, there´s a love interest subplot between Bea and histologist (don´t ask) Stephen Archer (Warren William) otherwise the film wouldn´t sell.
From the opening shot of a rubber duck in a bathtub zooming out from a toddler´s bath it´s clear that Stahl is remarkably handy with the camera, more so as he never bothers to flaunt his talent. Single mothers of only daughters with absent, due to demise or flight, and unnamed fathers in a seemingly matriarchal world would have given Freud a field day, particularly when Stephen comes in and an ambiguous relation with Jessie develops (he is entrusted by Bea to entertain Jessie while mum´s absorbed by her business life), but Marx wouldn’t complain either, as the mechanics of post-1929 crash capitalism and racial politics are spelled out as clearly here as in anything Bertolt Brecht ever wrote.
There´s a mild scholarly debate over which Imitation is the better. To no detriment of our much-beloved Douglas Sirk, The MacMahonian holds with those who favour this one. And they probably didn’t run quote of the year contests back in 1934, but if they did this Imitation features a strong contender: Dellilah to Bea, trying to assuage her from Peloa´s bitterness and cruelty toward her mother on account of her race: “let her be, Mrs Pullman, it aint her fault, and it aint yours either. It aint mines either. Truth be told, I don’t knows whose fault it is. It caint be the Lords…”. And then to the camera: “it sho´ got me puzzled”.