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Imitation of Life
Emotions run high
2005
Review: October 16, 2007
Director: Douglas Sirk
Starring: Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, John Gavin, Sandra Dee, Susan Kohner, Robert Alda
Might help you get into the drama of it all, but not needed.
THE SETUP:
A few years in the lives and loves of a woman, her housekeeper, and their daughters.
DISCUSSION:
Having made it almost to 40 as a gay man without ever having seen this film, I knew that I had to rectify this situation pretty soon. "Oh," a friend's friend said of me regarding this film, "he can't write about movies without ever having seen that." And now, having seen it, I am fully qualified! You know, and some people pay money for expensive film schools.
We open with credits that show a number of diamonds falling across a deep blue background. For some reason it's unusually beautiful. Then we meet Lana Turner as Lora, an aspiring model and actress, who has lost track of her daughter at Coney Island. We do get a few nice shots of Coney Island circa 1959, which was of particular interest to me, having just been there two days before for the [probable] last open day of Astroland amusement park. She finds her daughter in the care of Annie, a kindly African-American woman with a light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane. They start chatting, and Annie lets it be known that she is looking for work as a live-in housekeeper. They all meet John Gavin as Steve, a photographer who has taken a picture of the two young girls. It's quite a coincidence—all our major characters meet each other within three minutes, all on the same day!
Lora and her blonde daughter, Susie, make to go home, and Sarah Jane throws the first of many ungrateful tantrums as she wishes she had a real home to go to. Lora offers Annie and Sarah Jane a place to stay for the night, and they go home. You can see, once home, how Annie just assumes the housekeeper role, and Lora lets her. After not too much talk about how they both want the other there, Annie and daughter end up staying. Then Steve comes over with the photo he took at the beach, which has been turned into an ad. He asks her out. Then Lora bluffs her way into an interview with a producer, but he discovers her ruse, but gives her a chance anyway, but he wants her to do nude… and she tells him off and storms out!
She then has her date with Steve, and you'll notice that she's already calling him "darling" and they start talking about marriage and it's… their first date? And they've only met twice before? Maybe there's a lot of stuff we haven't seen or… romance was just different back then. Lora says of her career: "I want more! Everything! Too much!" They're heavy into the first-actual-date marriage talk when the phone rings and it's a producer who wants to meet with her about a part—right then. Steve tells her not to go, but she must. You can see that he totally discounts her dream [and that she has a brain that she might have dreams with], and she essentially calls him a sell-out for using his photographs to promote beer.
Then she blows a part written by star playwright David Edwards, and tells him that his play is the weakest thing he's written in years. Of course, he agrees with her, and calls her back to discuss her ideas. Now—to totally diverge—one of my favorite things about by sisters' Cosmopolitan magazines was the horoscope, which would say things like "This week you and your Italian lover will open a bakery in Milan, then you'll jet to Paris for a rendezvous with that passionate young Euro-hottie, but don't forget to make time for your favorite man, the billionaire competitive skydiver"—and I would always think of an obese woman in a trailer park in Arizona who was reading it all. This movie is a little like that scenario: Will Lora choose the smoldering photographer? Or the troubled genius playwright? Or should she concentrate on building her skyrocketing Broadway career?
SPOILERS > > >
So Lora becomes a star with her playwright at her side, having basically thrown herself at him. He keeps writing successful parts for her, and she keeps succeeding in them, and about ten years pass. But by that time, she's not content. She wants more. She wants everything. She wants... too much. You'll notice that by now she has what is supposed to be a real blue-period Picasso. But she wants to do more dramatic parts, and thus she and the playwright are finished. But time has also passed for Susie and Sarah Jane, and they're both young women, although Sarah Jane is now even more ashamed of her mother. She's got a white boyfriend who "will die" if he ever found out her mother is black… and she's not exaggerating; he slaps the living shit out of her when he finds out! But Susie [Sandra Dee at her most appealingly insipid] is starting to go on "dates" with Steve, such as going horseback riding, then to a romantic lounge. Is this not inappropriate? Later, when mom finds out, she says she had absolutely no idea, but no one blames Steve for taking this girl half his age to such romantic locales. I'll leave most of it for you to discover but things come to a head between mothers and daughters and between mother and lovers and everyone else, then Mahalia Jackson comes on to deliver an AMAZING performance, and that's about it.
< < < SPOILERS END
It was good melodrama. I can totally see why this is a huge movie in the gay community, because you have bitchiness, tantrums, STARDOM!, kiss-offs, prejudice, distant mothers, overbearing mothers ["If I loved you too much, I'm sorry"], and high, high drama. It's very much a melodrama, but it's good because there is no one topic it chooses, like Sarah Jane's internalized racism or Susie's daddy issues or the friendship between Lora and Annie… it just sets them all up and lets them unfold, intertwining as they do so.
Apparently the 1934 version of this film stays much closer to the novel. In it, the Annie character shares a pancake recipe that makes Lora rich, but it was decided that by 1959 a black woman would just have her own baking business. And apparently director Sirk shot the film in such a way as to convey more attention and sympathy for the black characters. Hey, I only know what I read on Wikipedia.
But personally, I just didn’t have that much of a reaction. I’m glad I saw it, in a sort of it’s-good-to-know-about-well-regarded-movies-of-the-past kind of way, but it didn’t leave me with that much, or really move me. So, that’s another one off the list.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you like melodramas with high emotion.
