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| Douglas Sirk with Lana Turner |
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| Sirk and Turner with producer Ross Hunter |
IMITATION OF LIFE A USA (125 mi) 1959 d: Douglas Sirk
It’s a sin to be ashamed of what you are. And it is even worse to pretend, to lie. Sarah Jane has to learn that the Lord must have had his reasons for making some of us white and some of us black. —Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore)
The price of ruthless ambition, where self-centeredness becomes the American Dream, returning to themes from Magnificent Obsession (1954), accentuating the materialistic mindset of the 50’s, highlighting the tragedy of false ideals, but seen through a prism of racial exclusion, with America turning a blind eye to racism during the 50’s, and just about every other decade, with tragic consequences. A plush and glamorized remake of John Stahl’s 1934 film Imitation of Life bears only a passing resemblance to its source, the best-selling 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, which was originally serialized in 1932 in the magazine Pictorial Review under the title Sugar House. Sirk’s film achieved far greater commercial success, becoming one of Universal Studio’s highest grossing films in history, though some of that might have been attributable to a very public, behind-the-scenes scandal involving actress Lana Turner’s 14-year old daughter Cheryl Crane, who fatally stabbed Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, part of Mickey Cohen’s infamous gang, who had been threatening and physically abusing Turner, with the court ruling justifiable homicide. The film proved to be a comeback vehicle for Turner, the 40’s femme fatale focal point in Tay Garnett’s classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and a Hollywood glamor queen whose personal and professional life were in crisis. This also proved to be Sirk’s final American film, recalling years later, “I had outgrown this kind of picture-making which…was typical of Hollywood in the fifties and of American society, too, which tolerated only the play that pleases, not the thing that disturbs the mind,” where his critical reputation rests heavily on four 1950’s melodramas, All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written On the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), my own personal favorite, and this film, known for taking pedestrian sentimentality to a subversive extreme. The role of the film’s under-acknowledged producer, Ross Hunter, becomes significant in Sirk’s films, especially the part he played in casting actors who were passing for straight, most notably, Rock Hudson, so the theme that you can’t escape what you are is paramount. In this film the casting is equally important, however its status as a woman’s picture, featuring the dual lives of two single working mothers, one white and one black, makes it ripe for both a racial critique and a feminist investigation. Its unique story structure is a rarity, even within the context of the woman’s film, as it explicitly develops a parallel between its two female protagonists, becoming not only a discourse on race, with whites remaining completely oblivious, but the complications of working mothers. By juxtaposing Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a resolute white actress who finds her salvation in the theater, with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), her black maid, humble and self-effacing, never raising her voice (nonetheless she’s just as determined as her white counterpart), whose job literally is domesticity, sharing a home and parenting one another’s children, and by interweaving the two women’s relationships with their daughters, whose dissatisfaction follows in their mother’s footsteps, it veers into an over-stylized hysteria of artifice and melodramatic exaggeration, where men are merely a backdrop for these women, as the film offers an opportunity to observe an unusual and revealing intersection of the issues of race, class, and gender, while also offering a scathing critique of the rich and spoiled. Turner has the showier and more glamorous role, where her own life draws parallels, discovered in Hollywood at the age of 15, having multiple lovers including Artie Shaw and Tyrone Power, who she considered the love of her life, married eight times with seven different men, where her career constantly took her away from her daughter, who was raised by a series of nannies, growing ever more resentful of her mother’s success, but it’s Moore toiling in the shadows who brings the heartfelt authenticity the picture needs, simultaneously wrenching and restrained, “How do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?” Nominated for an Academy Award in a Best Supporting role, she had few career offers afterwards, as significant roles were simply not written for black women. Turner grew rich from the film, reportedly given the most luxurious trailer in Universal’s history, Imitation of Life Official Trailer #1 - Lana Turner Movie (1959) HD YouTube (2:20), having forfeited much of her salary for the part, but more than made up for it as she received a percentage of the profits, turning out to be her biggest payday.
The film recounts a decade in the life of Lora Meredith, beginning in the late 40’s when she’s a young widow struggling raise her child, Susie, holding a variety of odd jobs, but a short stint as a model leads to a break as an actress, then jumping ahead a decade later after she has achieved fame as a Broadway star. Her success is made possible by her association with Annie Johnson, a black single mother she encounters early in the film on a crowded Coney Island beach, with Annie moving into her apartment as a nanny and housekeeper with her daughter Sarah Jane, who is about the same age as Susie, immediately becoming best of friends. Lora also becomes attached to a young amateur photographer she meets on that same Coney Island beach, Steve Archer (John Gavin), who immediately takes a liking to the two kids, who he randomly photographed that day, where the picture eventually leads to an advertising job. The thrust of the drama is that Steve wants her to marry and settle down, which was the prevailing view in the postwar 50’s, but a life of domesticity doesn’t take into account her own personal ambitions, which becomes the central drama of the film, cutting it short with Steve, as success often takes her away from her daughter and her home. During their years together, both women endure parental conflicts, as Susie (Sandra Dee, pert, pretty, and blond, the highest paid teenage model in New York and one of the most sought after young actresses in Hollywood) feels Annie is more of a mother than her own, who is always absent, while Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner, daughter of Lupita Tovar, a Mexican-born actress who had a career in Hollywood, and Paul Kohner, a Jewish film producer from Bohemia who was best friends with director William Wyler), the undutiful daughter, attempts to pass for white, even as a young girl in school, where her anger and ultimate rejection of her mother speaks to her generation’s rejection of domestic work, which causes Annie no end of grief, eventually dying of heartbreak. Susie eventually falls in love with Steve, who steadfastly remains a loyal friend. Though Lora initially rejects Steve in favor of her career, where her hard work eventually pays off, purchasing a lovely home, decorated in a plush décor, reflecting the pinnacle of her success, yet her emotional world feels vacant and empty. By the end of the drama, she wonders if she’s been living an “imitation of life.” That title says it all, as it suggests a shadow world, a morbidly depressed underside to all that middle class success, a subject addressed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her new feminist activist group, the National Organization for Women, a prelude to the women’s movement of the 60’s, where radical feminism would emerge by the end of the decade, raising questions about what a woman really wants, striving for something more than husband, children, and home, suggesting women had been sacrificing their own opportunities in order to fit the model of a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs, where economic stability had not brought happiness, often feeling adrift and alone, as if vanquished in a desert of monotony where the daily routine becomes a grind. The role of women in American society is awash with contradictions, cautioned in the 40’s about the hazards of working women, while urged today to pursue professional careers. Yet this film adds additional layers of subtlety that figure prominently, the psychic price rebels pay for being different, parental suffocation, the comfort of religious faith (the compensation for such low wages and lower status), and society’s repressions, where it’s no accident that gays, whose closeted denial mirrors the mentality of Sarah Jane, and black women, who perhaps finally recognized themselves onscreen, have always been drawn to this picture. At the time it was made, the film was a Hollywood milestone debunking the myths of a safe, white middle-class America in their pursuit of stability and happiness. Underneath is an undeniable rage. The scene of Troy Donahue, discovering Sarah Jane’s mother is black, is particularly vicious, brutally beating her and leaving her in the gutter, accompanied by the chaotic sounds of jazz music, sending the message that Sarah Jane was born to be hurt, destined to a lifetime of racism and prejudice, no matter how many times she tries to reinvent herself. More than half a century later, that’s still hard to watch. More importantly, is being different any easier now?
This film takes place during the dawn of the civil rights movement, as the nation’s schools were recently integrated from a 1954 Supreme Court decision, the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks and the subsequent bus boycott led to the integration of buses in Alabama, while in 1957 the U.S. Congress passed the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction in 1875, forming a Civil Rights section of the Justice Department, empowering prosecutors to target interference with the right to vote. Sirk significantly altered the context of the novel, where a maid’s pancake recipe leads to her employer’s success in the restaurant business, yet the two women’s relationship is largely the same, where racial and class differences are minimized. Lora’s ambitions are largely determined by her deceased husband, who was a theatrical director, so she was simply following in his footsteps, yet the singleminded purpose she brings to her career is stunning, the equal of any man, especially the way she dresses down her would-be agent, Allen Loomis (Robert Alda), who openly acknowledges, “Me, I’m a man of very few principles and they’re all open to revision,” whose sexual advances she cuts short, not willing to cross that line, yet she’s extremely fortunate to find a young playwright, David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) in search of an actress, as they are able to build something together. She breaks from him as well, in need of dramatic roles instead of sticking to comedies, where her career is an astounding success. But that’s never the central focus of the film, with Sirk more interested in the consequences of her success, as trouble continues brewing at home, with Susie resenting her mother’s narcissistic ambition and instead turns to Steve for friendly advice and companionship, becoming infatuated with the idea of love. But the real focus is on Sarah Jane, continually passing for white, getting mixed up with a relationship that goes terribly wrong, before finding herself dancing as a chorus girl in tawdry night clubs under an assumed name, where she refuses to recognize her own mother, pretending she’s just some stranger, as she doesn’t want to lose a job that is available only to whites. In her rejection, however, she finds herself just as lost as all the other women, having turned her back on her mother’s influence and affection. Sarah Jane’s anger still resonates today, seemingly a misfit among blacks, disillusioned with the artificial paradise of white America, having no world she can call her own, as Kohner’s angry defiance also led to a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Audiences may have been drawn to the glitz and glamor of Lana Turner, as the studio paid more on her garish wardrobe ($23,645) than they did on Juanita Moore’s salary ($5,550), dressed in prominently featured jewelry that was worth over a million dollars, but ended up being emotionally gutted by the performances of both Moore and Susan Kohner, who end up stealing the picture, perhaps the ultimate irony, as bigger stars Turner and Dee are not at all sympathetic. For Turner, all her life is tied up with this elusive black woman, but knows next to nothing about her, so when she dies, Turner is left completely clueless and empty. Passionate, cynical, and laced with irony, these lurid melodramatic overtones accentuate what this film is about, exposing the mediocrity and sheer indifference of the American Dream, as two heroines who are both disillusioned workers and failed parents question the choices they’ve made. Ironically, in the end it’s Steve who makes the compromises, initially championing artistic integrity before selling out as an advertising executive selecting photographs to sell beer, where he’s forced to sacrifice his own ambitions as a successful photographer. By the time each realizes the price they’ve paid for success, and the void that exists in their own lives, getting back together again feels like the right thing to do, as they’ve never stopped thinking about one another, much to the horror of Susie whose romantic inclinations have been stymied by her own mother.
According to Sirk, “You can’t escape what you are…. I tried to make it into a picture of social consciousness — not only of a white social consciousness, but of a Negro one, too. Both white and black are leading imitated lives… There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can’t reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections. If you try to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass. It’s hopeless.” It’s that underlying element of hopelessness that is the key to understanding this picture, as no one really believes the happy ending, which is a mirage. A tearjerker with a message, there’s even a theme song that opens the film sung by Earl Grant, perhaps best known for his instrumental version of the song Ebb Tide, "Imitation of Life" (Douglas Sirk, 1959) -- The Opening Credits YouTube (2:06), while the rousing finale is an unforgettable depiction of that perfectly scripted, grand-opera gospel road to glory, with all that pomp she never received during her lifetime, as four white horses pull a black carriage loaded with a mountain of white roses, where it’s hard not to choke up in tears, especially when Sarah Jane shows up, featuring none other than the incomparable Mahalia Jackson singing Trouble of the World, Imitation of Life (1959 Douglas Sirk) YouTube (5:42). When the film was released, contemporary critics found Sirk’s films to be artificial and melodramatic, overreliant on manipulating the audience emotions, having little to do with the concerns of the real world. In the 70’s and 80’s however, critics and scholars have a near universal praise for Sirk’s films, directly counteracting the dismissals of the earlier critics, where his critical reputation has almost completely reversed. His first well-known American film was Sleep, My Love (1948), but nearly all his films depict families in which a house, car, and affluence are present, while sexual and emotional fulfillment are nowhere to be found. Russell Metty’s cinematography often frames the characters through doorways, against windows, or in front of mirrors, keeping the camera at a distance, continually emphasizing both the spaciousness and confinement of the décor, accentuating the lavishly artificial and visually stylized aspects of the melodrama, where characters lose sight of and become disconnected from their lives. The word expressionist is frequently used to describe Sirk’s technique, an indication not only of the style of his work in the United States, but also his background in films within the framework of German expressionism in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, where his excesses are viewed as a form of Brechtian distancing. If there is “distance” in Sirk’s style, it’s something he shares with fellow émigrés Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak, having fled the horrors of the Nazis, observing the naïveté of American society with a bemused concern, with Sirk making a series of films about middle-class America, with its losses and disillusionments. This film moves from initially showing what it means to be a woman living in a male-dominated society, while in the second half it addresses the perspective of how women of color are affected by racism. Along those lines, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder offered his own critical analysis, “It is not because white is a prettier color than black that Sarah Jane wants to pass for white, but because life is better when you’re white. Lana Turner doesn’t want to be an actress because she enjoys it, but because if you’re successful you get a better deal in this world. And Annie doesn’t want a spectacular funeral because she’d get anything out of it, she’s dead by then, but because she wants to give herself value in the eyes of the world retrospectively, which she was denied during her lifetime. None of the protagonists come to see that everything, thoughts, desires, dreams arise directly from social reality or are manipulated by it.”
