Tag Archives: Melodrama

Film Intro: “Imitation of Life” (1959) [MAC Birmingham, 30/06/24]

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There is no melodrama like a Douglas Sirk melodrama, and Imitation of Life (1959) is no exception. It’s a powerful film, a key Sirk text, and a potent story about motherhood, race, class, and gender. To quote the BFI, “Douglas Sirk’s final Hollywood feature is a remake of John Stahl’s [1934] film of Fannie Hurst’s novel about two single mothers, one white, one black, striving together in a man’s world. It focuses, with typically sharp irony and intelligence, on issues of racial prejudice and inequality.”

Imitation of Life film centres on two sets of mothers and daughters, the Merediths (who are white) and the Johnsons (who are Black). In the opening scene, the young girls meet on the beach, and instantly become best friends. Susie has gone wandering from her mother to play with Sarah Jane, and this is where Lora (Lana Turner) finds her daughter, in Annie’s (Juanita Moore’s) care. Lora assumes Sarah Jane is white and Annie’s is her black babysitter, and is suprised to learn Sarah Jane is Annie’s fair-skinned multiracial daughter. On learning Annie and Sarah Jane have nowhere to stay, Lora invites them home for the night, but the close friendships between both sets of mothers and daughters build and bind, and we see this unit — this family —over the next eleven years as the girls mature.

In the other mother, both girls find something they desire, and what their own maternal figure lacks: Susie longs for her mother’s love rather than her actress mother’s glamour and fame, while Sarah Jane deliberately performs whiteness to achieve a higher quality of life – not out of distain for her mother, but survival as a part-black woman in a white man’s world. As Claire White wrote in her piece ‘The kids are not alright: Imitation of Life’, “in many coming-of-age stories, white girls such as Susie are afforded the luxury to have relatively trivial concerns, whereas girls of colour such as Sarah Jane have bigger, societal issues to deal with.” As White continues, “while Sarah Jane (played as a teenager by Susan Kohner) tries to live a life of her own, far, far away from her darker-skinned mother who is always at home, Susie (Sandra Dee) just wants to talk about boys, kissing and algebra with her mother, who has become a successful Broadway actress and thus is never around.”

Over the course of the film, Sarah Jane perpetuates the fallacy that she is white and is constantly annoyed when Annie continues to kindly point people to the truth. When Sarah Jane’s race is discovered by a boy, with upsetting consequences, both mothers and daughters have a different perception of what this means and where the blame lies.

Sirk was keen to provide the Annie–Sarah Jane relationship in his version with more screen time and intensity than the characters were given in the 1930s versions of the story, and the critical consensus was that Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner (who was born to Roman Catholic mother of Irish and Mexican descent and a Czech Jewish father) stole the film from Lana Turner (which, as you will see, they did). The on-screen mother and daughter were individually nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category at both the Academy Awards and Golden Globes of 1959 with Kohner winning The Globe for her performance. Sirk said that he had deliberately and subversively undercut Turner to draw focus toward the issues of the two black characters, and his treatment of racial and class issues is admired for its perceptiveness of the times.

While their problems are very different, both sets of mothers and daughters have a degree of disconnect, and this is indicative of the time as the generational divide of 1950s America increased the sense of alienation between youth and adults. This has been echoed by the sociologist Kenneth Keniston, who in 1965 wrote that “the rapid advancement in technology meant that the future for the youth of that era was more unknowable and uncertain than for any generation before it.” And we see this divide between Lora and Annie, and Susie and Sarah Jane, who lacking the guidance they seek at home in the care of their mothers, find “it is only through distance from the home that they can forge their own path.” There is a moment when Annie apologises for loving her daughter “too much,” but still — as painful as it is — understands that she can only live her life and forge her independent identity if she sets her free. There is an unspoken bond between them, although Sarah Jane isn’t aware of its significance before it’s too late.

While Sirk’s version of Imitation of Life was not especially well-reviewed upon its original release —  it was compared to a soap opera and deemed inferior to its 1934 predecessor — it became the sixth highest-grossing film of 1959, making $6.4 million. It’s now far more famous than Stahl’s version and is considered a masterpiece of Sirk’s American career. The critic Emanuel Levy wrote that “one of the four masterpieces directed in the 1950s, the visually lush, meticulously designed and powerfully acted Imitation of Life was the jewel in Sirk’s crown, ending his Hollywood’s career before he returned to his native Germany.”

Imitation of Life is a film that endures, and continues to inspire various contemporary works of media. Todd Haynes’s 2002 film Far from Heaven is a homage to Sirk’s films, notably All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life, while R.E.M.’s 2001 song “Imitation of Life” took its title from the film (despite none of the band members having seen it). Additionally, the 1969 Diana Ross & the Supremes song “I’m Livin’ in Shame” is based on the film, and in 2015, BBC Online ranked the film as the 37th greatest American movie ever made, based on a survey of film critics.

Film Intro: “Now, Voyager” (1942) [MAC Birmingham, 23/06/24]

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In an essay for Criterion titled ‘Mother Monster,’ the academic and writer Ella Taylor states, “Now, Voyager’s real badass mom, and not in a good way, is a snobby Boston Brahmin played with quietly rabid conviction by British actress Gladys Cooper. Mrs. Henry Vale is a prime example of how melodrama of the period rendered the horrid mothers in classic fairy tales—the witch, the wicked stepmother, the predatory crone.”  And in Now, Voyager, we have arguably the doyen of bad mothers.

Now, Voyager was one of the biggest hits of the maternal melodramas Hollywood made during World War II, as studios sought to spotlight mothers as cinematic role models for women at a time when some were war widows raising children alone, some were embarking on extramarital trysts in the absence of their own partners, while others were basking in their newfound independence as they stepped into workplace jobs previously done by men. Directed by Irving Rapper and based on a 1941 novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, Now, Voyager stars Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale, a middle-aged “frump” whose is under the thumb and command of her overbearing mother. Mrs Vale describes Charlotte, who she had given birth to during her forties, as “a child of my old age.” At one point she says, “of course it’s true that all late children are marked. Often such children aren’t wanted. That can mark them. I’ve kept her close by me always. When she was young, foolish, I made decisions for her. Always the right decisions.”

Charlotte’s sister-in-law, who fears Mrs Vale is driving Charlotte towards a mental breakdown, introduces Charlotte to the protective, kind, and liberal psychiatrist Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains), who observes Mrs Vale’s control over her daughter’s life and recommends Charlotte spends some time away in his sanatorium. “My dear Mrs Vale,” Jaquith says as he smoothly confronts her, “if you had deliberately and maliciously planned to destroy your daughter’s life, you couldn’t have done it more completely.”

After discharge and reluctant to return home, Charlotte embarks on a literal journey of discovery in the form of a life-changing cruise, where – away from her mother – she blossoms into the picture of chic independent woman. Those of you who have seen the film before will be aware of the famous tracking shot of Davis on her return. She is a woman transformed by liberation, and the reveal of Charlotte’s new appearance – where she emerges looking very much like Bette Davis the movie star, and with a newfound sense of personal assuredness. When asked by Mrs Vale what she plans to do with her life on her return home, Charlotte irks her traditional mother by saying she will “get a cat and a parrot and live alone in single blessedness.” But Charlotte’s independence also brings the most human of hardships, a complicated love affair in the form of desire for an unhappily married father Jerry (Paul Henried), and — through a twist of fate, a chance meeting an encounter Jerry’s young daughter, Tina, with who Charlotte forms a significant bond, taking on the role of a compassionate and sympathetic surrogate mother to the troubled girl with mother issues of her own.

Of course, Mrs Henry Vale would not be such a menacing and formidable screen presence without the talent, diction, and sternness Academy Award Winner Gladys Cooper brings to the role. British born Dame Gladys Constance Cooper, DBE, had an illustrious career spanning seven decades, starting out as a teenager in Edwardian musical comedy and pantomime, before moving to dramatic roles and silent films before the First World War. Between 1917 and 1934, Cooper managed the Playhouse Theatre – where she also starred in various roles – and from the early 1920s won praise playing the lead in productions by W. Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward (amongst others) on the London stage. Cooper turned to cinema full-time in 1940, where she found Hollywood success cast in roles as aristocratic and disapproving society woman (although, granted, did was offered opportunities to play more personable, approachable women, as she did opposite Laurence Olivier’s Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940). Coopers various cinematic mothers, which pinnacled in Now, Voyager, also include a socialite mother in Kitty Foyle (1940), Laurence Olivier’s spurned wife in That Hamilton Woman (1941), Deborah Kerr’s tormentor mater in Delbert Mann’s Separate Tables (1958).

Yet, for all its success, Now, Voyager is both ambivalent towards motherhood, and in general mothers did not fare well at the pictures during this time, as cinemagoers preferred other variations of womanhood on screen. Ironically Davis would herself portray an overbearing mother in The Little Foxes and a mother surrogate of sorts All About Eve, as the star who takes the fame hungry newcomer under her wing only to be dethroned. Taylor notes that you can tell Davis was all-too aware and not entirely convinced by the characterisation of Charlotte, Davis as “rather too cool and aloof a cat to entirely persuade as a woman who ends up wanting self-sacrificing motherhood even more than she desires a passionate liaison.”

In Now, Voyager, we take pleasure in seeing Charlotte gain autonomy over the film. Still, in our gratification, we may also wonder about the events that lead to Mrs Vale’s nastiness and ponder what, or who exactly, in Taylor’s words, “mistreated the monster.”