• Imitation of Life (1934)

3/18/21 (Thurs)

An amazing film of 1934 by John Stahl based on a novel published the previous year. Bea (Claudette Colbert) is a widowed mother who has taken over her husband’s maple syrup sales route, doing what she can to keep food on the table for her small daughter. Delilah (an unforgettable Louise Beavers), a black domestic, shows up at the door having mistaken the address on a want ad, but manages to talk Bea into letting her work for just room and board for her and her own grade-school daughter. Struck by Delilah’s delicious pancakes, Bea turns her syrup and the pancakes into big business, becoming extremely wealthy in the process. She scrupulously sets aside a half-share for Delilah, viewing her as an equal business partner. But Delilah’s only ambition is to care for her beloved daughter along with Bea’s household. When Bea suggests that Delilah buy her own home with her earnings, the latter panics, thinking she is being thrown out. She begs to continue living as a domestic with Bea, who has little choice but to agree.

As their girls grow up, each mother faces a dilemma. In the less persuasive story, Bea has finally found her dream man in the form of a hunky ichthyologist (they apparently exist, at least in this film) but discovers that her daughter has fallen for him as well. That is resolved in melodrama. Meanwhile, Delilah’s light-skinned daughter has been able to pass as white and, having grown up with Bea’s daughter, has essentially taken on a white identity. As a young woman, fearing exposure of her black heritage, she brutally rejects her shocked mother (“I don’t know this woman. Does she look like my mother?”) and walks out. That is resolved in tragedy. Delilah’s experience lifts the film into another dimension.

The film has been criticized for portraying Delilah as a meek domestic happy with her subservient lot, with many noting the sharp contrast between Bea’s glamorous upstairs life and Delilah’s more modest downstairs existence. I think they’re missing the point. Delilah is trapped in a mindset that won’t let her enjoy the spoils of financial success; it is she who chooses to stay downstairs. The money and its trappings seem to mean less to her than the satisfaction of serving others, which in her mind gives her life dignity. She seems to have accepted her lot in life as God’s plan for her. Her innocence, profound compassion and all-encompassing love for her daughter make her incapable of understanding the daughter’s confused feelings. When the daughter leaves her, Delilah pleads tearfully with her to reconsider – “I ain’t no white mother! It’s too much to ask of me…You can’t ask me ‘ta unborn my own child!” – which in Beavers’ deeply felt performance is unbearably sad. Delilah is a wonderful creation, a tragic figure doomed not by a character flaw but by her own goodness.

Beavers was the lynchpin of the film in an unassuming, understated, utterly compelling performance. I suppose she’d have to be angrier and feistier in a modern version, making this a relic of the times (I haven’t seen the popular 1959 remake). But her interpretation felt right to me, especially given the character’s religious beliefs. A tremendous performance. The fact that she wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar says more about the Oscars than about her. (The first black performer to win the award would be Hattie McDaniel a few years later in Gone With the Wind – a part for which Beavers was apparently the front-runner.)

Colbert was excellent in every way as the determined and ever-positive syrup salesman. Her friendly relationship with a black woman, down to ensuring her fair portion of the business, may or may not have been realistic in its day, but it was completely believable as presented here thanks in large part to Colbert’s spirited performance. She’s never been better. (She won the Best Actress Oscar that year but for It Happened One Night, which also beat this movie for Best Film. I think they chose the wrong movie in both cases.) In a bold move for the time, interestingly not duplicated in the 1959 remake, Delilah’s grown-up daughter was played by a half-black woman, Fredi Washington, who was very fine. Warren William as Bea’s lover and Ned Sparks as her business adviser were first-rate, but this film unquestionably belonged to the women.

The film also benefited from a finely wrought script by William Hurlbut (with help apparently from eight other uncredited writers, including the great Preston Sturges). I loved the scene where Delilah comes to the school with a raincoat for her daughter, completely unaware of how her presence is embarrassing her mortified daughter. She asks the teacher, “Is she passing?”, referring to the daughter’s grades but heard by the rest of us as “passing white”. Great writing. The dialogue in general was of a very high order. Much of the script and story wouldn’t pass muster today, such as the direct allusion to Aunt Jemima in Delilah’s photo for the pancake logo, and points like the mother and daughter calling each other “darling” are antiquated. But that’s not the writer’s fault. The story makes its point not by showing overt racism but by suggesting Delilah’s inability to even imagine a better role for herself in society, that is, the bigotry of low expectations, a much more subtle approach. The literate script also kept the more melodramatic elements, like the death scene and the daughter’s tears of remorse, from falling into the maudlin.

I’m eager to see the hugely successful Lana Turner version, but I don’t see how this could be bettered. A big thumbs up.