White people and black people are different in her view, and it’s the black man’s burden to carry the whites and suffer their whims. Enter your email address to subscribe to Cinema Autopsy and receive notifications of new posts by email. Imitation of Life (1934) Plot Summary (3) A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter; the two women start a successful business, but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way. Jessie approaches the grieving mother and instead of embracing her, holds her by the hand and shoulder, guiding her. Not many people know that the actual inspiration for Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life came from a road trip to Canada that the author took with her friend Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed black short-story writer and folklorist who wrote Mules and Men (1935), a non-fiction study of black culture in Florida, and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), a novel about a black preacher. Okay, very good to know, thanks for sharing! It’s something you have to absorb to fully understand, to mentally push back the clock and see the ways things have changed and how they haven’t. Their daughters grow up together, but Peola has a far harder time with things. Imitation of Life was originally a popular but unremarkable romantic potboiler novel by Fannie Hurst. So both mothers, black and white, sacrifice and break their hearts for their daughters. A nice ironic touch towards the end of the film is when Annie reveals that she has always owned a mink coat while earlier in the film Lora was offered one as a loan so that she could appear in public within the upper social circles. He beat his fists against life all his days. Stahl’s Imitation never even so much as hints at the possibility of racially motivated violence; instead, there’s a sense of Peola longing to escape the dreary confines of her supporting story into the glamorous social melodrama Beatrice and her daughter unthinkingly inhabit. On the other hand, you may yearn for her to simply burn the church down as it stands as a symbol of a misguided subservient life that led straight to the grave. It would give her something to strive for. His legacy has influenced several filmmakers since, including John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar and François Ozon. Vadim Rizov at Mubi puts this better than I ever could: The main issue in both [this film and the remake] in the black story is the light-skinned daughter’s desire to pass for white. I can’t hang on no cross! She believes God made folks black and white for a reason and that it is nobody’s place to question that decision. Turner Classic Movies Film Festival (TCMFF) 2016 Wrap-Up, The Bad Sister (1931) Review, with Conrad Nagel and Sidney Fox. Delilah’s willingness to be whatever her mistress wants her to be is an understandable affront to her daughter; the only reasons she offers against passing are that it’s wrong and God must have had a reason for making them black. Delilah and Peola can’t meet on any level. For a movie about a successful female business magnate (Archer even bemoans at one point, “These big business women scare me to death. Just from the opening moments as she approaches a screen door, Beavers is filled with a light. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. But what makes Imitation of Life so interesting is the subversive and ironic touches that Sirk includes. Peola knows it more than anyone else in the movie, but she can’t say it. a white male in blackface, whom some have described as a German immigrant. I ain’t no white mother! Of these the race question promised to be the most interesting, but the photoplay was content to suggest that the sensitive daughter of a Negro woman is bound to be unhappy if she happens to be able to pass for white. They’re so efficient– and so competent!”), we never actually see her in her office. Moore and Kohner were both nominated for Academy Awards for their powerful performances. It breaks Delilah’s heart, but as they grow older, Peola’s desire to assume the whiteness that her skin grants her grows as well. One morning, Delilah Johnson (Beavers) arrives at her house, confusing addresses for a place she wanted to get work as a domestic. The defendant, a school teacher, reconsiders her push for innocence for teaching Darwin in the classroom and his defense attorney, Henry Drummond, points out that he must have “the loneliest feeling in the world.” But he adds: But all you have to do is knock on any door and say, “If you let me in, I’ll live the way you want me to live, and I’ll think the way you want me to think,” and all the blinds’ll go up and all the windows will open, and you’ll never be lonely, ever again.

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