Pretty Good

Fantastic!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Melodrama relies heavily on archetype and hyperbole, and when it's done right, when it's pushed to the limit, it almost resembles Noh theatre: human existence as highly stylized ritual; pain, suffering and loss all boiled down into a series of tableaux so rigid that they almost become hieratic. It's a thoroughly unironic and direct means of getting at the truth, and that lack of irony is probably why it's fallen out of fashion. Done wrong, it's unpalatable kitsch. Done right it's high art. Few people understand how far to push it. Fassbinder did, and so did Douglas Sirk.And so did John M. Stahl…Unfortunately, Stahl is rarely mentioned alongside those other two stalwarts. In fact, he's often treated like a hack, an unfortunate buffoon who drove Tiffany Productions into the ground and had to resort to producing talking chimpanzee movies in order to survive.Nothing could be further from the truth.It's no wonder that Sirk remade three of Stahl's masterpieces: Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession, and When Tomorrow Comes. But where Sirk serves up subversion via camera angles, lighting, and a painterly control of Technicolor, Stahl comes right at you with static shots, costuming, big chunks of dialogue. A lot of my filmgeeky friends wince when I tell them that Stahl's Imitation of Life is even better than Sirk's, and it is.Stahl's 1934 version is as ostensibly political as any Hollywood film I have ever seen, dealing with issues of class and race and gender as directly as Straub-Huillet or Chantal Ackerman, only in the framework of mainstream cinema, which makes it all the more subversive. The fact that it was made pre-code probably has something to do with it, but still, this film pulls no punches. Imagine Marx and Freud filtered through a lens at a back lot in Burbank.The film, based on a Fannie Hurst novel, follows Claudette Colbert's character, Beatrice Pullman (there is more than one reference to Dante throughout the film, a reminder of the hell we all live in), who gets rich by boxing and mass-producing her African-American maid Delilah's pancake batter (see it for Louise Beavers' performance alone). For publicity's sake, Delilah is turned into an Aunt Jemimah-esque cliché, and later she's abandoned by her light-skinned daughter, who wants nothing more than to pass in the white world. In turn, Beatrice's life is complicated when her own daughter, Jessie, decides she wants to bed mommy's new beau, famed ichthyologist Stephen Archer. Ultimately, the film ends with a grim reminder that in a male-dominated world, female subjectivity, even for someone as insanely successful as Beatrice, is defined by a woman's ability to fill the gaping hole inside her with male adoration.Again, in the hands of most directors, this would be pablum, camp, kitsch. In the hands of John M. Stahl, it's as real as it gets.

Nominated for Best Picture of the year by the Academy, it features the beautiful Claudette Colbert, as a struggling woman who teams with her friend (played by Louise Beavers) to succeed with a pancake recipe and using her "Aunt Jemima-like" likeness.However, conflicts arise as the women age and their children (played by Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington, respectively) grow up. Additional quality supporting acting is provided by Warren William, Ned Sparks (who gets all the great lines!), and Alan Hale.Colbert is a single parent, trying to raise her daughter, when she meets Beavers who, with her daughter, moves in as Colbert's domestic help. With help from supplier Hale, they start a small cafe on the boardwalk. Sparks is a self proclaimed pancake connoisseur, down on his luck, who speaks two words ("box it") in exchange for a free meal. So, with his help, Colbert markets Beavers' pancake flour to great success. Beavers and her daughter continue to live with Colbert, and her daughter, because of the fond relationship that's grown between the two women.After 10 years of growing success, William is invited to a celebration party by Sparks, where he meets Colbert and a romance begins, even though Sparks "warns" her against it. The women struggle with their grown up children: Beavers with her light colored daughter (Fredi Washington) who wishes she were "white", Colbert with her daughter's (Rochelle Hudson) puppy love for her boyfriend William.Added to the National Film Registry in 2005, it was later remade in 1959 by director Douglas Sirk with actresses Lana Turner and Juanita Moore (Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner, respectively, play their grown- up daughters).

117: Imitation of Life (1934) - released 11/26/1934, viewed 9/9/08.Cole Porter's 'Anything Goes' premieres in New York City.KEVIN: This surprising eleventh-hour addition to the list left me wondering what could possibly compel us to skip it in the first place. Claudette Colbert (playing Beatrice, in her third film this year) teams with Louise Beavers (as Delilah) in an absorbing drama about two very different single moms, their daughters, their successful pancake business, and a lifetime of friendship. At the center of the movie is the relationship between Delilah and her light-skinned daughter Peola (played by Fredi Washington as an adult, in pretty much the role she was born to play). The drama of this story is so powerful, that all the other subplots take a back seat, including the plot of Bea and her daughter Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) falling for the same man. This is the one film that dives in head first with the hard questions for which there are no easy answers. I would like to have seen more scenes between Jessie and Peola interacting as grown women. My only problem with Fredi Washington's performance was that it was hard for me to buy that she was 19 years old. Other than that, her performance is so gut-twistingly poignant that it was sometimes hard to watch.DOUG: A chance meeting between two single moms leads to a lifelong friendship in Imitation of Life, a movie that was a rather late addition to the Odyssey, but one I'm very glad we looked at. Not since Little Women have I seen a melodrama where everyone is so nice to each other. We've already seen Claudette Colbert in a wide variety of roles in a short amount of time: conniving Roman queen, scheming Egyptian queen, spoiled runaway heiress, and so forth. Here we get to see another side of her: loving, working mom. Louise Beavers as Delilah paves the way for African Americans in the cinema. The movie deals with a lot of dodgy territory for the mid-30's, and putting a black woman in a front-and-center supporting role is just the start of it. Delilah's daughter Peola (Fredi Washington as a teenager) is a mulatto, and deals with alienation at trying to relate to her black mother but preferring to pass as white. Contract Player Alert: Warren William joins Claudette on screen again after playing Caesar in DeMille's Cleopatra. Another welcome contract player is Ned Sparks (42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933), who plays a passing business man who helps put Bea on the right track. **SPOILER ALERT**Other dramas develop as Bea's daughter Jessie falls for Steve who is after Bea. After sizing up her daughter's interest in Steve, she begs him to keep his distance (she must have seen Mildred Pierce already). I will say this though: I've heard that most guys, when they grow up, fall for women similar to their mothers. If the reverse is true for girls, then Jessie falling for Steve kind of indicates that he's the right guy for Bea. **END SPOILER** Great performances and good drama attached to the script based on Fannie Hurst's novel lead to a high recommendation for this one.Last film: It's a Gift (1934). Next film: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

When Imitation Of Life came out in 1934, Fannie Hurst was at the height of her literary reputation having had her two best works this one and Back Street, come out back to back as both novels and movies. Both stories are about a women's sacrifice.One day before World War I, Louise Beavers comes looking for domestic work and gets the wrong address and comes knocking on Claudette Colbert's door. Colbert is a recent widow with a child and Louise has a child the same age. Colbert can't afford any salary, but Louise is willing to work cheap, just for room and board for herself and her child. This starts an unusual partnership both personal and business because Claudette's late husband was a seller of a cooking syrup and Louise makes a melt in your mouth type of pancake. When passing stranger Ned Sparks tells her one day to package the flour, this makes both Colbert and Beavers millionaires overnight. Beavers can't see it however and passes up her own household to stay with Claudette.A lot of people today look at Beavers's character and say this is a racial stereotype that Hurst was perpetrating. Taking the racial component out of it, I've seen several people who are just like Beavers in their own way. Clark Gable had a father who could have lived quite well off his son, but couldn't deal with the Hollywood lifestyle and actually told his son they ought to resume their previous occupations as oil roughnecks. Stan Musial when he was making big money as a baseball star had a mother who took in washing back in the little steel mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania where he came from and not because he wasn't willing to provide.And I had an uncle who worked hard at Kodak and also built up a milk delivery business of his own and at an age where he could have just relaxed and taken it easy, he was out working at close to 80 at a tool and die plant. There are folks out there who shy away from the outward trappings of success like Beavers. And there are those stubbornly over-committed to a work ethic when they don't have to be.Both Colbert and Beavers are just moms with problem daughters on their hands. Daughter Rochelle Hudson is crushing out on Warren William who has his eyes on Colbert. But Beavers has bigger problems.Remember these girls were literally raised together with their mothers in business. Fredi Washington sees the white world, she's light skinned enough to pass, she wants what's over in that world. But her denial of heritage hurts Beavers more than my words can describe. But Hurst's words in the novel and the screenplay betray a rare understanding of racism during her time. Imitation of Life got three Oscar nominations including Best Picture. It's a dated film, but that fact alone makes it worth watching as a glimpse of the racial picture in America in the Thirties.