9. PASSES LIKE MOLASSES: One with a looooong death/dying sequence.
My grandmother loved this movie. Whenever she would hear about how many movies I watched, she always said that I should watch more movies like Imitation of Life. My grandmother is a few years gone now and I remember that very early in my life, she pulled me aside and told me that this would be our last holiday together. I cried for days and days, worried that after all the gifts that she would be dead. Instead, she lived. And the next year, she did the same thing and my brother reacted like I did. After a few years, we realized that she would tell us this every year or her other Christmas idea, the thought that this year, we would have to cancel the season. I have no idea why Christmas was canceled, but it was often because of something my grandfather — who worked triple holiday shifts to pay for it — had done. To be fair, he drunkenly knocked the tree down every year. But after several more years of canceling the birth of the Christ child, she finally either quit doing this or we just laughed it off.
Decades later, I was picking her up — our tradition, I’d come to town later than everyone else and always pick her up whenever she was ready to be around the rest of the family — and she said to me, “You know, this is out last Christmas together.”
I looked her in the eye and said, “Grandma, that was in 1977, and you’ve told me that every year since.”
“I have,” she said, as she looked out the window and started to laugh.
Anyways, that should explain to you why this is my grandmother’s favorite movie, because she lived to be in her 90s on a diet of Coca-Cola and chocolate. Never any real food. She fell off the couch twice in the same week, cleaning the curtains, and went through a table like a pro wrestler and got up and did it again. Once, she was trying to find something under the bed and used a lit match to look. This was in like 2018, I kid you not. And man, did she like emotional drama and gossip. She still had a scanner and CB radio in her home and absolutely loved Facebook, having two accounts so she could keep up on the small town I grew up in. She had subscriptions to the National Enquirer, the Star, the Examiner and Globe, so my love of scandal and sleaze probably came from her.
I can see what she loved about Imitation of Life.
I mean, first off, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner, who had her own scandal, as her daughter Cheryl stabbed her boyfriend Johnny Stampano in the stomach to save her from a beating; Sean Connery also knocked a gun out of the gangster’s hand on the set of Another Time, Another Place) is a single mom who cares more about being a star than raising her daughter Susie (Terry Burnham as a young girl, Sandra Dee when she grows up). She loses her at Coney Island and the girl is saved by Steve Archer (John Gavin) who will forever be her friend-zoned man, always saving the day to the point that her daughter will realize what she hasn’t and grow up to love him like a woman should love a man, even if it’s kind of incestuous and Steve is too much of a good person to give in to an attractive 16-year-old Sandra Dee but hey, I’d take a 38-year-old Lana Turned over that anyway.
Lora and Steve find Susie with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and her daughter Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker as a kid, Susan Kohner as a grown woman). To pay her back, Lora takes in this single woman and her daughter, which seems like a kindness, but she’s really getting a free person to take care of her daughter while she acts in the plays of her boyfriend David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy, yes, the same man who would dominate Old Detroit and the mask and novelty industry as the owner of Silver Shamrock) and the schemes of her agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda).
As for Steve, he never wanted her to be a star and that’s the one bad thing we can say about him. Maybe he knew how sleazy it was all going to be. But he should have let her have her career. That said, it was 1959, but eh, that’s just trying to make up for men being men.
More troubling, but again, it was 1959, is that Sarah Jane wants to be white to the point that when she finally runs away from home, her mother has to act like she was her maid so she doesn’t give away the fact that her daughter is white.
Lora also goes to Italy to be in a movie so I assume that she’s either Carroll Baker or Jennifer North.
The end of this movie, man. After a whole two hours of denying her blackness — then again, if blonde boys were slapping me in the face when I confessed that I wasn’t white, would I feel any other emotion? — Annie dies after an entire marathon of being depressed and weakened. Like, she’s dying from the first time we see her and she dies for this whole movie until she dies with her daughter throwing herself on the coffin screaming, “I killed my own mother!”
In the book, the white woman is Bea Pullman, who becomes rich when she sells her maid Delilah’s family waffle recipe. The white woman gets all the money and the kindly black woman doesn’t even take the 20% she is offered and remains working in the house.
Anyways, Lana Turner wore like a million worth of gowns in this and as I said before, you can watch this just to stare at her. I’d never seen a Douglas Sirk movie before this. It was the movie he went out on. R.E. M. sang the words, “That’s sugarcane that tasted good / That’s cinnamon, that’s Hollywood / Come on, come on, no one can see you try” in the song named for this movie but they never saw it.
Oddly, my grandmother’s favorite song was “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. and she would play it over and over for hours, the same 45 single, knowing all the words.
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