Imitation of Life (Universal, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 11) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of early-1930’s classics on Turner Classic Movies. The first was the original 1934 version of Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life, directed by John M. Stahl for Universal based on a script by Willliam Hurlbut (who would write The Bride of Frankenstein for James Whale the next year, and though the two films are miles apart genre-wise, in a way they’re both about outsiders cursed by the circumstances of their births and desperately seeking acceptance). The imdb.com page for the 1934 Imitation of Life lists a whole bunch of other writers who allegedly contributed: Preston Sturges, Finley Peter Dunne (political satirist and creator of the “Mr. Dooley” character), Walter Ferris, Bianca Gilchrist, Victor Heerman, his wife Sarah Y. Mason, Samuel Ornitz and Arthur Richman. The film starts with widow Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) desperately trying to make ends meet to raise her daughter Jessie (Juanita Quigley as “Baby Jane” – the moment he saw that billing Charles inevitably joked, “Whatever happened to Baby Jane?,” though the real Quigley had a considerably better life than the fictional Baby Jane Hudson: after a long career that lasted into adolescence, she quit the movie business to become a nun, though she later renounced her vows and married a man, made her last film – Porky’s II – in 1983 and died in 2017). Bea (as she’s known) is selling maple syrup from her late husband’s recipe and barely making enough to keep herself and her daughter alive. Things change for her when she meets a heavy-set Black woman, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), who shows up for an interview for a maid’s job. She has the wrong address, but Bea offers her carfare and then Delilah rescues Jessie when Jessie falls into the bathtub and almost drowns. Like Bea, Delilah is also a widow raising a daughter, Peola (Dorothy Black), and she offers to work for Bea for just room and board. Delilah also makes Bea pancakes from a secret recipe passed down from her grandmother to her mother to her, and she says it will die with her – though she whispers it to Bea.

The two women decide to start a breakfast restaurant on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, where they live (though they later relocate to New York), and they bluff a landlord (Clarence Wilson, the great villain from W. C. Fields’ movies Tillie and Gus and The Old-Fashioned Way) into giving them an old pool hall as a location. The restaurant takes off and one day Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks), a down-and-out man, comes in. Bea takes pity on him and offers him a pancake meal on the house, and he’s so taken with the taste of Delilah’s super-pancakes he suggests they follow the lead of Coca-Cola and box the pancake flour for sale. Within a few jump-cuts the business – “Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Flour” – is a huge success (I’ve long thought Fannie Hurst was inspired to write this by seeing a box of Aunt Jemima’s in a market and starting to wonder just how this preposterously packaged product came to exist), and it’s advertised by an animated neon sign showing Aunt Delilah flipping a pancake while wearing the trademark smile. (The earlier scene in which Bea coaxed Delilah to smile the way she wanted for the trademark is marvelous.) The two women stay together – Bea offers to find Delilah a house of her own, but Delilah, whose devotion to Bea approaches masochism, refuses to leave – and as the years pass Jessie grows up to be Rochelle Hudson and Peola grows up to be the great light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington. Only Fredi hates being considered Black and the racist prejudices that come with it – Delilah had earlier explained Peola’s light skin by telling Bea that Peola’s late father was an unusually light-skinned African-American – and throughout her childhood, adolescence and adulthood she keeps trying to “pass” for white. Delilah keeps showing up in her life and “outing” her as Black; Peola particularly resents Delilah referring to herself as “your mammy,” a term that inevitably tags her as Black. Delilah costs Peola a job as a greeter and cashier at a white Southern restaurant, and the vigor with which she and Bea (who joins her in her crusade to find her daughter) keep “outing” her becomes uncomfortably cruel after a while.

At one point Delilah offers to pay Peola’s way to attend an historically Black college, but she quits after a few weeks and disappears again. Meanwhile, Bea has met and started dating Stephen Archer (Warren William), an ichthyologist who spends a lot of his time on voyages abroad and wants Bea to give up her business and accompany him on his travels. Only things take a detour in their relationship when Bea has to leave town to accompany Delilah on her latest search for Peola. Bea’s daughter Jessie happens to be back home on vacation from her own college, and she accompanies Stephen on all the dates he planned for her mom. Jessie falls in love with Stephen, though he dismisses it as a schoolgirl crush and remains faithful to Bea. Elmer Smith – ya remember Elmer Smith? – has negotiated a deal by which National Brands will buy Aunt Delilah’s while Bea will retain 50 percent of the profits, but Bea doesn’t want to sell. The movie doesn’t end the way you’d think it would, with Bea bailing out on the company and going off with Stephen; instead she decides not to sell and sends Stephen on his way, telling him he’s welcome to come back but only once Jessie has forgotten him and taken up with a man her own age. The film ends with Delilah’s funeral, depicted as a giant procession with various Black people she knew dressed in lodge uniforms (both Charles and I noted the resemblance of their costumes to the uniforms Marcus Garvey’s acolytes wore) and a church choir singing a hymn to Jesus.

Imitation of Life is a fascinating movie but also a frustrating one, and I get the impression the filmmakers wanted to make an anti-racist movie but didn’t quite know how. In 1959 Douglas Sirk directed a remake, but he made two quite retrograde decisions that to my mind significantly weakened the story. First, instead of making the white and Black women business partners, he and his writers, Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, made the Black woman, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), just the maid of the white one, aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner). Second, he cast the equivalent of Peola, Sarah Jane, with white actress Susan Kohner instead of finding a light-skinned African-American like Fredi Washington in the original. Though the remake has some genuinely stunning moments – including the funeral scene, in which we see all the Black people who were part of Annie’s life though Lora had no idea they existed, and Mahalia Jackson makes a guest appearance as herself belting out “Trouble in the World” – and Lana Turner gives the performance of her life, it still irks me that on the eve of the civil rights movement Sirk, Griffin and Scott took away the Black mother’s independence and free agency that Stahl and Hurlbut allowed her. One of the most fascinating aspects of the 1934 Imitation of Life is how fresh much of it seems even though some aspects are certainly dated; in the opening, Bea is getting her daughter Jessie ready for a day at day care and Jessie resists having to go instead of spending the day with her mom. Of course we know that mom is a career woman and she has to make a living to support both of them, and it’s pretty clear that one reason Bea accepts Delilah’s offer to be a live-in maid and governess is so she won’t have to hassle child care. TCM was showing Imitation of Life as part of a salute to depictions of working women in the 1930’s, and while it’s a much richer movie than that it’s also a tour de force for both Colbert and Beavers. Indeed, one could make a case that Colbert won her Academy Award for the wrong movie; while It Happened One Night is a great screwball comedy, her performance in Imitation of Life is a deeper, richer reading of a much more multi-faceted and challenging role.