Annie, equality is so distant a prospect
it’s dangerous even to dream. Did these
two actors steal the film away from
its nominal star? The Academy
certainly seemed to think so: Moore
and Kohner received the film’s only
two Oscar nominations.
This isn’t perfect progressive
filmmaking. While the 1934 film put
light-skinned, African American
Civil Rights activist, Fredi Washington,
in the Sarah Jane role, Sirk and Hunter
opted to instead cast Kohner, a Mexican/
Czech-Jewish actress with no African
American heritage. Yet, in scene after
scene, Sirk slyly juxtaposes these
ultra-blonde personifications of
white privilege with a mother-daughter
struggle against a structural racism
so internalised, it’s insurmountable.
At times Lora’s total lack of curiosity
about her black companions’ inner lives is
almost comic (“It never occurred to me
that you have any friends!”, she remarks
when Annie describes her funeral plans),
but the film does not make the same
mistake. In the climatic funeral scene, as
a choir leader (cameoing gospel legend,
Mahalia Jackson) mournfully sings
‘Trouble Of The World’, the church and
surrounding streets fill with Annie’s
many, many friends. It’s more black
faces than you’ll see on screen in any
Hollywood film of this period, bar the
all-black Carmen Jones.
All this makes for the most
ruthlessly tear-jerking ‘mamadrama’
since Bambi found himself all alone in
the snowy forest. According to Moore’s
reminiscences in a 2001 documentary,
Turner cried so much after filming
one scene that when she returned
to set “her face was so swollen, she
couldn’t work”.
As ever, Sirk is impressively unafraid
of excess — in emotion, in design, in
layer upon layer of irony. It’s what makes
him so beloved by filmmakers from Pedro
Almodóvar to John Waters. A more
‘tasteful’ director might have averted
his camera in the scene where Sarah
Jane is savagely beaten by the boyfriend
who discovers her secret. Sirk not only
holds still, but adds a wild, discordant
jazz soundtrack to intensify the
moment’s melodrama.
Here we are, eight years before Guess
Who’s Coming To Dinner, 60 years before
Green Book won the Oscar, and Sirk —
perhaps the real star of Imitation Of
Life — is exposing the limitations of
Hollywood’s trite racial politics in
expansive Eastmancolor. Subversion never
looked so sumptuous. ELLEN E. JONES
IMITATION OF LIFE IS OUT NOW ON DOWNLOAD