Imitation of Life

Genre Films: OLLI: Spring 2021: weeks 5 & 6 week 5: IMITATION OF LIFE (1959) directed by Douglas Sirk; cast: Lana Turner, John Gavin, Sandra Dee, Juanita Moore, Susan Kohner, Dan O'Herlihy, Troy Donahue, Robert Alda Richard Brody: new yorker .com: “For his last Hollywood film, released in 1959, the German director Douglas Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism. The story starts in 1948, when two widowed mothers of young daughters meet at Coney Island: Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), an aspiring actress, who is white, and Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a homeless and unemployed woman, who is black. The Johnsons move in with the Merediths; Annie keeps house while Lora auditions. A decade later, Lora is the toast of Broadway and Annie (who still calls her Miss Lora) continues to maintain the house. Meanwhile, Lora endures troubled relationships with a playwright (Dan O’Herlihy), an adman (John Gavin), and her daughter (Sandra Dee); Annie’s light-skinned teen-age daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), is working as a bump-and-grind showgirl and passing as white, even as whites pass as happy and Annie exhausts herself mastering her anger and maintaining her self-control. For Sirk, the grand finale was a funeral for the prevailing order, a trumpet blast against social façades and walls of silence. The price of success, in his view, may be the death of the soul, but its wages afford retirement, withdrawal, and contemplation—and, upon completing the film, that’s what Sirk did.” Charles Taylor: villagevoice.com: 2015: “Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life … remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country. “For all its reputation as a relentless tearjerker, this story of Annie (the peerless Juanita Moore), a black maid trying to hold on to a light-skinned daughter determined to pass as white, is characterized by Sirk’s deeply ironic control. “That’s most apparent in Sirk’s handling of Lana Turner as Lora, Annie’s boss, the generous stage star who is nonetheless oblivious that the opportunities she takes for granted aren’t available to everyone. Annie exists in the real world Lora never really has to. “What makes the movie so thorny is that Lora’s is the world Annie’s daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner, in a fierce performance) aspires to — and Sirk refuses to judge her for that. Sirk lays out the life Sarah Jane would settle for — a stifling one of church dances and teachers college and marriage to a young black who knows to keep to his place — and dares us to impugn her desire to escape. He never condescends to his material, but he questions every motive, relentlessly showing us the delusions each character is caught in. Too often, New York audiences have treated the stylization of Sirk’s films as an occasion for derisive laughter. The depth and bitterness of Sirk’s irony, his refusal to provide easy answers, shames those who’d bring any less to this American masterpiece.” week 6: DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) directed by Billy Wilder cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Tom Powers, Gig Young, Richard Gaines, Fortunio Bonanova, John Philliber From The Movie Guide: "A seminal work in the emergence of film noir as an explosive movement in American film. Based on the notorious Snyder-Gray case of 1927, DOUBLE INDEMNITY is both a starkly realistic and a carefully stylized masterpiece of murder. "Walter Neff (MacMurray), bleeding from a bullet wound, staggers into an office building. As he speaks into his dictating machine, we learn in flashback that he is an insurance salesman who becomes involved with the sleek Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck). Phyllis convinces Walter not only to help her take out a life insurance policy on her husband (Powers) without his knowledge, but also to help her murder him in order to collect on it. Staging an unlikely accident in order to qualify for the 'double indemnity' clause in the contract, the deadly duo must next face claims adjuster Barton Keyes (Robinson), whose instinct tells him that something suspicious is afoot. Their faith in their story and each other sorely tested, Walter and Phyllis finally square off in a fatal game of cat and mouse. "Wilder's typically passionless direction fits beautifully with this sinister story. On his first studio assignment, screenwriter [Raymond] Chandler peppered the dialogue from [James M.] Cain's original [a short story in the book Three of a Kind] with his distinctive brand of hardboiled cynicism. The results, as when Phyllis and Walter flirt by using the extended metaphor of a speeding motorist, are terrific. [Miklos] Rozsa contributes a typically edgy score and [John] Seitz's cinematography makes great use of such noir trademarks as sharp camera angles, heavy, sculpted shadows and light slatted by venetian blinds. But it is really the starring trio which lends bite to this compelling crime classic. Stanwyck, in a deliberately phony blonde wig, remade her career with her striking portrayal of an icy woman whose boredom and desire fuel a plot of murder and intrigue. MacMurray, in a great change of pace, gives the performance of his career as the shifty loner excited by a challenge and a deadly dame's anklet. Robinson, meanwhile, beautifully gives the film its heart. His speech about death statistics, rattled off at top speed, is one of the film's highlights. Lifelessly remade for television in 1954 and 1973." DOUBLE INDEMNITY was nominated for seven Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Stanwyck), Best Adapted Screenplay (Raymond Chandler), Best Black & White Cinematography (John F. Seitz), Best Sound Recording (Loren L. Ryder), Best Music (Miklos Rozsa). .

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