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The Half a Hankie Movie
by
Beverly C. Lucey
One Saturday night, in 1959, I had no date.
Actually, it's pretty safe to say that I never had a date on a Saturday night in the Fifties. Not until my junior year in high school, was I finally allowed to get into a car with a male teenage driver.
Going to the movies with my parents was pretty embarrassing. It was like living in Dorkland. If they allowed me to bring Arlene or Jane we would sit elsewhere in the theater, far away from my folks and as close to a clot of boys as we could find.
On this particular evening, though, my mother, father, and I went to the Paramount Theater in Lynn, Massachusetts to see
Imitation of Life , starring Lana Turner and Sandra
Dee. My mother had read the novel by Fannie Hurst in the 1930s and seen the first film made. We were seeing a remake.
The world was changing dramatically during that time regarding civil rights, but I wasn't paying attention. I couldn't have told you how important the Brown vs. Board of Education decision would affect schools. I'd never given a thought to the idea that I lived surrounded by white people. Where were the black people? Somewhere else.
Imitation of Life hit me in heart and mind. Sure, it was an overblown, Technicolor, blond people with no talent make it big in show business kind of movie. The dialogue was stiff, ("Well, I'm going up and up and up - and nobody's going to pull me
down!" Lana Turner as Lora Meridth) much of the plot was contrived (well, nobody pulled her down), but I'd recommend you rent it as soon as you can. I saw it again on campus in the Sixties, then at a revival second run movie house in the Seventies. I rented it on VHS while recovering from surgery in the Eighties. By the Nineties it was on DVD, and now I think it's time to have another look.
Here's why.
The subplot has much to say about raising children, race relations, personal identity crises, friendship, corrosive secrets, and regret.
It was called a 'tearjerker.'
A single white mother and daughter are struggling to survive in NYC. The opening is a beach scene. A black mother and her light-skinned daughter are also at the beach with no place to go. The women talk, the young girls play in the sand, and during the afternoon decide that if they shared living quarters they might find life a bit easier.
It's clear at the start that the young olive skinned daughter is ashamed of her mother, does not want anyone to know she is black, and ultimately spends her life passing as white. Her mother is as totally unselfish as the actress mother is driven. Decades go by as Lana Turner becomes a star while Juanita Johnson is carried along functioning as a 'friend.' In truth, she is the maid. Wouldn't you know.
Ironically, in the original version, the black mother is the one who gains fame and success with a pancake recipe. Clever white woman is a marketing genius. But at least there was some parity in their mutual talents.
In the Fifties, we step backwards into much more stereotypical roles. Or at least Hollywood bet that we would prefer it that way. After all, television was still segregated. Black acts would appear on Ed Sullivan, but not interracial ones.
Decades go by, the relationship dynamics don't change much though.
It was the funeral scene that did us all in. It was at this point that the cliche, "not a dry eye in the house" seemed most likely to be true.
So, my father is sitting between my mother and me. I've used up every piece of Kleenex in my bag and have a lap full of soggy white paper. My mother was totally unprepared because she was not a woman who cried. This night she was two seats down dripping and sniffing and sobbing.
I remember my father sitting between us, two noisy females who were totally unable to keep quiet. Finally, he reached into his pocket, pulled out the ironed handkerchief he always carried and ripped it in two. He flagged one to the left for me, and dropped the other one across my mother's arm.
How odd it is to say this film is incredibly hokey, yet still worth your time. Give it a try. When you need a good cry.
If you've never seen Mahalia Jackson perform, or six white horses leading a procession, complete with brass playing musicians, then it's time you did.
Get a nice big box of facial tissue with aloe, that's soft on the nose. Your honker will thank you.
Beverly Lucey
http://beverlylucey.blogspot.com/
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