Clyde’s Movie Palace Takes a Look Back at Imitation of Life (1959). KLEENEX AVAILABLE FOR FREE IN THE LOBBY.

It’s hard to believe that Director Douglas Sirk’s remake of Imitation of Life (first filmed in 1934 and based on the 1933 Fannie Hurst novel) was once thought of as nothing more than a high-class soap opera. I thought of it that way once, but that opinion went out the door quite a while back. The film is now considered a masterpiece by many, and I have to concur with that opinion.

Imitation of Life, along with the 1934 version, have both been inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry as being historically or aesthetically significant and recommended for preservation by those holding the best elements for that film. In this case, that would be Universal, who released both films as a two-movie set on Bluray. In addition, Criterion has released the 1934 version as well. Whether we’ll ever see a 4k release is debatable, but this film would surely benefit from it. Are you there, Kino Lorber?

Our movie begins in 1947 at a crowded Coney Island beach in New York City where a distraught mother, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), searches frantically for her not so lost daughter Suzie (played at age 6 by Terry Burnham). Here, she bumps into her future love interest, freelance photographer Steve Archer (John Gavin), who directs her to a police officer for help.

Suzie has found herself a playmate, Sarah Jane (played at age 8 by Karin Dicker). They are being watched over and fed hot dogs by Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black woman. When Lora arrives, the two children run off to play together while Lora and Annie chat and get to know each other.

Lora: Sarah Jane’s a lovely child. How long have you taken care of her?
Annie: All her life.
Lora: I wish I had someone to look after Suzie.
Annie: A maid to live in? Someone to take care of your little girl. A strong healthy settled-down woman who eats like a bird and doesn’t care if she gets no time off and will work really cheap.
Lora: Well, yes if one exists. Oh, someday!
Annie: How about today? I’m available.
Lora: You?
Annie: Me. Annie Johnson
Lora: You mean you’d consider leaving that lovely little girl?
Annie: Oh, I wouldn’t be leaving her. My baby goes where I go.
Lora: (Incredulously) Sarah Jane, is your child?
Annie: Yes, ma’am, it surprises most people. Sarah Jane favors her daddy. He was practically white. Left before she was born. Seems to me, Miss Meredith, I’m just right for you. You wouldn’t have to pay no wages. Just let me come and do for you!
Lora: I couldn’t do that. I’d have to pay you but can’t now.     

 

And if you thought that was that, you know very little about Basic Movie Plots 101.

When Sarah Jane starts crying that she and her mother don’t have a home, Lora relents and says, “Annie Johnson and Sarah Jane, Come on down!”      

As for Photographer Steve, romance will soon follow once he acquires Lora and Suzie’s home address.

Lora reminds Annie that their presence in her apartment is a one-night-only engagement meaning the arrangement will continue for quite a while.

Suzie offers Sarah Jane a black doll to play with that she happens to have in her collection, but she’ll have none of that shit. She wants the white doll that is Suzie’s favorite; thus, the movie wastes no time telling us that Sarah isn’t tuned into this whole business of being black. Sarah Jane, who was crying over not having any place to live just a short while ago, is also not too keen on living in a back room off the kitchen. At the ripe old age of eight, she’s tired of being relegated to back rooms and has seen enough of them.

It doesn’t take long for Lora to realize that a live-in maid who works practically for nothing but a place to sleep and a meal now and then is damn convenient. And here you thought slavery had ended in the 1800’s. Not that Annie or Lora would ever classify their relationship as such. Eventually, it works out for both parties financially, but not necessarily as an improvement to their mother/daughter relationships.

Lora and Steve hook up romantically when he delivers the pictures of Suzie and Sarah Jane that he took at the beach. While Steve and Lora are at lunch, she learns that agent Alan Loomis (Robert Alda) is casting a new play and manages to finagle her way into an interview. It goes well at first, but Loomis sees through Lora’s act but still wants her as a client, which requires her to do certain immoral things. Welcome to Hollywood Whoredom, Lora Meredith. Come on down!

But Lora, being of sound mind and moral principles, turns Loomis down without even thinking twice about it, sheds his mink coat, and heads out the door.

All this while Annie has been addressing Lora’s envelopes for her, making a deal with the landlord on the rent, which includes getting ten dollars off for cleaning the stairwell and laundering a persnickety man’s clothes for him while the two kids are in school. Annie runs this show, and Lora is the one along for the ride while she weeps over Loomis, making her feel cheap. Yet, inexplicably, or maybe out of necessity, Loomis remains Lora’s agent throughout her up-and-coming career. It’s a clue as to what many actresses were and, in some cases, still are subjected to in order to establish a film or Broadway career.

Steve, just like every insecure Republican Male in 2023, wants Lora to forget about being a Broadway actress to become his housewife, clean, cook, do the dishes, draw the bath, have babies, bring him a beer, and draw his bath. Bye-bye, Steve.

Eventually, through a bit of luck, Lora gets a supporting role in a play by writer David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy). After rave reviews, Lora becomes his permanent comedy star, like the Lucille Ball of Broadway. It is strongly suggested that she also becomes Edward’s lover during this time.

Eleven years and eleven plays later, things have changed quite a bit for Lora, Annie, and Suzie (now sixteen and played by Sandra Dee). But not necessarily for Sarah Jane (now eighteen and played by Susan Kohner). It’s a best-of-times, worst-of-times scenario.

Because of her Broadway success, Lora has all the material things one could ask for and bestow upon her daughter simultaneously. She doesn’t have a good relationship with Suzie, who spends much of her time away at boarding school, only seeing her mother on rare occasions when she can get away from her plays. Sarah Jane, who is more of an adult now, is still struggling to become white, having secretly acquired a white boyfriend. It’s a move that leads to tragic consequences.      
     
Unlike Suzie, who would like more time with Lora, Sarah Jane would like nothing more than to have Annie stay as far away from her and as inconspicuous as possible.

And remember Steve, the photographer? Having mellowed out a bit about the whole male chauvinist housekeeping wife bit, he re-enters just in time to become a companion looking after Suzie while Lora is overseas making a film after she had promised her daughter she was taking time off to spend more time with her. Suzie doesn’t perceive Steve as her designated companion and instead falls in love with him.

I want to tell you all this works out, but I can’t. This movie isn’t some ordinary run-of-the-mill weeper and could just as easily have been titled Tragedy of Life.

While watching Imitation of Life a couple of weeks ago with my wife in our home theater, she turned to me at one crucial point involving Sarah Jane. She said, “Frankly, I don’t blame her. Look at how black people have been treated. If I could escape that, I would do it.”

Despite the insistence of Lora that Annie is her friend and confidante and that she seems content to accept it as just that, she remains Lora’s glorified maid. Without Annie, one could even surmise that Lora may not have had the opportunities her success brings her. Sara Jane, forgetting for the moment that the only reason she has the things she does is because of Lora’s success when asked to serve Lora’s dinner guests, Sara Jane does so as if she’s Prissy in Gone With the Wind. But this “act” comes when Lora and Annie want to fix her up with nice black boys, sons of chauffeurs, butlers, gardeners, and maids.

Sarah Jane’s struggle to be identified as white is painful to sit through, not because she wants to, but to her, it’s a way of survival, to escape the reality of racism and segregation. To no longer be looked at as inferior. We feel her pain and struggles in scenes where Sarah Jane’s race is discovered. One has to wonder, however, if the audiences of the 50’s understood that. Many of them, including some critics, considered the film nothing more than a soap-operish tear-jerker. But now, over 60 years later, Imitation of Life is regarded as a masterpiece of race commentary. In 2015, BBC Online named the film the 37th greatest American movie ever made, based on a survey of film critics.

The acting, with the exception of John Gavin, is impeccable. Gavin is as wooden as a ventriloquist’s dummy but he’s not in the movie enough for you to care. Both Kohner and Moore received Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Neither won, but either/or deserved to. Kohner did win a Golden Globe in that category, however. But let’s not trivialize Lana Turner’s contributions either. She was never better at portraying the glamour queen, helped by Sirk and Producer Ross Hunter giving her lavish clothes befitting of Broadway royalty.

Have things changed in all these years? Some. But the underlying systemic racism is still here.

We have one political party, the GOP, running on the idea of how white you can be. During the Obama Presidency, the same political party would claim he was not really black at all while at the same time insisting he wasn’t even born in the United States.

During the Obama years, I had a discusion with one family member regarding the Obama presidency, pointing out many facts she didn’t care to be aware of. At the end of the conversation, she responded, “I don’t care. I just hate Obama.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why or why this country would continue to give power to White Supremacists like Trump and DeSantis while making it a crime to teach about racism in schools and, as in the case of DeSantis and friends, proclaiming that slavery was one big happy beneficially good time for black people.

By the film’s end, Lora’s struggles and problems with Suzie seem almost trivial. Director Douglas Sirk masterfully moves that story to the background to focus on Annie and Sarah Jane. When the film was finished, Sirk returned to his native Germany, never to direct another feature film, having had his fill of the Hollywood machinery:

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style. And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble. A director in Hollywood in my time couldn’t do what he wanted to do.

This is truly a great film. I would, as others have, put it on the list of films you must see before you die, and without hesitation, it deserves an A+ rating. Even to this day, I find the ending of this movie a struggle, as just about every man or woman does. Just don’t forget the Kleenex.

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It’s Hazmat Suit Night at Clyde’s Movie Palace and All Patrons Wearing One Get Free Admission to See: Outbreak (1995)

In the fifties and sixties, the biggest threat to the existence of man on this planet was that a nuclear holocaust could happen at any minute. I'm not sure that fear has ever left us. After all, when you have Dictators such as Putin and Kim Jong Un, and we elect total loons like Donald Trumpenstein, every day is anything can happen day.

We're also smart enough to know now that if the bomb is going to drop, all one can do is put their head between their legs and kiss their ass goodbye. You'll be darn lucky if you have time to do that. One second, you're here; the next second, you're vaporized.

All it takes is one button press to blow the world all to shit. As willing as it always is, Hollywood picked up on that theme with films such as Fail-Safe, The Bedford Incident, Dr. Strangelove, and On The Beach.

And let's not forget the radiation side effects left over from mega-bomb testing that you won't find in any book or college thesis. If the bomb itself didn't get us, Film Writers and Producers wanted us to believe that some strange monstrous creature blown up to gigantic size from the effects of nuclear radiation would have us all for lunch.

Eventually, Hollywood's preoccupation with the threat of Earth becoming a nuclear wasteland subsided. Once you’ve blown the planet all to hell in a movie like The Day After, there’s not much left to tell.

They seemed to become more preoccupied with more mundane matters such as wiping us out via natural disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes, meteors and comets spinning around in the far reaches of space intent on making Earth their target, or aliens from another world coming down and feasting instead of Godzilla chowing down on sushi.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another genuine threat loomed on the horizon, made more imperative by recent current events. We may have had too much of a good thing because of our natural tendency to pop an antibiotic down our throats at the first sign of a cough or sneeze. Someday, there may be a virus that will be immune to all popped pills and capsules, and when that happens, it will be adios to one and all.

The virus could be manufactured as it was in Stephen King's The Stand or come from a monkey living it up in sunny California despite the absence of a passport, visa, or green card. And that is the premise behind Outbreak, another Hollywood concoction that lets us see our demise in real time before we actually experience the thrill firsthand.

In 1967, a new virus spread through the Motaba River Valley region of Zaire, wiping out most of the inhabitants of a Mercenary Camp who came in contact with it. In two days, it has claimed 48 victims. We witness the horrific effects of the disease when two U.S. Army soldiers are flown in by helicopter in quarantine suits to survey the damage and to see if the virus is contained and is no longer spreading. 

After gathering blood samples, telling a doctor they'll send supplies in as soon as possible, and reassuring one man that he will be fine, they depart. Shortly after that, they show their genuine humanitarianism by ordering the place to be bombed all to shit.

And yes, all you morbid violence freaks out there do get to see the bomb drop with men waving at it as if it's a big barrel of Big Macs just before they're disintegrated into gooey microscopic particles of skin and bone matter. But think of the bright side. It did wipe out their disease and kept them from starving to death.

You won't have to hire a voice analyst to know that the voices of the two men in the quarantine suits did, in fact, belong to Morgan Freeman and Donald Sutherland. But who are these masked men?

Fast forward about 27 years to the present day at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID for all you abbreviation fanatics) in Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where Colonel Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) and his co-worker Major Casey Shuler (Kevin Spacey) research and study viruses both old and new in an attempt to keep them from spreading across the planet.

Daniels's ex-wife Roberta (Rene Russo), now works at the Center for Disease Control (that's CDC for all you abbreviation freaks), tracking the outbreak of diseases across the U.S. so they can be contained. She was working with Daniels and Shuler, but for obvious reasons, she moves on to greener pastures. Seems she wants to be as far away from ex-hubby Sam as possible while still getting what amounts to a promotion.

I don't know why they're divorced, but it must have been awful because, in the early part of the film, she seems really pissed off at Sam whenever he shows up. The reasons for the break up don't really matter. Their split is merely a plot device to add another dimension to their characters. And it's one plot device that actually works well. 

We find all of this out because Sam is ordered by the voice of Morgan Freeman to head to Zaire because there's a level four alert in place. At the USAMRIID, Sam works at Level IV, which deals with extreme biohazards, maximum security, and Infectious agents: Ebola, Lassa, and Hantaviruses. Highly Virulent, no known cures or vaccines. So we can assume that any outbreak Sam is called in to investigate can be some pretty scary shit.

(Clyde note: In 1999, the World Health Organization (WHO for all you abbreviation nitpickers) began its level alert system. Level 4 is listed as containment of the new virus in a limited area or delay of its spread." Still, it is also acknowledged that the virus is contagious among humans. A Level 5 alert signals that the pandemic has begun. But these standards weren't issued until four years after the release of Outbreak.) 

More importantly, we now know that Morgan Freeman's voice belongs to Sam's superior officer, and his name is Billy. The following day when we see his gazillion stripes, medals, and stars, we discover that Billy is one hot-shot army guy who officially goes by the name of Brigadier General Billy Ford (No relation to Gerald or Henry Ford). They are friendly enough, almost like old-school buddies. But looks can be deceiving. 

Along on this mission with Sam is Casey Shuler and wet behind-the-ears tissue sample guy Major Salt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) The three are dumped into an African village eerily similar to the one we saw at the film's beginning, with the now familiar bloated and bleeding corpses included.

There is one significant difference. This time the virus "seems" to be contained, which means no fireball shooting like a cannonball from out of the sky, bright as a rose, gleaming its eye, exploding, and blowing villagers to kingdom come and beyond. The reason the virus is contained? Everybody who had it is already dead or near death. It is a mess that causes Major Salt to make a huge mistake, but since the virus is not airborne (yet), it's no harm, no foul.

After collecting some samples, Sam, Casey, and Major Salt returned home to study the virus. But as Sam says, a brand new virus is something you may only see once in a lifetime. For all you Covid people, we've now seen one.

Casey Schuler: I hate this bug. 
Colonel Sam Daniels: Oh, come on, Casey. You have to admire its simplicity. It's one billionth our size and it's beating us. 
Casey Schuler: So, what do you want to do, take it to dinner? 
Colonel Sam Daniels: No. 
Casey Schuler: What, then? 
Colonel Sam Daniels: Kill it.

When Sam reported that the Motaba virus "seemed" contained, it's with good reason that he wasn't any more definite. He wants officials to issue an alert to be on the safe side in case he's wrong. Just because it was contained in the Motaba village does not mean the virus didn't escape somewhere, someway, or somehow.

Like in a Capuchin Monkey in Zaire on vacation from South America. And then perhaps that disease-carrying little bastard is netted and carried off to be used for lab experiments in the U.S.      

Once in California, what if the animal were carted away by Jimbo McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey) to be sold in a pet shop. And then, let's suppose Jimbo gets covered in monkey spit. The pet shop owner he's trying to sell the animal to gets scratched by one really pissed-off miniature ape when he decides not to buy the animal. And finally, Jimbo McDreamy, unable to sell the little fellow, lets it loose in the California wilderness just before catching a flight to Boston to lay a big old wet smooch on his girlfriend. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.

Meanwhile, back at the USAMRIID ranch, we finally learn the identity of Donald Sutherland's voice. He is Major General Donald McClintock and outranks everybody except maybe God, The President, and The Pope. This guy is such an asshole, though. He probably thinks he's in charge of them too.     

Since the 1960's when McClintock ordered the wipeout of the village in Zaire, turning it into the world's most giant wienie roast ever, the Major General and Billy have been doing some things that weren't entirely on the up and up. And let's not forget the fact that genocide, even on a small scale, isn't part of any Treaty I've ever heard of.

These guys have been secretly experimenting with the original Motaba, hoping to develop a new biological weapon. And along the way, they created a serum that they've secretly kept in a vault for thirty years as if it were the body of Ted Williams which can prevent the spread of the little booger. And as it turns out, the virus is the same as the strain Sam brought back from Africa.

Pretty soon, the shit hits the fan. The disease spreads from one carrier to the next. Jimbo gives it to his girlfriend, a lab assistant carelessly checking blood samples, breaks a vial of blood, then passes the disease on to patrons of a movie theater in the town of Cedar Creek. The President must decide whether to eliminate the village from the California landscape, and as Porky Pig might say, "bida bida bida bida bida, that's all folks."

Billy and his buddy, General McClintock, are more interested in protecting their own asses (think DeSantis/Trump and a slew of other Republicans and crackpots) than how many people will die in Cedar Creek. McClintock orders Billy to send Sam, his best pandemic specialist, off to take care of a situation already under control. To keep Sam out of Cedar Creek because if anyone could figure out what they had been up to for thirty years, Sam could. But Sam has this thing about following orders when there is obviously some underlying motive to keep him in the dark.

If you're sure that the good friendly folks of Cedar Creek will be spared in the end, then you need to have a refresher course in 60's doomsday films like this one. When push comes to shove, President, whomever it may be, won't want that stuff creeping across the White House lawn to nail his ass. Especially when you have McClintock convincing you that the only way out is to blow Cedar Creek all to hell, the sick along with the ones not yet ill. What?  You think the Constitution is going to protect you when there’s politicians and their hand-picked Corporate Supreme Court Justices out there shitting on it day after day?

All the characters in Outbreak are exceptionally well written, especially for a film that is simply another disaster movie at its heart. Dustin Hoffman is quite surprising in a role entirely different from anything else he has done. He is intense, rebellious, knowledgeable, and, when necessary, a decent action hero. However, he'll never be compared to Harrison Ford, who was initially planned for the role. But I don't see Ford as the scientific type, so it balances out. Sammy is everything we expect our hero to be, except that he should have been nicer to his ex-wife Robbie.

Rene Russo, as his ex, is good too. She is more sensible and down to Earth than Hoffman, yet not so much so that she would let such a dangerous threat as this virus fall entirely under the radar. When Sam pleas with her to ask for an alert to be called, she hesitates but does it anyway, knowing that while her ex might be an asshole when it comes to relationships, he's usually right on the money when it comes to interacting with microscopic particles.

Kevin Spacey isn't given much to do initially, but this is early in his career, and he is the third banana. But he has a heartbreaking scene with Russo late in the game in Cedar Creek. One thing, though, and it really annoyed me throughout the film. Spacey has the weirdest crappiest hair coloring and haircut I've ever seen in a movie. So throw a few raspberries to the hairstylist. As for his career 28 years later, Spacey seems to have permanently fucked up that with his perverted tendency to sexually assault people.  

Cuba Gooding Jr. is as good in this film as he would be a year later in Jerry Maguire, for which he won an Oscar by yelling, "Show me the money."

In fact, it's almost as if he's auditioning for the part of Rod Tidwell. Too bad his film selection since winning that statue has pretty much sucked, not to mention that he took a page out of the Kevin Spacey handbook of sexual assault. Maybe these guys should have gotten together and blamed the after-effects of Motaba.

Donald Sutherland, whom Writer, director, and producer Joss Whedon (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers), who worked with Sutherland on the Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie, once referred to Donald Sutherland as being a dick. A nice anecdote from Whedon, a guy who turned out to be an obnoxious, sexist dick himself.

But one thing is sure, Sutherland can play a dick better than anybody. For reference, see his villainy in The Hunger Games Trilogy. 

Morgan Freeman has the more difficult task. He has to play a dick with a conscience who knows he's doing some messed up shit but has to follow orders because Sutherland has more stripes on his sleeves. As to whether or not Billy can redeem himself in the end, that remains to be seen. Billy's actions could be why he got sent to Shawshank for an extended stay.   

Many aspects of Outbreak are genuinely frightening. The film opens with one of the most devastating scenes I've ever witnessed, alerting us to the dangers we are about to face. We know beforehand what the result will be when the monkey scratches the pet store owner, and we immediately begin to cringe at the thought, just as we do when the monkey is set free. Other terrifying scenes deal with how the virus rapidly spreads and begins to infect the population. Wolfgang Petersen's adept direction never lets the film linger, keeping things moving along at a rapid pace while at the same time not forgetting to focus on his actors whenever possible. It's much better than Poseidon, where he seemed to be going through the motions.

One of the more remarkable scenes is the one in the Cedar Creek theater, which shows the virus spreading from one victim to the next. Later, when Sam tries to figure out how the virus has spread beyond the quarantined hospital rooms, he looks up at the vent. As the camera takes us through the duct into the other hospital room, Sam realizes the virus has mutated, can now travel through the air, and that Billy's super secret vaccine isn't going to cure that shit now.

Nothing is spared from us as we see the disease's devastating effects on those who become infected. It is all these things that make Outbreak such a good film, much of which the credit for can go not only to Peterson but to Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and the many makeup artists and special effects wizards who worked on the film, with an excellent cast that took the subject matter seriously instead of just collecting a paycheck.  

Outbreak is an excellent scary what would happen if... film made more terrifying because everything that occurs is a real threat.

After Covid, it is now inevitable. Making matters worse, we now have a significant segment of anti-vax nut cases in this country led by jackasses like Trump Monster, and total nutcases like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lauren Bozo Boebert, and Trailer Trash Marjorie Taylor Greene would help to do us in. Kennedy Jr.'s father is rolling over in his grave at his son's bullshit.

Those thoughts alone should be enough to keep you glued to your seat. And if a film such as Outbreak can keep us edgy and tense while reminding us that it may be fiction, but it's also a probable fact, then I have no choice but to give it a grade of A.

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