Rochelle Hudson – Movie Musings

A surprisingly subversive tale on race under it’s traditional ‘woman’s picture’ exterior

Director: John M Stahl

Cast: Claudette Colbert (Beatrice Pullman), Warren William (Stephen Archer), Rochelle Hudson (Jessie Pullman), Ned Sparks (Elmer Smith), Louise Beavers (Delilah), Fredi Washington (Peola), Alan Hale (Furniture man)

Imitation of Life sits at a fascinating juncture of American life. On the surface, its a familiar “woman’s film”. Struggling widowed mother Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) turns her life around by building a pancake bakery empire, based on the unbeatable pancake recipes of her Black maid and best friend Delilah’s (Louise Beavers). She builds a better life for her daughter Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) and navigates romantic complexity with dashing ichthyologist Stephen Archer (Warren William), who unwittingly attracts the devotion of the teenage Jessie.

Now, a film establishing it was possible for a woman to make a successful business career without the assistance of a man – and that she wouldn’t be, in some way, narratively punished for her presumption – would be radical enough. But, also in Imitation of Life is a complex, questioning look at race in America. Because humble, deferential Delilah – who sees her life’s purpose as being to serve – is openly the foundation of that success. Delilah isn’t even comfortable taking her share of the company (20% for being the face and genius of the company), an attitude Imitation of Life simultaneously encourages us to find both quaint and frustratingly servile. Instead, Delilah wants nothing more than to keep her apron on and bring Beatrice food and foot massages whenever she needs them. What this says about both of them is kept fascinatingly present all the time.

Imitation of Life presents an intriguing, under-the-surface searchingly frank depiction of a close bi-racial friendship that still drips with unspoken hierarchy. Delilah, of course, wouldn’t think of calling Beatrice anything other than Ms Bea, while Beatrice would never think of introducing her as anything other than Delilah (she doesn’t seem to have a last name). Repeated shots employing staircases – most strikingly a mid-shot that sees both women head to bed, one going upstairs the other down – stress the barriers between them. While the wealthy Bea parties upstairs, Delilah smilingly knows her place is downstairs in her comfortable but considerably less grand servants’ rooms. There is friendship, but everyone has their ‘natural’ place – and the film subtly invites us to feel awkward when we recognise this.

However, Imitation of Life gives its most dynamic plot to Delilah and her daughter Peola. Superbly played by Fredi Washington – bringing a lifetime of personal experience to her passionate portrayal – the pale-skinned Peola, unlike Delilah, can ‘pass’ as white. For a Hollywood film to even present this is daring enough: the clear-spoken Peola, who lacks Delilah’s stereotypical sing-song accent, is a living, breathing challenge to the absurdity of America’s racist segregation laws. She can work in a restaurant, where the punters would be aghast if they knew her background (as aghast as they are when Delilah walks in). She has possibilities in her life beyond the ‘Black college’ her mother wants to send her too or the career of menial drudgery even the most intelligent Black people in America were consigned to at the time.

Imitation of Life, with its romantic regard for the traditional Delilah, can (and does) stare disapprovingly at Peola’s contemptuous dismissal of her mother, whose very existence is a living, breathing reminder to people that Peola doesn’t belong upstairs but very much downstairs. An attitude cemented at childhood, when Delilah unexpectantly arrives at school to ‘expose’ Peola’s heritage to everyone. But there is enough sly commentary in Imitation of Life to suggest this is as much a generational split. That Peola is perhaps right to be frustrated that its Beatrice rather than her mother who has made a fortune from their old family pancake mix.

In fact it can feel like Peola is rebelling as much against the older generation of Black people than she is her mother. The people like her mother, whose grandparents (or even parents) were slaves and accept willingly they belong in deferential service to rich whites, gratefully receiving their parental handouts. Peola dresses and speaks like a modern young woman, and her resentment is as much at Delilah’s lack of self-worth and happy embracing of her (admittedly friendly) economic exploitation. Peola is looking at a new future – one where Black people would (rightly) no longer accept such rigid guardrails on their life.

Imitation of Life captures these ideas slightly clumsily, presented in a way white 1930s Americans were comfortable processing, but it’s there. Sure Delilah – played with a real warmth and tenderness by Louise Beavers, adding emotional depth to a ‘mammy’ character – may be, at heart, a stereotype who turns up in Bea’s life with magical serendipity to improve her life with her service. Peola may often be given the words of a stroppy ingrate who won’t accept her place. But both characters – and Beavers and Washington – are straining at presenting something more complex, smuggling it under the Hays Code radar, as a generational tale of divergent options in the Black community.

This makes Imitation more than the comforting Uncle Tom story it presents as. It’s also, certainly, a heck of a lot more interesting than Colbert’s storyline. (Colbert must have noticed this, so it’s too her credit she enthusiastically took the larger but duller part). Colbert does a fine job, her affection for Delilah measured with just enough patronising paternalism. The melodramatic romantic entanglements with Warren William (not at his most interesting) and the almost terminally flat character of Jessie (played forgettably by Rochelle Hudson) drift dully past the eyes as we wait for the camera to go back downstairs for the real story once again.

Imitation of Life resolves most of its plot lines with comforting forgiveness and with characters stepping back into accepting their more expected roles. But it carries just enough suggestion of subversion, underneath its placid acceptance of a status quo, to make you think the same people would have made an angrier, more dangerous film if they had been given the chance.

Odd choices are made in this Hugo adaptation, despite good photography and performances

Director: Richard Boleslawski

Cast: Fredric March (Jean Valjean), Charles Laughton (Inspector Javert), Cedric Hardwicke (Bishop Myriel), Rochelle Hudson (Cosette), Marilyn Knowlden (Young Cosette), Florence Eldridge (Fantine), John Beal (Marius), Frances Drake (Éponine), John Carradine (Enjolras)

There isn’t a more famous loaf of bread in literature, than that stolen by Jean Valjean to feed his starving family. There’s something quite sweet about the fact that Richard Boleslawski’s film of Hugo’s doorstop gives that loaf its moment in the sun, as its half-eaten remains are produced as evidence in Valjean’s trial. It’s an unintentionally funny moment, but feels right in a sometimes blunt film, that at times makes odd decisions for those of us so familiar now with the plot’s ins-and-outs and the moral up-righteousness of its lead character after forty years of the musical. Boleslawski’s version is an odd mix, part psychological drama, part atmospheric thriller, part thuddingly obvious soap where a loaf of bread needs to be literally seen. Parts of it work extremely well, other parts weigh the film down like the chains on its galley slaves.

The film is overwhelmingly focused on the clash between Valjean (Fredric March) and Javert (Charles Laughton). One a good man who wrestles with temptation, but follows the sprit of justice. The other a rigid fanatic, who sees the letter of the law as gospel and the rights and wrongs of a situation an irrelevance. First meeting when Valjean serves a decade as a slave at the oars in the galleys, their paths recross after a released Valjean has a road-to-Damascus moment after the intervention of a noble priest (Cedric Hardwicke). Reinventing himself as ‘Monsieur Madeleine”, he becomes mayor of a small town and protector of Fantine (Florence Eldredge) and her daughter Cosette (Rochelle Hudson). But he cannot escape the pursuit of Javert which carries him into hiding for years in Paris, where a now grown-up Cosette falls in love with reforming student Marius (John Beal), leaving Valjean with one last dangerous choice.

Les Misérables restructures the novel into three acts, each presenting Valjean with a moral quandary. As such, Fredric March’s impressive performance must be unique among Valjean’s: this version is forever tempted with greed, anger and his own desires, constantly struggling to overcome his baser feelings. March is very good at bringing to life this conflict, just as he sells the sense of awakening purpose Valjean feels washing over him after the Bishop’s intervention prevents him from being returned to prison. It’s a muscular, agonised performance of a man constantly striving, even in the face of his resentment, to live up to his adopted moral principles. So, much as Valjean would like to let another man be accidentally condemned for his crimes, or to keep Cosette to himself or pull a trigger on Javert (March’s skilfully communicating the deep internal conflict each time) he’ll still (however reluctantly) find himself doing the right thing.

He contrasts excellently, with Laughton’s rigid, well-spoken, self-loathing Javert who has absorbed his moral code so completely, its left no room for any other form of principle or emotional judgement. Introduced, lips quivering, as he explains being denied promotion due to his convict father, Laughton’s Javert has channelled that resentment to worshipping the penal code as God. As he repeats, several times, good or bad is irrelevant, it’s just about the law. Of course, Laughton’s performance bubbles with repressed frustration, his pursuit of Valjean clearly motivated by far more personal feelings of anger and envy than he is willing to admit. Valjean is a spoke in his wheel of justice, a factor that makes no sense to him.

Boleslawski’s film is at its best when these two face off. It’s also at its most stylistic for these sequences. Les Misérables is awash with Gregg Toland’s atmospheric, mist-filled photography and expertly uses his expressionistic shadows. It’s depiction of a Parisian uprising, just like it’s introduction of a fast-paced horse chase between Valjean and Javert, are snappily edited and throw in a parade of dynamic Dutch and high angles. At the end of each act, Christian imagery is well used (in two cases, shrines to Mary and Jesus) to add emotional heft. A pursuit through grime and mist-filled sewers near the film’s close has a Fritz Lang atmospheric strength (did Carol Reed watch this before The Third Man?) as well as the film’s most effective use of music to build atmosphere as Valjean desperately submerges himself and Marius to hide.

There is effective stuff in Les Misérables. So, you try your best to forgive the fact it’s full of extremely on-the-nose, obvious touches. The introduction of the bread at the trial is not an end of its obviousness: for starters, the galley’s were prison hulks, not actual ships rowed around by convicts (where do they imagine these enormous hulks are going?). Truncating so much of the book down – and focusing overwhelmingly on its two leads – means many other parts of the story are short-changed or make little impact or sense (the hilariously watered down Parisian revolutionaries don’t turn up until the final 40 minutes). Florence Eldridge’s Fantine (all references to her prostitution are of course cut) does almost nothing but die – although not before the film gives her a (unique) ludicrously sentimental reunion scene with her daughter (played by a highly irritating precocious film-school brat before she grows up into Rochelle Hudson). Clearly the actual tragedy here (a mother never sees her daughter again) was considered too much.

Then there are the strange mis-readings and mis-interpretations. I can understand why Marius and his law students are re-imagined, by conservative Hollywood, into legal reformers rather than idealisitic revolutionaries (Marius even denounces the very idea of overthrowing the government as terrible). Here they want only penal reform – although of course, while ensuring the guilty are harshly punished – and chat like champagne socialists. It’s a bit of a mystery why this call for slow-paced, moderate social reform erupts into throwing up barricades, but clearly audiences at the time couldn’t be expected to get on board with anti-Monarchist cells. They’d probably agree with Eponine (interpreted here as a sort of femme fatale and Marius’ secretary) that it’s all a silly, slightly disreputable, waste of time.

However, even more strange, is the inexplicable interpretation of Valjean’s desire to keep Cosette to himself not due to being a protective father-figure investing everything in his life into his daughter, but instead an unpleasant sexual desire to make Cosette his wife. Even leaving aside this utter perversion of the novel, since we’ve seen Valjean raise her from the age of about 6 it’s hard not to feel a bit of bile forming in your throat at the stench of grooming this gives the relationship. It’s almost as if Hollywood could only imagine a man going to great lengths to protect a woman if he wanted to eventually get in her pants.

It’s odd reinventions like this that don’t quite work even within the world presented by the adaptation, let alone compared to the original source, that weighs the film down too much. They are blotches in the streamlining of a huge novel. But when the film focuses on an increasingly personal clash between two men, both well played by March and Fredric, and its atmospheric visuals, it works much better.