Tag: Warren William

Imitation of Life (1934)

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.

Lady for a Day (1933)

Capra’s charming comedy is really a sort of proto-Ealing film, and certainly a lot of fun

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Warren William (Dave the Dude), May Robson (Apple Annie), Guy Kibbee (Henry D Blake), Glenda Farrell (Missouri Martin), Ned Sparks (Happy Maguire), Jean Parker (Louise), Barry Norton (Carlos), Walter Connolly (Count Romero), Nat Pendleton (Shakespeare), Halliwell Hobbes (Butler), Hobart Bosworth (Governor)

Based on a short story called Madame La Gimp (probably wise to change that title), Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (for which he received his first Oscar nomination) fits neatly into his wheelhouse in one sense with its feel-good, comic sentimentality. But it also feels rather like an Ealing film made before the studio even existed. It’s a film where ordinary folks, some of them not exactly saints, with a mix of cunning and luck, run circles around the powers that be in the name of a good cause. It’s also a sharp, witty, fast-paced comedy with a happy ending. It’s a real crowd-pleasing comedy.

Apple Annie (May Robson) is an ageing fruit seller in New York City, who has seen better days but now lives in a rundown flat. But she’s doesn’t want the daughter, who she gave up for adoption decades ago, to know that. Using headed notepaper from a posh hotel, she has spun her a story for years that Annie is a well-to-do society figure in the Big Apple. So, it’s a disaster when daughter Louise (Jean Parker) writes back saying she’s engaged to the son of a Spanish count and is bringing him to New York to meet her mother. Apple Annie’s story seems doomed – but her salvation is that she is the lucky charm of rogueish gambler gangster Dave the Dude (Warren William) who never does a deal without buying one of her apples first. Can Dave ‘s money and his crew – with the help of a borrowed apartment – act out her fantasy for real?

Lady for a Day becomes a charming, fast-paced, semi-farce with Dave’s rough-and-tumble crew constantly trying to keep a step ahead of Louise’s prospective husband and father-in-law finding out the truth. They are helped by a large group of semi-vagrants from Apple Annie’s neighbourhood, all presented with an endearingly, non-patronising sense of supportive community. This leads to a constant parade of hustling their visitors from place-to-place, intercepting phone calls to the Spanish consulate and roping in a parade of New Yoick hustlers to play society grandees at a soiree. All of this while trying to stay one step ahead of the police and press, who are both convinced if the Dude is chucking this much money and people around, he must be planning a big score.

It’s the sort of charm you can’t imagine being allowed to fly even a year later: gangsters who don’t for a single-minute consider renouncing their life of making money from illicit deals (among other things), presented as put-upon, but-decent guys, bending over backwards to make an old woman’s dream come true. Lady for a Day doesn’t for a second suggest there should be a price to pay for their naughty day jobs. ‘Worse’ than that, in true Earling style, it presents the police chasing after them as dumb flat foots, hopelessly clueless and off-the-pace. Hard to believe the Hays Code passing that.

But it really works here, especially since Capra directs with phenomenal zip and wit. You could imagine a version of Lady for a Day weighted down in cheap sentimentality (in fact, you don’t need to – Capra made it in 1961 calling it A Pocketful of Miracles), but instead this is genuinely funny with well-drawn characters. Warren William is very good as the increasingly put-upon Duke, who can’t believe he’s been pulled into funding this good deed, but commits to it with world-weary resignation. He ‘sparks’ brilliantly off Ned Sparks’ rat-a-tat, cynical fixer flummoxed by his boss turning ‘Father Christmas’ but as determined to deliver on the deal as he would be on any other criminal enterprise.

And refreshingly Lady for a Day’s plot still has an air of criminal enterprise about it. They aren’t above threatening Halliwell Hobbes’ excellently dry butler with a bit of physical harm if he doesn’t play his part to perfection (doesn’t stop Hobbes getting in a cuttingly witty line about Sparks’ poor grammar). When a trio of journalists cause problems, they kidnap them (only for a few days they promise!). Difficult people are quietly strong-armed out of the way. Capra – working with a typically excellent Robert Riskin script – gets the tone just right, with just enough whimsical, Wildean farce.

This also plays into several set-pieces. The planning of the elaborate soiree is a particular gem. Packed with a parade of gamblers, tough guys and molls – all lacking even a drop of sophistication – they are carefully given a named role (one of them protests playing the Secretary of Defence – “a secretary is a secretary”) and a single line of high-styled dialogue, which they require hours of careful coaching to not fumble. The entire idea is excellent and superbly executed. Their dialogue is all provided by Guy Kibbee’s (quite excellent here) English gent-turned pool hustler, ‘playing’ Annie’s husband and enjoying a taste of the high life – while, in another memorable scene, discovering his pool hustling skills are more than a little helpful to the cause.

The film also works because it has a lovely, heartfelt performance by May Robson (Oscar nominated) as Annie. There is a wonderful Dickensian quality to Robson, with Apple Annie a Mrs Gamp with a tragic past (there are several references that she was once a lot more affluent than shifting apples on the street). Robson makes her sweet but sparky but never loses track of her vulnerability and fear that the truth may be discovered. She makes the character feel real and grounded, meaning the scenes with her daughter (which could have tipped into sentimentality) are genuinely quite touching.

It’s another successful beat in a fast-paced film that is entertaining, genuinely quite heart-warming and stuffed with excellent performances from a parade of studio players grabbing the sort of roles they wouldn’t normally get by the scruff of the neck. With its compassionate regard for the little guys, while not presenting either vagrants patronisingly or gangsters naively, it constantly entertains. It’s got a pre-Code daring about it (there is a neat joke about a gay hairdresser and a hint that Annie had her child out of wedlock, neither of which would have flown years later) and in its comic wit and fast-paced energy it’s one of Capra’s finest. Sure, it ends before Annie has to return to her previous life (and I’ve no idea what they would do if Louise visited again) but the film is as much about spinning a charming fantasy for us as it is for the characters.

Cleopatra (1934)

DeMille’s blockbuster is a fun, camp spectacle with plenty of his suggested sex and naughtiness

Director: Cecil B DeMille

Cast: Claudette Colbert (Cleopatra), Warren William (Julius Caesar), Henry Wilcoxon (Marc Anthony), Joseph Schildkraut (King Herod), Ian Keith (Octavian), Gertrude Michael (Calpurnia), C Aubrey Smith (Enobarbus), Irving Pichel (Apollodorus), Arthur Hohl (Brutus), Edwin Maxwell (Casca), Ian Maclaren (Cassius), Eleanor Phelps (Charmion), Leonard Mudie (Pothinos)

When a sand-and-sandals epic opens with a not-particularly-disguised naked woman cavorting erotically with incense, you know you are in Cecil B DeMille territory. Thirty years before the ill-fated Taylor-Burton epic, DeMille’s Cleopatra was the box-office hit of 1934. It was also a stompingly silly film, crammed with hammy performances and sexual imagery which it got-away-with in those pre-code days because it was an important historical subject taking place on humongous sets. But Cleopatra is also extremely good fun, a film so camply delighted in its naughtiness (and bowling along with such pantomimic energy) that it knocks spots off the turgid 1963 flop.

This Cleopatra follows pretty much the same structure (literally in half the time). Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) is at war with her brother for the throne of Egypt. Smuggled into the presence of Julius Caesar (Warren William) wrapped in a carpet, she reveals the evil machinations of her rival Pothinus (Leonard Muddie) and seduces Caesar (possibly more with the prospect of controlling Egypt, since this Caesar is a power-mad cold-fish). When Caesar is dispatched by conspirators during the Ides of March, Cleopatra’s focuses on man’s-man Marc Anthony (Henry Wilcoxon) who is very open to her seduction. Before they know it though, the two are at war with envious technocrat Octavian (Ian Keith) who marches all of Rome to Cairo to crush the two. Bring on the asps!

DeMille shoots all this with relentless energy and pace, though not quite enough that you don’t notice the dialogue clunking out of the actor’s mouths (“You and your Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” a bitter Octavius observes about Anthony’s funeral oration). Cleopatra, like many of the Great Showman’s finest films (of which this is unquestionably one) gives us all the sex and smut we could possibly want, disguised in its classic setting. Cleopatra absolutely drips in lust and is crammed with suggestive imagery from top to bottom.

From that cavorting incense-carrier, we cut to the rooms Cleopatra has been kidnapped from. These look like nothing less than the aftermath of a kinky orgy, including a hog-tied servant who looks like he’s passed out in an asphyxiation sex-game. Colbert models a series of deep-dive dresses that leave little to the imagination. Poor, randy Marc Anthony doesn’t stand a chance (we know he’s a hot-blooded man because he never goes anywhere without his two barking greyhounds). Cleopatra even dresses at time like some musicals starlet, trailing billowing fabric behind her as she descends stairs.

Meeting her on her pleasure barge (this ship is practically Tardis-like in its interior dimensions) he’s treated to the sort of show that wouldn’t be out of place in Amsterdam’s Red-Light district. Scantily-clad ladies cavort, dancers dressed in skin-tight leopard skin are marshalled by a whip-carrying ring-master, while they cavort and engage in (literal) cat-fights until broken up by a crack of the whip. All the time Cleopatra reclines on a silk-covered bed, Colbert’s eyes flashing unmistakable “come hither” glances. No wonder the randy sod quickly finds himself going all-in on Egypt.

Along with sex, the film mixes in plenty of action. Caesar’s assassin is rather imaginatively filmed through a POV shot (“You? You too Brutus?!” Warren William intones in despair), as daggers fly in. The forthcoming battles are teased in an early scene where Caesar, bored with an Egyptian delegation, fiddles with various models of siege engines. All of these come into play in the film’s later sequences, that sees a parade of fast-cut war scenes overlaid: siege engines fire, armies plough at each other over deserts, ships clash at sea, men drown in agony. Much like the epic scale of Cleopatra’s court and barge, the film doesn’t skip on the epic conflict.

Between these two tent poles, we basically get a soap dressed to-the-nines in sandals, short skirts and armour. Claudette Colbert in a banner year (this was one of three hits she had, and she won the Oscar for It Happened One Night) is sultry, playful and if she never feels for even-one-minute like a figure from antiquity, at least she has that in common with the rest of the cast. She gives Cleopatra a charismatic energy that makes her believable as a figure round whom all else revolves. Wilcoxon plays Anthony with a thigh-slapping, hail-fellow-well-met quality. Warren William underplays as Caesar – which can make him look dull in a film as overblown as this – but makes for an effectively cold and calculating man.

Egypt, in its voluptuous naughtiness makes all Rome look rather dull though. Our capital is introduced in a house-party where the conspirators pose and moan like hammy matinee performers, stroking their historically incorrect beards, while the ladies bitch like New York housewives gleefully spreading catty gossip. Octavian is re-imagined as whining middle-manager, a weasily Ian Keith constantly moaning about never getting enough attention and clearly far-too inhuman to ever be stirred by Cleopatra the way the lusty Anthony is. With the frame of the film being classic antiquity, we can even pretend this is somehow serious drama when really it’s just Dallas.

These actors march their way through a series of break-ups and get-togethers, punctuated by moments of silly drama. (Cleopatra, Hamlet-like, even stabs Porthinus through a curtain seconds before he can assassinate Caesar!) But it all kind of works because you suspect nothing is really taken that seriously. DeMille is making a big pageant here, a walloping epic of lusty suggestion, powered by larger-than-life performances. It’s meant to fill you with excitement and awe, to make you gasp in awe. It doesn’t really matter that we get a shit-stirring King Herod (a smirking Joseph Schildkraut) or an Enobarbus who puffs like a regimental sergeant-major (C Aubrey Smith, giant of beard). It’s all about the spectacle, the drama and showmanship. And no one really does that sort of stuff better than Cecil B DeMille.