A Young Perspective on Two Old Black Movies

There were no tears for Delilah this time.

There she was, dead in a glass-encased casket, escorted by white-gloved black men and carried by a train of white horses.

And yet for me and other blacks at the Four Star Theater, watching “Imitation of Life” (the original 1934 version that starred Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers), it seemed that our expectations of seeing a real tear-jerker had been mistaken; perhaps these expectations had been exaggerated, based on dim memories of the 1959 Lana Turner and Juanita Moore version.

By today’s standards, this particular presentation during the 10th annual “Black Talkies on Parade” festival in February--Black History Month--didn’t have much relevance to the real life that it purported to represent then, and especially not now. It’s an unbelieveable rags-to-riches tale of two widows--one black, the other white--and the growing pains of their daughters.

I found all the characters in the movie flat and cartoonish, but that deficiency was excusable because of the movie’s one daring and perennially affecting subplot: a close-up view into the singular psychoses of the black widow’s only daughter, a pale-skinned black girl so bent on passage to white life that she disowned her inconveniently dark mother.

Because this story doesn’t adequately address the aching questions it raises about the daughter’s pursuit of cultural assimilation--and, more important, because it preserves an insulting and insensitive portrayal of a black mother--it failed to move this 24-year-old male. Nor did it move the woman in her 60s who told me “Imitation” didn’t get to her this time. Nor did it move the 13-year-old who fell asleep in my row.

Who could stay interested in this woman, a rich partner in an empire built on her secret pancake recipe, who inexplicably opts for a sexless, caricatured existence as a downstairs domestic--instead of living comfortably in her own home? She comes up for air only to cook, clean or give foot massages to the white widow (her business partner) and to moan about her child Peola.

I was a teen-ager when I first saw the funeral scene in the 1959 version, so my hopes for the original 1934 version were high. But I hadn’t expected to discover the earlier the version’s monstrous logic: If the servile Delilah is supposed to represent a successful, privileged black American woman, then why shouldn’t Peola, the ambitious young daughter, disavow that pitiful image? And exactly who was guilty of imitating life here, Peola or her suppressed mother?

There is a value to seeing this kind of movie, however. It gives us perspective. Like seeing an artifact from another era in a museum, it reinforces how much has changed--in this case how far we have come in our representation of blacks and women on film. Of course the industry is not perfect yet, but at least it is not as tragically off the mark as the 1934 “Imitation.” I thought about those changes as I settled in to watch “Hearts in Dixie” (1929), a Civil War comic-drama, starring Stepin Fetchit.

For years, it seems, I had heard that Fetchit perpetuated the lie that blacks are shiftless and lazy, that he was a sellout. No black actor that I know of has had worse press from people who have never seen his movies.

Nobody ever mentioned to me that Stepin Fetchit was funny .

I didn’t even have time to become righteously indignant before I was laughing out loud at Fetchit’s philosophically lazy character who was “too tired from rest.” It would be an insult to his artistic touch to say any comic actor could have carried off this totally absurd creation--a mix of childlike innocence, grown-up goldbricking and a dramatic and comic timing you could set your watch by.

As to his threat to the industriousness of future generations of blacks, or anyone else desperate enough to choose a 59-year-old cartoon character as a role model, it seems as diabolical a threat as Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp” is to white children.

I was surprised by that, but not as surprised as I was to find in the same movie, a delicate scene that hasn’t been as ably depicted since “Roots”: A plantation family composed of gentle lovers, and bright, beautiful children, strengthened by religion and dignity--serving without being obsequious, inconvenienced by cruel circumstances of “the peculiar institution,” but not broken by them.

If it weren’t for black Los Angeles historian Mayme Clayton and the festival she organized, I would be hard pressed to find another event during Black History Month inspiring as much reflection.

The casts and crews are of these movies are less of an attraction to me than the content. The lure is seeing how these immortal images bear up under the demands of us mortals, who are constantly forgiving some film portrayals and forgetting others as we find new ways to see ourselves.

Knowing this, I wonder if I’ll have any tears for Delilah next time.