So, You Won't Watch a Black and White Movie?

 I heard this from my step-kids - all you watch are black & white movies.

I heard this from a girlfriend, she did not like black & white movies.

The step-kids were more fascinated by the original King Kong than Peter Jackson's update. We will need to see if the girlfriend changes her mind.

If you think old movies do not have complexities, that they must be dull due to their age, I suggest reading Imitation of Life: On Passing Between. I have not seen the original version, but I did see the re-make when I was young. It was in color. My recollection is it was also very melodramatic. It also had LanaTurner, not one of my favorite actresses, and the earlier, the subject of this essay, has Claudette Colbert, one of my favorite actresses. Now, other than my blather, why read this essay and/or watch this movie:

In 2005, the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress added the 1934 version of Imitation of Life to the National Film Registry, its roster of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films. Archivist Ariel Schudson’s essay marking the occasion touts the film as “a defining moment in the history of women in film and a watershed moment for African American casting in Hollywood.” Directed by John M. Stahl for Universal Pictures, and based on Fannie Hurst’s best-selling 1933 prefeminist rags-to-riches novel of the same name, the film raises issues of gender roles, labor, race, identity, and the American dream in a melodramatic framework that might have otherwise been regarded as that of a mere “ladies’ picture.” Indeed, much of the film’s action focuses on the domestic sphere and the intimate, homey matters regularly dismissed as women’s work. But Stahl, like Hurst, uses domestic spaces to give audiences a closer perspective on such intimacies, employing the themes of interracial friendship and racial passing as metaphor and provocation.

All the issues of this film remain unresolved today. 

The thoroughgoing complexity and irreconcilability of Imitation of Life make it an essential American film. It grasps toward a confrontation with realities that many Americans still find dangerous yet difficult to name. Reading it with and against its early twentieth-century grain is likewise essential as we, nearly one hundred years after this version’s release, still struggle to define ourselves in the light of what gender, class, work, and especially race has meant to being American.

And for those of the MAGA crowd, I ask why you think America was so great then that you want a return instead of progressing into a more free future?

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