Juanita Moore in The Imitation of Life (1959) - Supporting Actress Sunday

Few things make my actressexual heart sing more than an actress taking the thinnest, most cliché-ridden kind of role and investing it with a charismatic, transcendent humanity. And this week offers one of the best examples of such actressing alchemy. Of course, I'm talking about the at once subtle and spectacular actressing performed by...

...Juanita Moore in The Imitation of Life (1959)
approximately 47 minutes and 14 seconds
42 scenes
roughly 38% of film's total running time

Juanita Moore plays Annie Johnson, a hard-working and giant-hearted woman whose fierce devotion to her young daughter's happiness impels incredible self-sacrifice.
When we first meet her, Moore's Annie is spending the day at the beach with her daughter Sarah Jane. There, they meet Lora Meredith (Lana Turner in a fascinating, strange performance) and her daughter Susie. As the two single mothers chat, Annie offers to be Lora's live-in maid for free, a ridiculous proposal that accrues a poignant urgency when it becomes clear that Annie and Sarah Jane are, in effect, homeless. Moved by their plight, Turner's Lora -- in what will be become a life-transforming gesture -- invites Annie and Sarah Jane to stay with Lora and Susie in their coldwater Brooklyn flat.
Moore's Annie wastes little time making herself indispensable to Lora. She cooks, cleans, babysits, even fends of debt-collectors. Moore's Annie thus quickly establishes herself as a necessary presence in Lora's life at the precise moment when Lora's career (she's a model/actress) starts to take off.
Moore's Annie does all of this work, in exchange only for room and board, ostensibly to provide greater happiness and opportunity for her fair-skinned but dark-tempered daughter, Sarah Jane. Indeed, in many ways, the role asks that Annie be the embodiment of "mother love" and Moore's performance develops this affect in all kinds of ways. Even Annie's infectious buoyancy of personal spirit only deflates when she worries about Sarah Jane's troubles, especially her daughter's self-loathing of her (and her mother's) blackness. This is not to say that Moore's Annie is merely an idealized type, a perfectly selfless "Mammy" who's also an ideally sacrificing "Mother." Juanita Moore does develop Annie according to such ideals, as the script demands, but Moore (in clear collaboration with director Douglas Sirk) also layer such ideals with human complexity. A passionately Christian woman, Annie measures herself according to the impossibly high standards of such ideals and, in Moore's performance, we see the personal costs of such self-sacrifice.
(My favorite moment in Moore's performance comes after she and John Gavin's Steve have spent the evening together addressing envelopes. Turner's Lora arrives home and Gavin's Steve turns his attention wholly toward her. In a brief flash, clearly staged by Sirk, Moore registers Annie's sad resignation that the pleasure of Steve's attentive company is not hers to claim. It's a startling, vivid yet subtle glimpse into Annie's personhood -- one that is quietly echoed throughout Moore's characterization.)
But the thrust of Annie's arc comes from the challenges she faces with her daughter, Sarah Jane.
The driving narrative conceit of The Imitation of Life derives from the fact that Sarah Jane is light enough to "pass" for white. Moreover, Sarah Jane craves the privileges and opportunites that accrue to whiteness and, even as a child, bitterly resents being denied those privileges by her mother (who insists both that her daughter remain truthful about who she is and that there is pride in being black). Sarah Jane's troubles, then, impel the various narrative threads exploring (through the fraught lens of mother daughter relationships) how much one should live for oneself and how much one should live for one's mother/daughter.
Annie lives for Sarah Jane (and for Susie, for Lora, and for many others too) and it's her story of selfless sacrifice that anchors the film.
Moore's tasks in the film veer from exuberant support to silent suffering.
Juanita Moore scores the emotional steps between such polarities carefully, always demonstrating Annie's ability to be of service to pretty much everyone without ever obscuring her defining commitment to the one thing that truly matters: cultivating her daughter Sarah Jane's pride in who she is.
In the second half of the narrative -- when Lora's a successful actress, when Susie's a sweet but sad teenager, and when Sarah Jane's an incorrigibly rebellious bad seed -- Annie remains as Annie has always been...just more tired. (Of course, Annie's exhaustion becomes ominous code for "she's gonna die" which ends up amplifying the urgency of her subsequent scenes.)
When Annie discovers that Sarah Jane has been lying about her "late shift" at the library, she also learns that not only has Sarah Jane taken a trashy "showgirl" gig but she has "passed" as white to do so. In the scene that follows, Moore charts the range of emotions that define Annie's character arc, beginning with her maternal fury at her child's inappropriate behavior...
which shifts to a desperate concern that she might lose her daughter...
that culminates in the devastating pain of the seemingly irreconcilable -- or incurable -- differences that separate them.
A less emotionally decadent director might have left it at with the daughter leaving as the ill mother collapses on the street. But Sirk takes things one additional level and, in so doing, collaborates with Juanita Moore to configure one more heart-stomping confrontation between Annie and Sarah Jane.
Having pursued Sarah Jane across the country to Los Angeles, Moore's Annie is nonetheless mortified to see her daughter again passing for white and dancing in a nightclub.
She follows Sarah Jane to her rented room and insists that they speak.
In this scene, Moore's Annie expresses her love for her daughter while affirming that she will do nothing to interfere with Sarah Jane's happiness, even going so far as to deny that she's Sarah Jane's mother. It's a brilliantly executed, emotionally shocking sequence -- anchored by the potent synergy between director and performer.
Then Moore's Annie goes home to die (but not before helping to rescue the mother-daughter connection between Lora and Susie and delivering an extended deathbed scene that would be hilarious if it weren't so so tenderly sad).
Moore inhabits this most familiar stock character -- the perfect "mammy" who's also the idealized "mommy" -- with an elevating, precise humanity. Throughout this remarkable film, Juanita Moore deftly adds resonant character details (that look at Steve, the blazingly ironic line "You never asked") to deliver a lucid, thoughtful and emotionally pungent performance. A radiantly humanizing characterization of a potentially negligible role.

Unofficial Female Film Canon

If you haven't already checked it out, you simply must peruse "The Unofficial Female Film Canon" recently posted at House of Mirth and Movies (via Bright Lights Film blog). While hardly comprehensive, it's a compelling, vast and diverse list.

And it certainly stirred me to thinking about which "female protagonist" movies would simply HAVE to be on mine. I suspect my first additions would be Within Our Gates, Maria Full of Grace, Caged and Hairspray (1988), though that's certainly only the beginning. But what say you, lovely reader? What films would be on your addenda to House of Mirth & Movie's "Female Film Canon"?

Shelley Winters in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) - Supporting Actress Sunday

Among the more difficult Supporting Actress performances to profile are those actresses who do what they do as members of an especially intricate ensemble. It's much simpler to track (and time) those performances where the supporting actress blows in, does her thing and leaves. Yet what drew me to this project in the first place were those actresses who were, as I like to say, doing most of their actressing from the edges of the scene. This week, we have a performance that does both: a handful of big attention clarifying sequences stitched together by intimate, ambient scenes in the background or at the edge of the camera's frame. What's more, it's the first Supporting Actress nomination (and win) for one of only two women to take home two Supporting Actress trophies in the category's 80+ year history. Of course, I'm talking about the career-transforming performance by...

...Shelley Winters in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
approximately 51 minutes and 51 seconds
27 scenes
roughly 30% of film's total running time

Shelley Winters plays Mrs. Petronella Van Daan, the privileged matron of the family that joins the Frank family as they all take refuge in an attic during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
Mrs. Van Daan is a privileged, cultured woman, who dotes on her son Peter (Richard Beymer in a surprisingly affecting performance) and who bickers ferociously with her husband Hans (Lou Jacobi also very good).
Where the Franks are prone to self-sacrifice, high principles and good grades, the Van Daans are a little less perfect, with Mr. Van Daan a creature of appetite, Mrs. Van Daan prone to vain fixations, and Peter a skilled daydreamer and thus middling student.
The forced intimacy of hiding impels these two very different clans to forge an almost familial relationship and the contrast between the two ratchets the narrative tension at nearly every turn. Although Peter seems first smitten with the elder Frank daughter Margot (a subtly effective Diane Baker), Winters's Mrs. Van Daan is the first to notice the chemistry stirred between her son and the younger Frank girl Anne (Millie Perkins, unremarkably adequate in the role, neither bad nor good and in a totally Hollywood kind of way).
The film (like the play upon which it is based) uses the historical character of Anne Frank -- age thirteen when the action of the narrative begins, approaching sixteen as it ends -- to craft a coming of age story. The film marks Anne's journey, undertaken within this cramped attic, as she blossoms from a precocious child into an inspiring young woman. For the first half of the story, Perkins's Anne is the catalyst for the characters around her, her childlike actions revealing each of the other character's deepest vulnerabilities.
For Winters's Mrs. Van Daan, Anne elicits a heightened awareness of her long lost girlhood -- both of being a much-desired young woman and of being the daughter of a man who only bought her "the finest things." Shelley Winters deftly marks how Anne's questions evoke both Mrs. Van Daan's most joyful and most painful emotions and, when the child carelessly spills milk on the woman's treasured fur coat, we see how Anne takes the blame for the difficult feelings her impetuous actions (as well as her mere presence) tend to instigate in the adults around her.
In this scene, as well as in several comparable "emotional set-pieces" that punctuate this claustrophobic narrative, Winters scores Mrs. Van Daan's abrupt transitions with clarity, twirling like a debutante in one moment and shrieking like a madwoman only a minute or so later.
Yet it's not in the character's showier moments that Winters's performance is most impressive; rather, it's in the many wordless, ambient moments that Shelley Winters really anchors both the role and the film as a whole.
Where Mrs. Frank (the extraordinary Gusti Huber) selflessly reins in her feelings most of the time, Shelley Winters's Mrs. Van Daan is guided by no such sense of emotional duty. Only the imperative of survival compels Mrs. Van Daan to repress her desire to rant, to wail, to shriek in terror and need. Throughout the performance, Shelley Winters both conveys and contains the vastness of Mrs. Van Daan's private, terrorized hysteria in ways big and small, loud and quiet, rational and irrational.
I also see a kind of actressing "bravery" going on in Shelley Winters's work in the role of Mrs. Van Daan, one that might be somewhat difficult to discern today if only because it's become so conventional (both in terms of what Oscar-bait performances now "look" like and also in the retrospective context of Winters's subsequent career).
Winters's performance here is remarkable for its lack of vanity -- she often looks just awful -- causing me to think of hers as among the first trophy-snagging performances by "de-glammed" actresses. (Remember that, throughout the 1950s, Shelley Winters was among Hollywood's most well-regarded sexpots and that Elizabeth Taylor's Martha was still a few years off. Remember too that the only two members of the Anne Frank ensemble to receive acting nominations were Winters and Ed Wynn, the project's most recognizable performers each playing way out of what was then their usual "type.")
Winters seems comparably unafraid to let Mrs. Van Daan look bad in emotional terms as well. Winters does not flinch from the characters shrillness, shallowness or selfishishness. Nor does she dodge Petronella Van Daan's petty, reactive and defensive pride. In so doing, though, Winters also lays the necessary foundation for the final emotional explosion to rock the tiny attic.
When Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing bread in the night, Mrs. Frank demands that the Van Daans leave immediately. Winters's work in this sequence is great. She begins by registering Mrs. Van Daan's most unguarded moment of sadness, a weary despair at what her life has become.
In the moments that follow, Winters's Mrs. Van Daan pleads for her friend's sympathy, before shamelessly begging for forgiveness, as she's pulled by her husband's pride up the stairs to pack. Winters's work here opens the ways in which Mrs. Van Daan, neither an especially strong or proactive person, expresses her instinct to survive and protect those she loves. In such moments, I see the respect Winters has for her character, a regard that possibly exceeds that scripted by the piece itself (which almost cynically exploits "ignoble" characters like Mrs. Van Daan to stir drama within an essentially static situtation).
As the final tableau dissolves in smoke, Winters's performance permits me to recall Mrs. Van Daan (and, by extension, Mrs. August Van Pels upon whom the character was very loosely based) not only as a character but as a human person who met an incomprehensible fate. Such is Shelley Winters's accomplishment in the role.
Shelley Winters takes this most showy and device-laden character and, avoiding camp, makes Mrs. Van Daan indelibly, memorably human. It's not as easy as it looks and, in The Diary of Anne Frank, Shelley Winters makes everything feel incredibly -- and terrifyingly -- real.

Thursday Morning Meditation: Try the Anus

Might have made more sense to post this yesterday, but whatever.
The photo below was sent to me by a friend who wrote:

"A couple months ago Lucky and I were returning home from a movie and as we passed McDonald's we couldn't believe our eyes! We were so shocked by what we saw and started laughing so hard that we drove straight to my house, got my camera, and returned back to take this photo!!"

As they say, don't knock it 'til...
(And for those who aren't up on recent trends in fine dining, click here for clarity.)

Supporting Actress Sundays for APRIL'09: 1959

The FIRST month of Supporting Actress Sundays in my FOURTH year of the project begins THIS week, with attention devoted to...

1959

Oscar's Supporting Actresses for 1959 are:

Hermione Baddely in Room at the Top
Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life
Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life
Thelma Ritter in Pillow Talk
Shelley Winters in The Diary of Anne Frank

Supporting Actress Smackdown for 1959:
Sunday, April 26.
Featuring a truly fabu Smackdown panel, including:
Alex, Ortzi, Ken, Brad and one or two others who have yet to volunteer.
If only I had a clue who they might be...
Any ideas?

(If you have a blog, are able to re/screen this month's movies, and want to join the Smackdowning fun, please email StinkyLulu asap! ALSO: if you've already expressed interest in participating in an upcoming month -- 1992 in May or 1983 in June -- please remind me. I've become somewhat confused with all the tie-breakingness and all.)