Douglas Sirk’s last Hollywood film is a glossy Broadway weepie with a much harder film about a black housekeeper and her light-skinned daughter running underneath it. Lana Turner’s half is thin; Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner’s half is the reason it has lasted.
Coney Island, the summer of 1947. Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a widow who has come to New York to act, has lost her small daughter on the beach. She finds Susie (Terry Burnham) under the boardwalk in the care of Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), another widow, whose own girl Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker) is playing beside her. A photographer, Steve Archer (John Gavin), takes their picture. By nightfall Annie and Sarah Jane have moved into Lora’s cold-water flat, Annie keeping house for a bed and no wages. Douglas Sirk’s last Hollywood film, a remake of the 1934 picture from Fannie Hurst’s novel, starts from that accident and follows the household for ten years.
We think it is a fine film and an odd one. It is two pictures in one frame. Lora’s is the glossy one: the agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) who expects payment in more than commission, the playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) who gives her a part, the staircase, the gowns, the telegrams. Annie’s happens in kitchens and doorways at the edge of Lora’s scenes, and it is the one that matters. Sirk knows which of the two we have paid to watch, and keeps drifting the camera to the other.
Sarah Jane is light-skinned enough to pass for white, and at eight she has already decided to. Karin Dicker plays her as a child who has worked out how the world is arranged. She refuses the black doll Susie offers her. She tells the class her mother is somebody else. Then Annie turns up at school on a wet afternoon with a raincoat and galoshes, and the teacher says there must be some mistake, there is no coloured child here. It moved us more than we expected, and not because of the girl running out into the rain. It was Moore in the doorway with the little coat over her arm, understanding in about two seconds what her daughter has been doing and deciding, for now, to say nothing.
Russell Metty photographs it in colours no real room has ever had. Lora’s flat is the yellow of a paperback; her later house has a white staircase wide enough for a musical and mirrors in which people talk to reflections rather than to each other. Frank Skinner’s score, with Henry Mancini also credited, swells on cue every time, and Milton Carruth cuts to the tear before it falls. Sirk had made All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind in the same manner, and the title tells you what the manner is for: everything Lora acquires is shown to us as a shop window. You may find that cold. We found it cold and then, about an hour in, found it working.
Juanita Moore is the reason to see it. She plays Annie almost without raising her voice, as a woman who knows more than anyone in the house and has learned not to show it. Susan Kohner takes over Sarah Jane at eighteen and gives her a hard, bright, frightened surface; her scenes with Moore are the best in the film and we will not say where they lead.
The rest is weaker, and much of it is Lana Turner. She is playing a woman who cannot stop performing, and in her scenes with John Gavin’s Steve it is hard to tell the character’s acting from the actress’s. Gavin is handsome and immovable and asked to be nothing else. Sandra Dee’s Susie at sixteen is handed a storyline in the last third whose purpose we could see and did not believe for a minute. One reviewer in 1959 dismissed the whole thing as a tear-jerker, and on the evidence of Lora’s half we would not argue very hard. Most critics since have come round to it, and so have we.
The last quarter of an hour is famous and we will not describe it. It is staged on a scale the rest of the film has been saving up for, and we cried in a way we slightly resented and then stopped resenting. At 125 minutes the film is patient about getting there. Watch it with someone who thinks old Hollywood melodramas are safe, and see how long they last.
