"Imitation of Life” Is Recommended Film

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 84, 10 April 1935, Page 5

"Imitation of Life” Is Recommended Film

CLAUDETTE COLBERT IS ABLY SUPPORTED BY NED SPARKS

(Regent: Screening Saturday.) What does a woman call success in life? When a question like that strikes the mind of a writer like Fannie Hurst the result is very likely to he a novel that will set hundreds-of thousands of people thinking. . Her answer to the success question was written in the 552 pages of “Imitation of Life” which Universal has made into a motion picture, with Claudette Colbert starred.

There is an interesting story behind this novel'and its strange and provocative title 'which will give an idea how an author brings a literary creation into being. Early in 1931, Miss Hurst was troubled. There was a great theme for a novel in the back of her head but. it would not come clear. What indefinite shape it had was in the form of a success story. The author had already treated that theme in two previous novels, “Five and Ten” and “A President is Born.” But each of these books had been about self-made men. Not? she wanted to write about a self-made woman. The problem was what kind ot a woman to centre the story on. Miss Hurst had long considered the role that woman plays in the modern world the most exciting subject for an author, especially a woman author, of any that presents itself to-day. Women had become doctors, lawyers, politicians. They were active in business. What-were the Teal thoughts in the minds of these successful women. Were they able to absorb themselves in business affairs during the business day, or, as Miss Hurst wrote in a letter to her publishers, was it always “still sex o’clock” with them. Her answer came to her unexpectedly. In the daily papers of that time appeared the story of an amazing woman who from virtually nothing had built up a chain of food shops which brought her great wealth and social eminence. In these news articles, Miss Hurst had found tho character to build her story around. She sensed a missing element in this brilliant career and set to work to bring it out in a novel. More than a year later her publishers, Harper, received the manuscript of “Imitation of Life” which told the story of one of the most appealing characters the novelist has as yet created, Boa Pullman. Bea Pullman is a young woman who after tho death of her husband, whom she has never Teally loved, sets out to support her little daughter and herself by selling maple syrup from door to door. With tho help of a coloured woman she opens a little pancake shop and later makes a fortnne by boxing the pancake flour and selling it. Then real love enters her life, but her daughter is then grown and an unusual triangle situation develops. Bea realises that success and fame do not constitute real living, that it has all been an imitation of life until love came.

Ia “Imitation of Life," Warren William who played Caesar to Claudette Colbert's Cleopatra in the recent film of that title, is with her again. John M. Stahl, who directed Universal’s previous Fannie Hurst success, “Bach Street,” directed “Imitation of Life," expending fourteen weeks of steady filming in the process of production. Claudette Colbert is seen as a very energetic and modern young business woman in her latest screen play. Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Flour, with its sales mounting to millions of boxes per year, is the product which brings fame and fortune to the fascinating Claudette, who is here seen in a role decidedly different from anything she has ever attempted before.