As important as deeply felt emotion may be to a performer, there’s something disingenuous about the modern pedagogical tendency to devalue imitation, for we can find many instances in which movie actors, even naturalistic ones, are required to perform imitative tasks: depending on the situation, they can be called upon to mimic accents and physical signifiers of age, social class, gender, and sexuality; to deliberately emphasize conventional poses and gestures; to “act” for other characters in visibly artificial ways; to imitate models of “themselves” by repeating personal eccentricities from role to role; and to impersonate historical figures or other actors.
We need only think of film comedy, which often involves the foregrounding of stereotypical behavior and the mechanics of performance. Alec Guinness, a distinguished stage actor whose work in dramatic films depended upon minimalism and British reserve, was one of the most natural-looking performers in screen history, yet he performed in a manifestly imitative way when he played comedy rather than drama. As George Smiley, the leading character in the British television adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1989), Guinness is so quiet, so natural, so lacking in energetic movement and obvious emotion, that he makes the actors around him look like Dickensian caricatures; he reveals a repressed emotional intensity only when he makes slight adjustments of his eyeglasses and bowler hat. Contrast his performance in Alexander Mackendrick’s dark comedy The Ladykillers (1955): as the leader of a group of crooks who rent a room from a harmless little old lady, he wears comic buck teeth and sinister eye makeup, and his interactions with the landlady overflow with fake sincerity and oily sweetness. As Pudovkin might say, he portrays feelings so that the audience, if not the naïve old lady, can see his absurdly unconvincing act.
The burlesque comic Ed Wynn once distinguished between joke-telling clowns and comic actors. The first type, Wynn explained, says and does funny things, and the second type says and does things funnily. The distinction doesn’t quite hold, because comic actors sometimes also say or do funny things; even so, light-comic genres often depend upon performers who can execute ordinary movements and expressions in amusing ways, as if “quoting” conventions. Ernst Lubitsch’s Paramount musicals of the early 1930s are clear examples, requiring the actors to behave in a chic but visibly imitative style. In The Love Parade (1930), which employs a good deal of silent pantomime, Maurice Chevalier is cast as a Parisian playboy and military attaché to the unmarried and sexually yearning Queen of Sylvania, played by Jeanette MacDonald. When the two characters meet, their comically stiff formality soon dissolves into flirtation and then into a duet entitled “Anything to Please the Queen.” Throughout, their every intonation and expression is so heightened and intensified that there’s barely any difference between talking and singing. In the slightly later One Hour with You (1932), everyone poses, speaks, sings, and exchanges glances in this imitative fashion, heightened by moments of rhymed dialogue and direct address to the audience. Chevalier and MacDonald play a happily married couple whose relationship is threatened when the wife’s sexually promiscuous best friend (Genevieve Tobin) secretly decides to seduce the husband. In the first scene involving the three, Lubitsch creates a gallery of conventionally expressive close-ups and obvious displays of body language. MacDonald stands with her arm around Tobin and smiles in delight as she shows off Chevalier. “Look at him!” she says proudly, “Isn’t he darling?” In close-up, Chevalier looks down at the floor and gives an exaggeratedly modest, shy smile. Cut to Tobin, who slyly smiles and remarks, “I think he’s cute.” Cut to Chevalier, who becomes uncomfortable, squirming and frowning. MacDonald whispers something in Tobin’s ear while Tobin stares at Chevalier, clearly impressed. “Oh!” she says, eyes widening in surprise. Another close-up shows Chevalier, still frowning but looking more puzzled and concerned. MacDonald whispers again. “He can?” Tobin asks, looking Chevalier up and down in frank wonder and admiration. “Yes, he can!” says MacDonald proudly. In his next close-up, Chevalier is baffled and openmouthed. “Let’s see him do it!” Tobin cries in delight. MacDonald crosses to Chevalier and sweetly pleads, “Darling, look like an owl!”
Lubitsch’s nonmusical comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932) might seem different because it’s filled with Samson Raphaelson’s witty dialogue, but it, too, involves imitation. In an opening scene, Herbert Marshall stands in the moonlight on the balcony of a hotel in Venice, looking down at the Grand Canal as an obsequious waiter hovers behind his shoulder, addresses him as “Baron,” and offers to serve him:
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron, what shall we start with, Baron? | |
| BARON: | Hmm? Oh, yes. That’s not so easy. Beginnings are always difficult. | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron. | |
| BARON: | If Casanova suddenly turned out to be Romeo, having supper with Juliet, who might become Cleopatra, how would you start? | |
| WAITER: | I would start with cocktails. | |
| BARON: | Excellent. It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous. | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron. | |
| BARON: | And waiter? | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron? | |
| BARON: | You see that moon? | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron. | |
| BARON: | I want to see that moon in the champagne. | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron. (Writes.) Moon in champagne. | |
| BARON: | I want to see, umm. | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron? | |
| BARON: | And as for you, waiter . . . | |
| WAITER: | Yes, Baron? | |
| BARON: | I don’t want to see you at all. | |
| WAITER: | No, Baron. |
Amusing as the words are, the charm of the scene has as much to do with Marshall’s performance, which epitomizes the popular 1930s idea of ultracosmopolitan masculinity. His well-cut tuxedo, his slicked-back hair, and his elegant pose, with one hand holding a cigarette and the other in a jacket pocket, all create an air of sophistication befitting an advertisement in a luxury magazine. Marshall also speaks amusingly, in a plummy English accent, almost singing his lines in a tone of worldly, romantic melancholy. In keeping with the dialogue, he’s too good to be real. Indeed, we soon learn that he’s not a baron but a jewel thief, perfectly suited to a film in which almost all the characters are pretending or wearing social masks.
Another form of imitation can be seen when actors play characters that try to hide their true feelings from one another or that put on a comic or ironic act—something that inevitably occurs in films that have theater or playacting as a subject. Such films often make it difficult to distinguish truth from pretense. In All about Eve (1950), for example, Bette Davis plays an aging theatrical star threatened by the offstage machinations of an apparently naïve and worshipful young understudy, played by Anne Baxter. Baxter’s performance is cleverly balanced between innocence and gimlet-eyed guile, so that we glimpse just a hint of her deception even when it fools others. Discovered as a waif standing in the rain outside a theater, she’s invited into Davis’s dressing room, where the star’s director-husband and a famous playwright have gathered after the show. Humble and shy, she passionately praises Davis and flatters everyone else in the room, converting them into a hushed audience curious to hear the story of her life. Just as her story begins, Thelma Ritter, in the role of Davis’s dresser and maid, suddenly enters and briefly disturbs the expectant mood. After a pause, Baxter proceeds: she’s a poor farmer’s daughter from Wisconsin who has always loved theater but took a job as a secretary in a brewery to help support her family; there she met and married her husband, Eddie, who also loved theater. But World War II intervened, and Eddie was killed in the South Pacific. Since then, she’s been finding work wherever she can and attending Davis’s performances at every opportunity. She tells all this with an absence of self-pity and an idealistic, worshipful attitude toward the stage, where “the unreal seemed more real to me.” There are several clues that she’s giving a performance: she’s a bit too pretty and nicely made up, her voice is a bit too cultivated and melodic, and her story contains a few too many sentimental clichés. Even so, she