We often talk a bit flippantly about female movie stars past a certain age being consigned to “mum roles”: blandly supportive background figures who pop up merely to nag or nurture when required. “Mum” shouldn’t be a byword for mainstream cinema’s laziest, most ageist and least dimensional instincts when it comes to female characterisation; the best films about motherhood treat it as a state of being, not just as a balm for others.
Many of the so-called “women’s pictures” of Hollywood’s golden age hinged on complex, conflicted portrayals of motherhood. King Vidor’s excellent 1937 version of Stella Dallas (Amazon Prime Video) is the mother-daughter weepie to end them all, powered by Barbara Stanwyck’s wrenching performance as a working-class woman who gives up her daughter to ensure her a better life. Twenty-two years later, equivalent themes of personal sacrifice and class subversion merged with surprisingly sharp racial politics in Douglas Sirk’s magnificent Imitation of Life, in which a white woman and her black maid are bonded by fraught relationships with their respective daughters.
