why trash on Miss Lora?

remember ,who confronted Miss Lora at the beach that she had no place to go...I agree with what you are saying, but Miss Lora was the one who offered to put her up for the night. Annie was the one who ironed her clothes and finished mailing those personalized letters for her.......Miss Lora never expected Annie to do that

I think Annie has the means to be able to have her own place, but since Miss Lora was never around, and Annie was more of a mother to Suzie than Miss Lora, the arrangement was perfect for both of them

Sarah Jane and her need to be white took enough out on Annie . Annie was getting old and tired. Miss Lora was self absorbed, she didnt think about Suzie or any of her problems she had going on with Mike........

I just think everyone benefited in the movie, expect for Sarah Jane. I think it is a sad thing that Sarah Jane never showed any emotion towards her mother ,until the funeral.

Well said. I didn't think of Lora's story being a distraction. Interesting thought. But I will say Lora did the best that she could by Annie considering that they were living in pre-civil right's era (the 50's).

You're seriously comparing the relationships in modern, post-Civil Rights Movement movies with those of a 1950s movie? You do realize that modern attitudes are far--far-different from those in 1959, surely.

I also don't think you've had much contact with the kind of people who employ maids, either. Not knowing anything about the help is entirely likely with them. They rarely know about their help, even if the help lives with them.

Look, if you have a maid, you're usually too busy with your own life to notice the servants. You wouldn't have help if you had the time and energy to do it yourself, after all. What's really interesting is that the richer the employer is, the more they expect the help to be unobtrusive to the point of being almost faceless and anonymous, and guess how they end up being treated.

I grew up with maids, and I even had a real live Mammy when I was a child. The only one I ever knew anything about was my Mammy, and that was only because she was indeed more like a mother to me than my own mother. My working mother didn't know the things about her that I did.

Later, I knew nothing about the maids we hired to take care of our house, other than their names. I was too busy with school and my extracurricular activities to know anything more about them. Maybe--maybe--if I stayed home sick when they happened to be working, I'd learn something interesting, like how one of them liked to read True Confessions magazine when she took a coffee break. But that didn't happen very often. Usually, they gave nothing of themselves away to any of us, although they were perfectly nice and friendly whenever we did interact. The maids didn't hang around at the end of the day, socializing with us, either. When they finished their work, they went home. As much as we treated them like employees, they treated us like employers by breaking the sound barrier to get away from work as soon as their time was up, just like anyone else with a job does.

With my far wealthier friends who had live-in help, they didn't know much more about their maids than I did about mine. None of them ever ventured into the maid quarters at all, or even talked to them, other than to tell a maid not to disturb this or that, or to be sure to do this or that. In fact, one of them told me that her parents had a firm rule that if the maid went in her room and shut the door, she was not to be disturbed unless there was an emergency. Nearly all rich people and their live-in employees were firm that way about drawing the line between when the help was working, and when their time was their own, or there was nothing but trouble.

So on top of this employer/employee dynamic that is entirely realistic, throw in how Lora is an actress, with a career notorious for both its self-centeredness and its heavy time demands, then pile on the racial dimension of the film, made at its particular time--when black and white rarely associated outside of their required interactions, and Lora knowing nothing about her maid is more true to real life you realize. It's a shockingly honest moment in American film-making about how clueless the privileged can be.

I will guarantee you that everyone involved in this film knew someone who had said something similar about their help, at some point: No idea the servant had friends outside of the home, no idea the servant could paint or had read all of the novels of Dumas or what have you. This attitude was frightfully common in my youth during the 60s, and is still true through to today. I not only saw it happen more than once when I was growing up, but also was guilty of saying something like it when I saw the maid reading True Confessions.

That's how clueless people with maids can be.

Well another way Miss Lora shows employer/employee relations is when she ask Sara Jane about the Harkins boy who's father was a driver.
Based on that one would think Sara Jane should only go out with sons of drivers, butlers, cooks etc.

Another problem SJ looking white and going with a black guy, most people would think it was an interracial relationship which was just not done back then.
Trust me on that one I was 12 when IOL came out.

How is that not racism? Racism is a very complicated pattern of thinking. It's not just rednecks in the woods wearing white hoods screaming the N word or overt mistreatment of minorities. Sometimes it can be on a very subconscious level like Lora. She considered Annie her best friend but she knew virtually nothing about her. How is that being a friend?

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.

sweet

thank you....again, Im not saying that Annie hated her job, she was fine with the job, it was just her ungrateful daughter Sarah Jane.......SJ was a very selfish , self absorbed , uncaring and ungrateful daughter. The whole movie pointed out that SJ had high hopes of being a star and ended up in strip joints , going out with losers..........remember when Annie showed up and pretended to be SJ mammie, according to the room mate of SJ?

I hope SJ is happy now, after all, I hold her personally responsible for killing her mother.......and don't let anyone kid you.......if SJ didnt kill her mother, then please explain to me that scene at the funeral

Guilt......yes, guilt with a capital G............