Question: Build a movie plot around this: On whose suggestion Bea sets up successful pancake flour corporation? Elmer Smith
Answer:
White widow Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and her toddler daughter Jessie (Juanita Quigley), take in black housekeeper Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) and her daughter Peola (Fredi Washington), whose fair complexion conceals her mixed-race ancestry. Bea exchanges room and board for work, although struggling to make ends meet. Delilah and Peola quickly become like family to Jessie and Bea. They particularly enjoy Delilah's pancakes, made from a special family recipe.Bea finds it difficult to make a living selling maple syrup, as her husband had done. Using her wiles to get a storefront on the busy Atlantic City boardwalk refurbished for practically nothing, she opens a pancake restaurant, where Delilah cooks in the front window. Five years later, Bea makes her last payment to the furniture man and is debt-free.Jessie (Marilyn Knowlden) and Peola have proven to be challenging children to raise: Jessie is demanding, not particularly studious, relying instead on her charm. She is the first person to call Peola "black" in a hurtful way, hinting that their childhood idyll is doomed. Peola does not tell her classmates at school that she is "colored" and is humiliated when her mother shows up one day, revealing her secret.Claudette ColbertLater, at the suggestion of a passerby, Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks), Bea sets up an even more successful pancake flour corporation, marketing Delilah as an Aunt Jemima-like product mascot. She offers Delilah a 20% interest in her family recipe, but childlike, Delilah refuses and continues to act as Bea's housekeeper and factotum, the shares held presumably in trust. Bea becomes wealthy from her business.Ten years later, the two older women are confronted with problems. Eighteen-year-old Jessie (Rochelle Hudson), home on college vacation, falls in love with her mother's boyfriend, Stephen Archer (Warren William), who is unaware at first of her affections. Meanwhile, Peola (Fredi Washington), seeking more opportunities in the segregated society, passes as white, identifying...