Rent Imitation of Life (1959)

Powerful Soap. - Imitation of Life review by Steve

Douglas Sirk's final American film is his best. It's a remake of the old Fannie Hurst best seller, revised for the era of black civil rights. Lana Turner becomes a big Broadway star while behind the scenes, Juanita Moore brings up both their daughters. The only way they can be together for mutual benefit, is for Juanita to act as the black maid, even though she isn't paid.

While bringing up the actor's child (Sandra Dee), she suffers the agonies of her own (Susan Kohler) who finds she can 'pass for white'. But this is a mirage. The reality is that her race will always limit her freedom. It is brilliantly acted, particularly by Moore as the black mother for whom American apartheid has been a lifelong trauma. This sounds like a soap. And it is, to a point.

 But the story suddenly mutates. Lana comments that she never knew Juanita had friends, and the 'maid' replies: 'You never asked'. And then the film becomes an overwhelming demonstration of the invisibility of black American lives in '50s America. This is a symphony of emotion conducted by Sirk to a conclusion which is so moving it is painful.

It has the opulence and glamour typical of Sirk's Universal melodramas. Lana wears a lot of fabulous gowns and diamonds in picture perfect domesticity. But never before has he exposed a sickness in American life with such passion. It is both subtle, yet operatic. It's a heartbreaker, but without the fundamental realism, it would be too much. It never falters. It is an extraordinary experience.

Deathly Struggles - Imitation of Life review by CH

An early struggle, boarding houses and all, brought Fannie Hurst material for novels and stories which made her so famous that there was even a market for a memoir, with recipes, of her dieting while the public was also eager for news of her greedy dogs. What's more, all this led to three-dozen films, including two versions of Imitation of Life (as well as a late-Forties Mexican incarnation).

The more subtle of these, with Claudette Colbert, was made soon after the novel appeared in 1933. Better known is the one with Lana Turner a quarter of a century later. In which time, colour had come to the fore - and was never so vivid as in the Fifties work by director Douglas Sirk who, after a varied career in Europe and America, found a whole new subject in this late flourish as a chronicler of suburban American life.

In this take on the story in which two single women - one white, one black - come to share a minuscule downtown flat while bringing up a child apiece, Lana Turner is a stage aspirant who, with success, takes that ad hoc maid (the inspired Juanita Moore) to her series of greater houses. What do their daughters make of this and the parade of men who find a place in a tumultuous narrative? The plot turns upon that, teenage angst exacerbated by an attempted "passing" as white which provokes a sidewalk fight scene with music suddenly redolent of West Side Story.

Summary makes it all sound as clumsy as it it undoubtedly is, never more so than the turn which reveals that the hard-pressed maid had been salting away sufficient money for a funeral which somehow includes a solo turn by Mahalia Jackson herself and, from nowhere, a crowd which the police struggle to keep on the sidewalk as four white horses pull away the black carriage and coffin. For all that, one cannot help be involved, there is so much to savour even if one's taste is more to return to the 1934 version (and watch again Humoresque, that wonderfully preposterous noir which turns around a violin and also sprang from the pen of Fannie Hurst).

Imitation of Life was Sirk's last film although he lived another three decades. In that time, and beyond, his reputation turned from that a man who had worked with whatever material came to hand (both Chekhov and Fannie Hurst) to a savant and auteur. Better perhaps to appreciate him as a man who dealt in both superior entertainment and such clunkers as, from Faulkner, The Tarnished Angels.