Imitation of Life wallows in excess. There's just "too much" of everything: too much emotion, too much conflict, too much suffering, too much super-saturated color -- at times, the screen looks like an open wound. The acting is hyperbolic and, in the last half hour, when there is a sort of morbid triumphal procession, a death bed scene, and garish night-club imagery coupled with huge, expressive close-ups the picture slips into a sort of excited delirium. In the opening scenes in which a little girl is lost at Coney Island, the establishing shots feature a hundred-thousand bathers crowded into the image with a thousand embedded in brilliantly blue ocean. (The sequence is so grandiose that the director, Douglas Sirk, can't sustain it -- after these spectacular establishing shots, Sirk has to use rear-projection to isolate his characters from the throng.) Shots are punctuated with flares of brilliant red and the leading lady wears elaborate garments with pearls and diamonds. Even when she is supposed to be poor and struggling, the heroine's platinum blonde hair is done up in a metallic coiffure that makes her skull look like its wearing the Sydney Opera House. The movie is relentless. When a teenage boy angrily confronts his girlfriend about her racial identity, he doesn't just sneer and sulk, but, instead beats her bloody, slapping her so in hard that she ricochets across the street and, then, viciously hitting her again and again until she falls into a gruesome pool of slime underfoot. Her face is hidden behind gouts of blood. There are no quiet moments in the picture -- if the plot isn't spinning melodramatically out of control, the decor and set decoration bellow at you. It' bullying, like being screamed-at for two hours. I suppose it's an accomplishment to maintain this level of wild expressionistic hysteria. The subject matter is fundamentally unpleasant and it's creepy to have this stuff howled in your face. But this picture is a classic of its kind and worth seeing and the subject matter -- the film is largely about race relations in this country -- is by no means inconsequential.
Imitation of Life in its 1959 version is an adaptation of bestseller by Fannie Hurst, previously made into an estimable movie in 1934. The two adaptations differ markedly with racial themes predominating in the earlier picture (starring Claudette Colbert): the theme of the young woman who can "pass" as White has always been alarming to Hollywood censors at Hayes Office -- such a character is said to imply miscegenation, something forbidden in the thirties and problematic when Sirk made his much more glamorous and upscale version of the story in 1959. It is interesting that the 1934 picture casts an African-American actress, Fredi Washington, in the role of the girl who can pass for White; Hollywood was less bold in 1959 -- that role is played Susan Kohner, an actress with a Latino background. In the later picture, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an ambitious and, somewhat, haughty blonde, who yearns to become an actress. Lora is a widow with a young daughter and an important element in the film is the suggestion that she is too old to play ingenue roles -- in fact, she admits to having "lost five years" raising her daughter. At Coney Island, Lora's daughter Susie goes missing. Susie has been playing with a slightly older child, Sarah, the daughter of a Black woman named Annie. Lora and Annie meet, their encounter also including a "meet cute" with Lora's love interest throughout the film, the aspiring art-photographer, Steve Archer. Lora and Annie are both struggling financially -- Lora is behind on her rent and payments to the milkman; Annie and her daughter are homeless. After some initial reservations, the two women agree to pool their resources and live together in Lora's cramped flat. Lora hikes around Manhattan trying to find modeling jobs. After much hardship (which includes repelling the sexual advances of Lora's smarmy agent), she achieves success and becomes a famous Broadway actress. At her school, Annie's daughter is "passing" as White; she is appalled and ashamed when her mother comes to school. Little Sarah refuses to play with Black dolls and asserts that she is "White". Annie doesn't think it is prudent to Sarah for pass as White but admits that it pains her to know that she gave birth to her daughter "only to have her hurt" -- obviously, she is ambivalent about her daughter's light complexion and the advantages it confers upon her.
Lora pursues her career in theater aggressively, cuts off her relationship with the poor photographer, Steve, and, ultimately, marries a famous playwright. After ten years or so, Lora breaks with the playwright -- he wants her to continue playing leading roles in his comedies; she wants to be recognized for serious theater. She renews her relationship with Steve whom she has always loved. Sarah has a love affair with a White boy. When the boy learns that she has a Black mother, he calls her a "nigger" and beats her up. Sarah, then, tells the noble and long-suffering Annie that if they ever meet on the street she is not to admit knowing her. Then, she runs away from home. (Annie tracks her to a dive bar where she is employed as a singer -- in fact, Sarah is very good and seems to have real talent.) Lora's relationship with Steve is again hampered by her ambition. She has to go to Italy to shoot a film with an Italian director who is clearly intended to be Federico Fellini. Lora asks Steve to watch over Susie who is now a senior in High School. Steve is kind and sophisticated and Susie falls in love with him. When Lora gets back from Italy, mother and daughter clash over Steve. Susie realizes that Steve loves her mother and, so, she plans to depart for college in Denver -- Lora lives in an elaborate modernist house, seemingly in Connecticut; she has stables and thoroughbred horses. By this point, Annie is dying. She flies to LA to see her daughter performing in an glitzy night-club act. Again, Sarah repudiates her mother. Annie returns to Connecticut where she dies. Annie has planned an elaborate funeral and the final fifteen minutes or so of the film involve her obsequies -- a spectacular service in which Mahalia Jackson sings majestically, then, followed by a procession along the city streets in Manhattan with a marching band and four white horses pulling a Victorian hearse in which Annie's casket is displayed like a particularly luscious wedding cake. Sarah appears on the street, throws herself through the police cordon, and cries out that the dead woman was her mother. The family is reunited in a limousine with Steve and Lora together again and Sarah and Susie weeping in one another's arms.
The movie is full of startling effects. In the dive bar scene, hideous patrons (they look caricatures from a Goya or Bosch painting) occupy the foreground while the glamorous Sarah taunts them seductively. In a later night club scene, Sarah, as a show girl, does an elaborate dance, half-naked and miming that she is opening champagne, on a huge gaudy turntable. The house in Connecticut is full of angular white balustrades and austere,clinical-looking stairwells. Characters are trapped in geometric cages. Annie watches her daughter perform in the clubs from behind baroque scrolls of ornamental iron. Hallways and bed chambers are militant (and suggestive) with big phallic beams and posts. The funeral scene involving all the characters in film (including the milkman whom Annie has sweet-talked in any early scene) is disproportionately lavish -- it's like the funeral for a head-of-state with Mahalia Jackson operatically singing over dark-suited congregants and ranks of lodge members, dignified Black gents with dark shirts ornamented with metals and ribbons. The funeral demonstrates that the most notable person in our society is the least appreciated -- the humble, kind, hardworking, and efficient colored maid. The suggestion is that presidents and movie stars and captains of industry are all well and good, but that the true laurels for achievement must be awarded to people like Annie, good and loyal servants. This is really the only way the spectacular funeral scenes can be interpreted. The point, I think, is that we don't know who is truly important in our society -- there may be classes of persons in our world upon whom everything depends but we don't know anything about them. At one point, Lora muses with Annie that, perhaps, no one will come to her funeral. Annie replies that she knows hundreds of people Lora can't believe this is possible. "Who do you know?" Annie replies: "Members of my Baptist church and I'm a member of many lodges and societies." Lora is surprised: "I didn't know." Annie replies: "Well, you never asked."
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