Imitation of Life
Tags: melodrama

Plot synopsis:
In 1947, widow Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) dreams of becoming a famous Broadway actress. Losing track of her young daughter Susie at the beach (portrayed as a child by Terry Burnham), she asks a stranger named Steve Archer (John Gavin) to help her find the girl. Susie is found and looked after by Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black single mother who also has a daughter, Sarah Jane (portrayed as a child by Karin Dicker), who is about Susie's age. Sarah Jane inherited her father's fair skin and can pass for white. She does this with fierce zeal and fervor, taking advantage of her European heritage and features. In return for Annie's kindness, Lora temporarily takes in Annie and her daughter. Annie persuades Lora to let her stay and look after the household, so that the widow can pursue an acting career.
With struggles along the way, Lora becomes a star of stage comedies, with Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) as her agent and David Edwards (Dan O'Herlihy) as her chief playwright. Although Lora had begun a relationship with Steve Archer, the stranger she met at the beach, their courtship falls apart because he does not want her to be a star. Lora's concentration on her career prevents her from spending time with her daughter, who sees more of Annie. Annie and Sarah Jane have their own problems, as Sarah Jane is struggling with her African-American identity and wants to pass for white because of its privileges in American society in the pre-civil rights era.
Eleven years later, in 1958, Lora is a highly regarded Broadway star living in a luxurious home in New York. Annie continues to live with her, serving as nanny, housekeeper, confidante and best friend. After rejecting David's latest script (and his marriage proposal), Lora takes a role in a dramatic play. At the show's after-party, she meets Steve, whom she has not seen in a decade. The two slowly begin rekindling their relationship, and Steve is reintroduced to Annie and the now-teenaged Susie (Sandra Dee) and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner). When Lora is signed to star in an Italian motion picture, she leaves Steve to watch after Susie. The teenager develops an unrequited crush on her mother's boyfriend.
Sarah Jane continues to pass as white and begins dating a white boy (Troy Donahue). He beats her in an alleyway after learning she is black. Some time later, she again passes for white to get a job performing at a seedy nightclub, but tells her mother she is working at the library. When Annie learns the truth, she goes to the club to claim her daughter; Sarah Jane is fired. Her rejection of her mother begins taking a physical and mental toll on Annie. When Lora returns from Italy, Sarah Jane has run away from home. She asks Steve to hire a detective to find her. The detective locates Sarah Jane in California, living as a white woman under an assumed name and working as a chorus girl. Annie, becoming weaker and more depressed by the day, flies out to California to see her daughter one last time and say goodbye.
Annie is bedridden upon her return to New York, and Lora and Susie look after her. The issue of Susie's crush on Steve becomes serious when Susie learns that Steve and Lora are to be married. Annie tells Lora of the girl's crush. After a confrontation with her mother, Susie decides to go away to school in Denver, Colorado, to forget about Steve. Not long after Susie leaves, Annie passes away. As she wished, Annie is given a lavish funeral in a large church, complete with a gospel choir, followed by an elaborate traditional funeral procession with brass band and horse-drawn hearse. Just before the procession sets off, Sarah Jane pushes through the crowd of mourners to throw herself upon her mother's casket, begging forgiveness. Lora takes Sarah Jane to their limousine to join her, Susie, and Steve as the procession slowly travels through the city.

Review: She finally finds her in the care of Annie Johnson, a black woman, and her very light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, who had been playing with Susie Before long Annie goes to work as a maid for Lora and the two women become fast friends Encouraged by an agent (Robert Alda), Lora gets a good role in a play by David Edwards In the years that follow, she becomes a successful Broadway actress and appears in one Edwards enormous hit But fame means work and work means neglecting Susie, now sixteen, who must bear the loneliness of a teenager whose mother is too busy being a star A handsome photographer, Steve Archer (John Gavin), is the resolute, admiring love of Lora's life but he too must wait and suffer for her affection Meanwhile, Annie has big problems with her daughter Sarah Jane rejects her race, and refuses to accept she is black She disclaims her mother to camouflage her ancestry and eventually takes a decision with extremely drastic effect"Imitation of Life" was an ideal tearjerker/soap opera for the major talents of Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner...
In Coney Island, the widow aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) finds her six-year-old daughter Susie playing with eight-year-old Sarah Jane, who is the daughter of the black homeless housekeeping Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore).
Meanwhile Sarah Jane run away home to work in fleshpots."Imitation of Life" is Douglas Sirk's last melodrama with an engaging and emotional story with romance, ambition, friendship, love and rejection.
She turns out quite a performance and I wonder why she didn't do more films.Sandra Dee as Ms. Turner's daughter is Sandra Dee playing a daughter -- you've seen it before.In the final scences when Susan Kohner's character does her "That's my momma..." piece you can hear sobs coming from the people in the audience...Do not be surprised if some of them are yours..
"Imitation of Life", Douglas Sirk's 1959 film starring Lana Turner and Juanita Moore, squarely fits into that last category.Lora Meredith (Turner) is a young widow, a single parent and struggling actress.
One day when she loses her young daughter Susie at the beach, and with the help of a photographer she encounters, Steve Archer (Gavin) she finds her with Annie Johnson (Moore), an African-American woman, and her own young daughter Sarah Jane.
She is continually scheming and running away in order to rid herself of her true heritage, which ends up literally breaking her mother's heart."Imitation of Life" is outwardly a very pretty film with gorgeous coloring, beautiful actors and costumes to die for.
Lana Turner, Sandra Dee, John Gavin, and of course, the teary eyed mama, Juanita Moore absolutely broke my heart with her pleas for love from her daughter.
This is an incredible movie that uses the best elements of soap opera, fashion, music and high drama to convey Sirk's scathing comments of 1950's society.The film revolves around mother/daughter relationships, with a hint of romance thrown in for good measure.
Meanwhile, Turner's black housekeeper(played gloriously by the underrated Juanita Moore)struggles with her own light-skinned daughter(Susan Kohner)who tries to pass for white.There is no element too small in this film for Sirk and producer Ross Hunter to give the ultra-dramatic treatment to.
When her daughter gets older, she tries to pass for white.The '59 version is done as a glossy soap opera - and why not, it stars Lana Turner in all her glamour and beauty and is directed by the master of this type of film, Douglas Sirk.
Sandra Dee plays Turner's daughter - great casting - and beautiful Susan Kohner is Moore's daughter, Sarah Jane.
John Gavin, Robert Alda, and Troy Donahue also appear in the film, Donahue in a nasty, small role and Gavin as Turner's love interest.One of the great tear-jerking melodramas of all time - a very different experience than the original - if you can see both, do so..
Not the glorious Lana Turner, nor the cutesy Sandra Dee, nor impossibly handsome and impossibly wooden John Gavin.You remember Juanita Moore's heartbreaking mother and Susan Kohner as her daughter.Watch the careful emotional builds in this brilliantly constructed film, from shallow soap opera to shattering climax.By the time we reach Mahalia Jackson rendering "Trouble of the World" for the glamorous cast, at Juanita Moore's funeral .
I sat riveted in front of my TV watching the Juanita Moore-Susan Kohner exchanges: "Why do you have to be my mother?"--"It's a sin to be ashamed of what you are." The pervasive racial unease of those times may be found in the life of Anatole Broyard, a black writer passing for white in New York's bohemian circles.
Okay, I want to get to the real stuff in a deep way, this means choosing a center, a point from which to view, and how deep and to make it a practice, otherwise we end up thrashing about in a sea of detail.I have made the choice for example to not bother with the socio- political stuff, issues of gender, race, class, it's not that they're unimportant it's that they don't go deep enough - so why this film is perhaps important in those regards I'll let others explain.I know a few things about aesthetics and the camera to see it's in the hands of someone who has taken care to color and create a great narrative space - perhaps not a master of coordinated sweep like Welles but visual just the same.
And for a film that is billed as a Lana Turner vehicle, the true star of these proceedings is the strong, yet angelic Juanita Moore."Imitation of Life" surrounds the tale of two mothers (one white and one black) whose relationships with their daughters is on the brink of destruction.
And Moore's daughter, played very well by Natalie Wood look-a-like Susan Kohner, struggles with her African-American heritage and blames her mother for preventing her from trying to pass as white.
In this second and best filmization of Fannie Hurst's classic tear-jerker, a woman(Lana Turner) aspires to an acting career and neglects her emotionally troubled daughter(Sandra Dee).
Lora's live-in black housekeeper, Annie (Juanita Moore), also a widow, is a kind-hearted, but stern woman, whose light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker), tries to pass herself off as white.
In the later movie, the leading female, played by Lana Turner, is an egocentric model looking for fame and limelight.In fact, when you get down to it, you end up sucked into the emotional drama of this 1959 "Imitation of Life" despite the superficial greed of the characters.
The civil-rights movement was not long underway in the States but this awkward attempted insight into prevalent racial attitudes so far misses the target as to, in my case anyway, excite a revulsion that was as unexpected as it was overpowering.The title sequence with an enticing screen-filling set of sparkling gems and Nat King Cole sound-alike title song hardly prepares for what follows with an unlikely meeting on Coney Island beach of poor struggling actress, widow Lana Turner and her peaches and cream young daughter Susie, encountering in short order the two stalwarts of her future life, aspiring photographer Steve, played by John Gavin and Negro single mother Annie (Juanita Moore) and her daughter, Sarah-Jane (Susan Kohner), a young girl with serious identity problems.From there it's a slightly rocky but none the less speedy road to the top of the theatrical tree for Turner as she uses,(by allowing them to think they're using her) firstly a sleazy agent and then a hit-comedy playwright whose mouthpiece she becomes in all his subsequent work.
More than all this though and the hub of the movie is the contrast in the respective mother-daughter relationships, Turner's well-meaning but long-distance love for her child, offset against the deep but blind devotion of Annie to her wild-child Sarah-Jane.I know this is all a big slice of Technicolour soap from the wonderfully expressionist palette of Douglas Sirk and true to form his cinematography is a wonder to behold, colours teeming on the screen, massive close-ups of his principals and beautiful interplay of shadow and light throughout.
Throw in some gratuitously offensive scenes like the one where Sarah-Jane caricatures Negro-slave characteristics in front of Turner's distinguished film company visitors and later on when her white boy-friend dumps her and beats her (to the incongruous soundtrack of a jazz percussion piece), again when her black background is revealed to him.Of course when old Annie expires of a broken heart due, by inference to Sarah-Jane's cold-hearted disowning of her (more likely the lifetime of servitude she gives to Turner and Susie), the scene is set for a three-hanky conclusion replete with almost a state funeral for Annie, pompous orchestral outpourings and a heavenly choir wailing away in the background.I've seen the recent Todd Haynes - Julianne Moore Sirk-homage "Far From Heaven" which of course benefited from the received wisdom of the hindsight of post-civil rights equality, but in this the original prototype, I still can't get those crass downright ugly scenes out of my head.
Fannie Hurst's tear jerking 1933 novel about the sacrifices mothers make for their daughters spawned two popular movies separated by a quarter century of glacially-changing social attitudes - a highly regarded 1934 version that remains faithful to the book's narrative and an elaborate 1959 remake which changes certain plot details to service German-born filmmaker Douglas Sirk's heavily Baroque style of film-making.
Both films maintain the same basic time-spanning storyline of two widows - one is a white woman who finds professional success but at a price that causes an unintended estrangement from her daughter, while the other is a black woman whose light-skinned daughter causes nothing but grief for all concerned.Produced by Ross Hunter with all his hold-no-expense lushness, the color 1959 film stars Lana Turner as ambitious aspiring actress Lora Meredith, who meets Annie Johnson accidentally when their daughters Susie and Sarah Jane get lost playing with each other at Coney Island.
Susan Kohner lends a Natalie Wood-like petulance as Sarah Jane, though the fact that she is a white actress undermines some of her credibility, even when she is brutalized by a racist boyfriend (played by a nasty Troy Donahue) in the film's most powerful scene.
This is given the 1950s glossy soap opera treatment, as is the film's other central story, in which Lana Turner gets it on with the cleft-chinned and stiff-backed John Gavin (whose hair is so Brill Cremed that it's actually BLUE).As he did with "All That Heaven Allows," Sirk manages to play up to his audience at the same time that he's lecturing them.
The greatness in this movie essentially lies in the two black characters.The scene at school when the young daughter is ashamed of her mother is unforgettable.As for Juanita Moore's funeral,it might be the most moving final a movie can have: a cast of thousands ,Mahalia Jackson,and the prodigal daughter who cries over her mother's coffin screaming "forgive me mama".Douglas Sirk gets away with the honors:such a tear-jerker screenplay could have been disastrous with any lesser talent.The Lana Turner/John Gavin affair is much more conventional and the story of the woman who prefers movie stardom (imitation of life?) to the warm love of a good man ("true" life?)has been told before.Besides,one can wonder where is the "true " life and where is the "imitation".You've got to be a real macho like Gavin's character to think that a woman was born to be a housewife.
Not to mention the acting- although I am not an immediate fan of Lana Turner she is great as the actress oblivious to the issues she faces but be prepared for a lot of delirious and melodramatic mood swings if you haven't seen the film yet, and Juanita Moore is excellent too, but Susan Kohner steals the show as the maid, the character I was most sympathetic to and Kohner did brilliantly carrying the second half of this film.Overall, excellent film, melodramatic it is but not in a bad way.
The relationship changes toward the second half of the film, and one may find oneself becoming angry at the Lana Turner character.Susan Kohner as Annie's daughter Sarah Jane, has a difficult role as the angry and confused daughter.
Sarah Jane refuses to be subservient and finally runs away from home.The entire ascent of Turner's career indeed seems rather shallow and trite, and yet Turner blithely walks through the film in her jewels and gowns, oblivious to the physical illness and family hardships of Annie, her supposed best friend.Sandra Dee, as Turner's daughter is the usual, rather one-dimensional character.
Both women are mothers and, ironically, it is the black mother-and-daughter storyline that is the most interesting and best remembered.Susan Kohner plays Ms Moore's light-skinned offspring, Sara Jane, determined to pass as white to the point of ditching her undeniably African-American mother.
"You've given me everything a mother could, but the thing I wanted most -- your love," Miss Dee shouts, much to Lana's anguish, proving that white women have tsuris, too; all the main characters in this film have been chasing illusions (the "imitations of life") that only bring them sorrow.
In reviewing movies featuring African-Americans in chronological order for Black History Month, we're now at 1959 when Juanita Moore appears in another filmed version of Imitation of Life.
While Ms. Moore steals every scene she's in through this version, her white acting cohort also catch up with her performance-wise especially the one who plays her light-skinned daughter, Susan Kohner who is half Mexican/half Czech in real life.
The 1959 version of "Imitation of Life" is an excellent tear jerker.Lana Turner (as Lora Meredith) and Juanita Moore (as Annie Johnson) are excellent as two women who are friends, despite their racial differences.
Second version of the Fannie Hurst book (previously filmed with Claudette Colbert in 1934) is a gloss-heavy production which takes actress Lana Turner from penniless single mom to lavishly-coiffed and gowned Broadway star; Sandra Dee plays her bitter, neglected daughter and John Gavin is Lana's eternal best friend.
Subplot with maid Juanita Moore and her troubles with rebellious daughter Susan Kohner (playing a black girl who hopes to pass as white) provides the emotional backbone of the story, and both ladies do superlative work.
Lana Turner has to be the most wooden performer since Charlie McCarthy, and Sandra Dee's gee-whiz mien makes me want to paste her one in the mush to shut her up.This film would have been much more interesting if it had followed the story of Annie Johnson and her daughter, Sarah Jane, without using Beautiful White People to prop the story up and make it "interesting" for the audience, who presumably wouldn't find the incredibly moving story of a young woman passing for white against the wishes of her mother, and the complexity that results in their relationship, absorbing enough on its own.Everything involving the Beautiful White People storyline has been done to death, in many other movies.
The film followed the relationship that developed between a struggling actress (Turner) and an unemployed black woman (Juanita Moore) and their daughters.
It's a well-crafted updating of the creaky Claudette Colbert version from 1934.And while Lana Turner, Sandra Dee, Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore do their best to target the female audience with their playing, there is always an artificiality to the whole film that reminds you that you are watching a rather well-crafted but typical woman's film that is designed to give the glamorous star an opportunity to wear beautiful clothes and act at the same time.There are many over-the-top episodes with the grandest one of all being the lavish funeral given Moore's character at the finale, finally giving her the dignity she never had in life.
That Turner's success as an actress seems as forced as her romance with daughter's love interest doesn't detract the soapy elements of IMITATION, but Susan Kohner, playing Sarah Jane all grown up, steals the show and is the only one who rises above the drivel that surrounds her, carrying a lot of the film's weight in its second half.
And of course Juanita Moore and Susan Koehner are excellent in the crux of the story, the loving black mother, housekeeper for Turner, whose more light-skinned daughter chooses to try to pass for white.
Basically aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) with 6-year-old daughter Susie (Terry Burnham), and homeless black woman Annie Johnson (Oscar and Golden Globe nominated Juanita Moore) with 8-year-old white daughter Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker), and their kids , meet each other at Coney Island beach, and soon enough move in together, Annie acting as maid to maintain her keep.
The film indeed deals with two different story lines, Lana Turner and her daughter trying to find material success, and Juanita Moore and her daughter trying to overcome a relational problem where a fair-skinned girl is ashamed of having a black-skinned mother.
Juanita Moore is heart-breaking as Annie Johnson, a devoted friend and loving mother whose heart is shattered when her frustrated, hurt and rebellious daughter, Sarah Jane (portrayed by the sultry and splendid Susan Kohner) discovers that her light-colored skin makes it easy for her to pass for white.
In terms of the movie's title, the mother has a true, loving life, her daughter Sarah Jane's is only an imitation of life.The other theme is the mother played by Turner.
Her daughter, who has passed for white, and could be argued was imitating Lana Turners characters, may have been following the wrong path.In Sirks most noteworthy films, Magnificent Obsession, All that Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, he is critiqueing American Values, and what values we should really have.
This is Sirk's intention to show the stereotypes themselves as ridiculous.The commentary really shows itself when the film focuses on the life of Sarah Jane, Annie's very light-skinned daughter, played by Susan Kohner.
There is also a subplot of Susie and Lora both being in love with the same man, but it is much less interesting than the relationship between Annie and Sarah Jane.Susan Kohner, who plays the older version of Sarah Jane, is the reason to watch this movie.