Released in 1959, "Imitation of Life" was director Douglas Sirk's final Hollywood movie.

Sirk's films from the 1950s are almost instantly recognisable - they have a unique cinematography which gives rich, lush colour and atmospheric lighting. They are also invariably so-called "women's pictures" and for a long time his melodramas were dismissed as mere soap operas by critics.

His work was reassessed in the 1970s and I recall seeing "Written on the Wind" when I was a teenager and being struck at the drama he got in his films - both from the actors and from the cinematographers.

Filmed in 1958, "Imitation of Life" starred Lana Turner, cast by producer Ross Hunter, to take advantage of her notoriety following the killing of her lover, Johnny Stompanato by her daughter Cheryl. It was an inspired choice and it gave Turner the biggest box office hit of her career.

The Plot

Turner plays Lora Meredith, a widowed mother to five year old Suzie. The film opens on a summer day in 1947 in Coney Island in New York, with Lora desperately looking for Suzie on the crowded beach.

Lora, with the help of a photographer named Steve Archer, finds Suzie, playing with a young girl called Sarah Jane and a black woman named Annie. Lora assumes that Annie is Sarah Jane's nanny because Sarah Jane can pass for white, but to Lora's hidden surprise, Annie is in fact her mother. When Lora learns that widowed Annie and Sarah Jane have nowhere to go, she invites them home to stay in her apartment for one night but Annie settles in and becomes Lora's unpaid maid whilst Lora searches for her big break as an actress.

Lora becomes blinded by ambition, rebutting the love of Steve Archer for fame and fortune on Broadway and the story neatly moves forward to 1958 once Lora has found success as an actress. Suzie is now 16 and Sarah Jane 18, and their relationships with their mothers becomes the main focus of the movie.

From an early age Sarah Jane resents the colour of her mother's skin and wants to rebel against the restrictions placed on her by society at the time. She uses her light skin to her advantage as much as possible, upsetting her mother in the process.

The Performances

Turner plays Lora as one would expect her to play her. Turner was a huge movie star but never an outstanding actress. Her best performance was in "The Postman Always Rings Twice", in which she smouldered fantastically and looked stunning. Here she looks older but incredibly stylish. Hunter ensured the budget for jewels and costumes for Turner in this film was immense - over $1 million to be precise. She looks impeccable in most scenes and some the jewellery she wears is eye popping in its extravagance.

Annie is played by Juanita Moore, who deftly steals the movie from Turner. Annie knows her place and has a heart of gold. She cannot understand why Sarah Jane would wish to deny her race and what she is. She is loyal to Lora at all times but is closer to Suzie, who is frequently left in her care while her mother appears in plays and makes movies.

Suzie is played by Sandra Dee, who was actually only 14 when she made this film. Dee's official age at the time was 16 but her archetypal stage mother had lied about her age when Dee was younger to get her work. Dee looks painfully young here and sounds it too, but this is probably her best remembered role from a film career that shone very brightly for a few short years in the late 1950s and early 1960s before fizzling out as she was gripped by alcoholism, depression and anorexia.

Dee, like Turner, was a movie star rather than an actress but she copes well playing the 16 year old Suzie who wants nothing more than to spend some time with an all too absent mother. She has a beautifully expressive face with wide eyes that can speak volumes.

Sarah Jane, played by Susan Kohner, is the strongest characterisation in the film. She resents having to play second fiddle to blonde Suzie and is embarrassed by the colour of her mother's skin. Kohner could have made Sarah Jane an unsympathetic character but she puts in an astonishing performance as a young girl who both loves her mother deeply and is yet held back and ashamed of her. Her performance is emotional, yet touching and she was nominated for an Academy Award for the part.

John Gavin plays Steve Archer, Turner's main love interest nicely - but this is a womens' film and the strongest roles belong to them. Robert Alda does a nice turn as a sleazy agent and Dan O'Herilhy plays a playwright who guides Lora to stardom, and loves her too. Lastly, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson puts in an unforgettable performance singing "Trouble of the World" in a scene that never fails to move me to tears.

My Opinion

I adore this film and have done for many years. Yes, its soap opera - I would imagine many TV soap opera directors have poured over Sirk's work to see how it is done - but it also contains important messages about race relations at the time and how many people were beginning to rebel against the conformist, almost stereotypical roles African Americans were expected to play then and the racism that was predominent at the time.

Sirk's direction is fantastic, subversive even - he and Hunter clearly pandered to Turner's star status by giving her the most scenes, the best costumes and the finest jewels, but the best scenes belong to Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner - Sirk really brings the best out of them, allowing them to give outstanding performances.

Yes, this film is dated now - it is based on a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst and is actually a remake of a 1934 film version starring Claudette Colbert, which sadly I have never seen. The "n" word is used, which seems quite shocking today, and some of the racism seems particularly casual. Sirk very cleverly shows the white characters acting as if Annie were invisible when she is preparing drinks or food for them, reiterating how casual the racism is.

Sarah Jane's chances of work rest on her employers not discovering she is black, and while Lora and Suzie both accept Annie and Sarah Jane to their family happily, the subject of race is discussed simplistically between the four of them but in a far more complex manner between Annie and Sarah Jane themselves.

Annie herself can see the way of the world and part of her big heart goes out to her daughter in one scene where she tells Lora "how do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?" and it is said in a fatalistic manner that no white person could truly understand.

It's too easy to dismiss "Imitation of Life" as a mere melodrama - yes its has all the ingredients to get women into the cinema and the Kleenexes out - but there is a message running through the film which did not go down well in some quarters at the time, and something we should never forget even with an African American in the White House.

The film in the end is a fantastic snippet of American society in the late 1950s just before the Civil Rights movement took off in a big way and Sirk has done well to document this in a movie many would dismiss as fluff without even having watched it.

Available on DVD from Amazon for £4.98 - the DVD contains no special features and therefore this review is for the film only.

Previously reviewed by me on dooyoo under the same user name.