Douglas Sirk’s 1959 adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, was the second film treatment of the book. Both versions capture the overall thrust of the story: two poor single mothers, one white and the other Black, who form an unlikely friendship and whose fortunes become entwined as an unexpected financial windfall raises both out of poverty but noticeably solves all of one woman’s problems while the other must still exist in a segregated society. But a study of the way that the two adaptations diverge provides an insight not only into the malleability of the source material but the radically different studio and cultural contexts in which each was made.
The first adaption, John M. Stahl’s 1934 version, hewed closely to the book’s plot in which the mothers hit it rich off the basis of the Black woman’s waffle recipe and her likeness, which her new friend markets as an Aunt Jemima-esque matron. This approach is inseparable from the film’s production during the worst of the Great Depression, with the story emphasizing the women’s hard-working natures managing to lift them out of desperation. It also created an ambiguity between the extent to which the Black woman gained from her friendship and partnership and that to which she was exploited.
In Sirk’s version, the white woman, Lora (Lana Turner), is an aspiring actress, and the film’s version of her newfound Black friend, Annie (Juanita Moore), is more abstractly crucial to her success. Broke and on the cusp of having utilities cut off, Lora is suddenly treated with more respect by her creditors, who, unable to conceive of a white woman inviting a Black woman to live with her as an equal, assume per social norms that Annie must be Lora’s new maid and that thus the white woman’s money troubles must be over. The illusion of stability and status that Annie’s mere presence lends to Lora, and Annie’s ability to look after Lora’s daughter, Susie (Terry Burnham as a child, Sandra Dee later as a teen), allows the woman to look like someone who belongs in an audition for a major production rather than a wannabe right off the bus.
Both films evince a shockingly ahead-of-their-time attention to the issue of colorism, though Sirk’s movie, by virtue both of being shot in color and being filmed during the increased consciousness surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, attacks this subject with more verve. Annie’s white-passing daughter, Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker, then Susan Kohner) knows even as a child the importance of appearing white, and every time her mother is revealed to the white world, it induces a fit of total horror and rage in the girl. In Stahl’s movie, the Annie figure, Delilah, often bumbles into giving away her daughter’s race, but here Annie is intriguingly more deliberate in blowing up Sarah Jane’s comfort when the girl begins to act out too much. Sirk builds the film more complexly around the mother-daughter dynamics of both pairs of characters, but it’s the way that Annie subtly matches her daughter’s racialized resentment that truly displays the intersecting lines of social commentary and intimate melodrama that drive the movie.
Elsewhere, Sirk tackles subjects like the insecurity of men at not being the principal breadwinner and the ceilings that even the richest and most famous women bump up against when it comes to being treated as valid, independent people. But the film keeps circling back to its multifaceted, serious engagement with the many ways that life in America is fundamentally opposed to Black freedom, and how external pressures produce overlapping forms of self-loathing. All of this is captured in sumptuous colors that are nonetheless constantly slashed at by plunging, angular shadows. As with Some Came Running and Vertigo, two films released around the same time, Imitation of Life maximizes Old Hollywood glamor to reveal the gangrenous rot just below the surface of America’s postwar prosperity, a reminder that the nation’s newfound self-image was erected on hate and denial that threatens to swallow everything in a sinkhole.
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