Synopsis
In 1940s New York, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway has a chance encounter with a black single mother, who becomes her maid.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Lana TurnerLora Meredith
- John GavinSteve Archer
- Juanita MooreAnnie Johnson
- Sandra DeeSusie (16)
- Susan KohnerSarah Jane (18)
- Robert AldaAllen Loomis
- Dan O'HerlihyDavid Edwards
- Karin DickerSarah Jane (8)
- Terry BurnhamSusie (6)
- John VivyanYoung man
Recommendations
- 100
Slant Magazine
The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color. - 100
TV Guide Magazine
If Sirk exploits the material for all it's worth and seems to be sardonically allowing the artifical genre to devour itself as he sits back and watches, at the same time the weepie aspect is so melodramatic as to tear the sobs from your throat. - 90
Village Voice
Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country. - 89
Austin Chronicle
The film is a biting critique of American race relations in the Fifties and a complex study in contrasts and paradoxes. - 88
Chicago Reader
The secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection. - 80
Time Out
Forget those who decry the '50s Hollywood melodrama; it is through the conventions of that hyper-emotional genre that Sirk is able to make such a devastatingly embittered and pessimistic movie. - 80
Variety
Lana Turner is outstanding in the pivotal role played in Universal’s 1934 version by Claudette Colbert. - 80
The New Yorker
Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.
