With a cascade of golf ball sized diamonds and a theme song crooned by a Nat King Cole sound-alike, the opening of Imitation of Life (1959) embodies all the glitz, glamour, and melodrama of women's films in the post war era.

Single mom and aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) frantically searches the beaches of Coney Island for her lost daughter Susie. The young girl is found safe and sound with her new friend Sarah Jane and her mother Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore). While the girls play, Lora muses on her life as a single parent, "Oh, I wish I had someone to look after Susie."

Annie suggests that she'd be perfect for the job. Lora is surprised that she would consider leaving her position caring for Sarah Jane. Annie good naturedly explains that, "My baby goes where I go."

"Sarah Jane is your child?"

"It surprises most people. Sarah Jane favors her daddy. He was practically white."

With nowhere to stay, Lora invites them to spend the night. While Annie prepares the small room off the kitchen, Sarah Jane argues with Susie over who gets to play with a set of dolls, one white and the other black. As her mother ushers her off to bed, Sarah Jane asks, "Why do we always have to sleep in the back?" An ominous piano chord underscores the relevance of Sarah Jane leaving the black doll on the kitchen floor.

The next day Annie agrees to watch after the girls while Lora pounds the pavement. "I walked my feet off trying to see every agent on Broadway. And some off Broadway. Way off." The two women become fast friends and quickly fall into a routine.

One evening, after a busy day of modeling flea powder, Lora receives a gentleman caller. Photographer Steve Archer has brought by some pictures he took of the girls playing at Coney Island. He flirts by complementing Lora's bone structure. "My camera could easily have a love affair with you."

John Gavin plays Steve, Lana Turner's love interest. Gavin belongs to a select group of handsome actors who were regularly cast in films of this type, not because of their talent, but rather, lack of it. Their wooden screen presence was guaranteed never to distract from the true star of the film, the women.

Lora is invited to an industry party by an important agent. When she arrives at his office after hours, he attempts to put the moves on her. "If the dramatist's club wants to eat and sleep with you, you'll eat and sleep with them. If some producer with a hand as cold as a toad wants to do a painting of you in the nude, you'll accommodate him for a very small part."

Lora is determined to succeed, but not by way of the casting couch. "It's disgusting! You're disgusting! You're trying to cheapen me. I'll make it Mr. Loomis, but it'll be my way."

Meanwhile, Sarah Jane continues to deny her race. "Sarah Jane's been passing at school," Annie explains, "pretending she's white."

"But I am white! I'm as white as Susie!" she declares.

Steve has given up his artistic aspirations and has landed a job in advertising. He asks Lora to forget her dreams and marry him when the phone rings with news about an audition for a big time playwright. As she leaves to pick up the script, Steve demands, "I'm not asking you to not go down there, I'm telling you."

Lora won't sacrifice her dreams for any man and spits out the movies most memorable line, "Well I'm going up and up and up, and nobody's going to pull me down!"

As Christmas approaches, Lora prepares for her audition while Annie tells the girls the story of baby Jesus. Still hung up on the whole race thing, Sarah Jane asks, "Was Jesus white or black?" Annie and Lora try to tactfully explain, but Sarah Jane just doesn't get it. "He was like me…white." Boy, does this girl have issues.

Lora's audition goes badly, very badly. In a ballsy move, Lora insists that it's the script that's so awful and not her. She tells the author, "You're too good a writer to have such a scene in your play." Playwright David Edwards (Dan O'Herlihy) admires her chutzpah and gives her the part. When opening night comes, Lora is a sensation. She begins a love affair with David and he writes his plays specifically for her.

The years fly by in a montage that illustrate Lora's rise to theatrical stardom. Audiences clap wildly as we glimpse pieces of her successful plays with titles like Summer Madness, Happiness, and Born to Laugh. Are we actually supposed to believe that Lana Turner is a gifted comedienne and that Dan O'Herlihy penned these fluffy comedies?

One evening, after a show, Lora waxes poetic about her success. "Something is missing."

"You need show business as much as it needs you." Annie tells her as she helps Lora dress. Turner has abandoned her sensible working-gal suits in favor of elaborate Jean Louis creations like an aquamarine cocktail gown with matching fur-trimmed jacket.

When Lora decides to do something by another playwright, David succinctly describes his competition. "It's drama. No clothes, no sex. No fun."

With their love affair over, Lora tries to placate David by praising his play, "I know it will be a hit."

"It won't without you." He says, tossing the script in the fireplace, "There goes my pride up in ashes."

Once he leaves, Lora tells Annie that it was "…just a theatrical gesture. He never makes less than six copies."

When Lora throws a chic soiree at her gigantic Frank Lloyd Wright inspired ranch house, we see that Sarah Jane has grown into sex pot Susan Kohner and Susie is now the perennially perky Sandra Dee. Steve re-enters their lives and hopes to rekindle his affair with Lora, "You know I still have you in my blood don't you?"

While on a picnic in the perfectly manicured countryside, Steve and Lora discuss their future. He'll give up his ad exec job, while she vows never to do another play. But, when they return home, Lora receives a call from her agent to play "…the best part since Scarlett O'Hara." It's clear to Steve that Lora still has the same ambitions.

In a scene that is both shockingly violent and inappropriately funny Sarah Jane sneaks off to see boyfriend Troy Donahue. Things go very wrong when he confronts her with the truth. "All the kids talking behind my back! Is it true? Are you black?"

"No, I'm as white as you!" She shouts as Donahue mercilessly hits her while incongruous up-tempo jazz music blares on the soundtrack. Beaten and bloodied, Sarah Jane is left to literally wallow in the gutter.

When Annie discovers a matchbook in Sarah Jane's coat, she goes to the seedy bar and arrives in time for the floor show. In front of a leering crowd Sarah Jane stiffly dances and performs a badly dubbed song. The club manager fires her when he learns that Annie is her mother. Annie begs her daughter to come home, but Sarah Jane packs her bags and walks out.

With Steve's help they discover that Sarah Jane is working as a chorus girl on the West coast. Annie arrives in Hollywood to confront her daughter one last time. "Are you finding what you really want?"

"I'm white. White! White!" she cries. "If we should ever pass on the street, please don't recognize me." Since there is nothing more she can do, Annie says a final, tearful goodbye.

While Lora and Steve discuss Annie's "condition", Susie mixes them both highballs (what exactly did they teach her in finishing school?) Diseases in films of this type are always fatal and rarely explained. "What can we do to help Annie, Steve?"

"There's no answer Lora, never has been. Not for a broken heart." Ah, that explains it.

With a bedridden Annie as her captive audience, Susie confesses her true feelings for Steve. "I've always been in love with him and always will be." Susie is broken hearted to learn that Steve and her mother will finally marry.

Lana Turner must've had a strong feeling of déjà vu when Lora confronts her daughter about her feelings for an older man. Turner suffered through a similar and very public romantic triangle with mobster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato and her daughter Cheryl. The boyfriend ended up dead and a fictionalized version of the story became the Cool Cinema Trash favorite Where Love Has Gone (1964).

"So Annie told you." Susie pouts. "Well, that's how you usually find things out about me. Let's face it Mama, Annie's always been more like a real mother."

"If Steve is going to come between us," Lora solemnly declares, "I'll give him up. I'll never see him again."

"Oh, Mama," Susie shouts, voicing what we're all thinking, "Stop acting!"

On her deathbed, Annie asks Lora to set things right with Sarah Jane, "Tell her I know I was selfish and if I loved her too much, I'm sorry. She was all I had."

Simple tears aren't enough when Annie passes away. Lora dissolves into a fit of histrionics as the camera slowly pans to an angelic photo of Sarah Jane on Annie's bedside table.

Annie's funeral looks to be the social event of the season. A cathedral the size of Yankee Stadium is filled to capacity with mourners. Hundreds of flowers surround the casket as Mahalia Jackson sings a hymnal. As pallbearers place Annie's coffin onto a horse drawn carriage, Sarah Jane breaks through the crowd. Sobbing hysterically, she throws herself on the casket. "I'm sorry Mama. Mama I did love you." Lora rushes to her side. "Miss Lora, I killed my Mother," She cries.

They ride in the somber funeral procession, a band leading the horse drawn carriage, just the way Annie wanted it. The music, accompanied by a heavenly chorus, builds to a crescendo, the end.

The story of two single mothers (one black and the other white) struggling to raise their two daughters is pretty progressive for the late 1950's. Still, there are antiquated "separate but equal" undertones present throughout the movie. The most perplexing and hilarious example of this is when, after decades of supposed friendship, Annie mentions to Lora all the people she'd like to attend her funeral. In all seriousness Lana Turner says, "It never occurred to me that you had any friends."

In a testament to the sincerity of Juanita Moore's performance, Annie answers, without a hint of sarcasm or malice, "Miss Lora, you never asked."

Though successful in it's initial release, Imitation of Life and other films like it, were regarded as simple pieces of genre filmmaking. Half a century later, film scholars are re-examining the genre and, more specifically, the films of Douglas Sirk. His detailed work on melodramas like Magnificent Obsession (1954) and All That Heaven Allows (1956) have garnered Sirk a new level of respect. Whether you appreciate the movie as a social commentary on racism and the women's movement, or as an over-the-top camp delight, Imitation of Life is a memorable classic from a bygone era.

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By Love Possessed

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The Prodigal

If renting movies is for you, try Netflix. They stock most of the movies CCT recommends.