Imitation of Life (Universal-International, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 8) my husband Charles and I watched three consecutive films on Turner Classic Movies, two of which were themed around the African-American experience. The first was the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, based on a tear-jerker novel by Fannie Hurst published in 1932 and first filmed by Universal in 1934 with John M. Stahl (Universal’s go-to guy for overripe romantic melodramas back then) directing and a script by William Hurlbut, miles away from his best-known credit as the writer of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), though as I said when I wrote a moviemagg review of the 1934 Imitation of Life (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/imitation-of-life-universal-1934.html), “[T]hough the two films are miles apart genre-wise, in a way they’re both about outsiders cursed by the circumstances of their births and desperately seeking acceptance.” Imitation of Life as Hurst conceived it and Stahl filmed it in 1934 told the story of two women, both widows with young daughters, one white and one Black. In the original the white one was called Beatrice “Bea” Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and the Black one was Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers). Bea’s daughter is Jessie (Juanita Quigley at six, Rochelle Hudson as a teenager), and Delilah’s is Peola (Dorothy Black at eight, Fredi Washington as a teenager). Peola is light-skinned (courtesy, we’re told, of a father who was an unusually light-skinned African-American) and is determined to “pass” for white, The two adult women enter the restaurant business when Delilah turns up accidentally at Bea’s apartment looking for a job as a maid, and though Bea doesn’t have any money she agrees to take Delilah and Peola in as boarders and have Delilah work for her keep. Delilah makes incredible pancakes, Bea makes an equally great syrup for them, and the two first open a restaurant in Atlantic City and then, at the suggestion of a former entrepreneur turned homeless by the Depression, they build a thriving business selling boxes of “Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Flour.”

Unfortunately, the 1959 filmmakers, director Douglas Sirk (making what turned out to be his last film) and writers Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, made two changes that severely weakened the story. First, they made the white woman an aspiring actress, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), who’s trying to achieve theatrical stardom on Broadway, and the Black woman, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), just her maid instead of her business partner, depriving her of the independence and agency Louise Beavers had got to play in 1934. Second, they cast white actress Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane Johnson, Peola’s equivalent, instead of the light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington who’d played her in the original. When I first saw the 1959 Imitation of Life I’d never seen the 1934 version and I was blown away by it. I was particularly impressed by Lana Turner’s performance; she’d never impressed me as having any acting talent at all, but with the end of her MGM contract in 1956 (with The Prodigal, a totally wretched alleged adaptation of the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son whose only good parts were the first five minutes and the last two minutes, the only parts actually based on the Bible) she seemed liberated. Her first post-MGM film, Peyton Place (1957), had been a first-rate movie both artistically and commercially – thanks to a profit-sharing deal, she made more money from that one film than everything she’d done previously – and obviously she was looking for roles that would showcase her acting skills. This time around I was also impressed by Sandra Dee as the white daughter Susie; like Turner, she was showing off acting chops I’d never thought she’d had. However, my admiration for the 1959 Imitation of Life dropped considerably when I saw the Stahl version from a quarter-century earlier. It seems really strange that in 1934 Stahl and Hurlbut went all-out with both the racial and gender liberation aspects of the story, while on the eve of the mass civil rights movement – with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the clash over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 already having served notice on white America that Black America wasn’t going to take being relegated to second-class status much longer – Sirk, Griffin, and Scott pulled back from the revolutionary implications of the original story.

Still, the 1959 Imitation of Life remains a quite impressive film, not as good as I’d thought it was before I’d seen the 1934 version, but with some aspects that still seem viable. Among them are the slimy agent Lora Meredith picks up on her way to stardom, Allen Loomis (Robert Alda, Alan Alda’s father and George Gershwin in the 1945 Warner Bros. biopic Rhapsody in Blue), who tells Lora that the only way she’s going to get ahead in the theatre is to prostitute herself to him and various influential people on Broadway (the #MeToo people would have had a field day with him!) – though in the end Our Lora manages to succeed as a star without having to have sex with anyone she doesn’t like – and the playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), who writes a series of comedies to showcase her and has an affair with her (mutually consensual) until they break up over her insistence on trying a dramatic role. One major weakness in the 1959 Imitation of Life is the casting of the male lead: in 1934 he was Warren William, who was old enough he and Claudette Colbert were a credible couple and we could see for ourselves how wrong it was that Rochelle Hudson formed a crush on her mother’s boyfriend. In 1959 the part was played by John Gavin, to whom Universal-International was trying to give a major star buildup. Gavin had already been inflicted on Sirk for his previous film, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), by the studio after his initial request to borrow Paul Newman from Warner Bros. for the role had been turned down. Though the story takes place over 12 years of time (1947 to 1959), Gavin doesn’t look any older in the later parts than in the earlier ones when he and Turner have a meet-cute on Coney Island. In fact he looks so young that when Sandra Dee falls in love with him, and then has to accept him as her stepfather instead of her husband, we think, “They’re both so young, why shouldn’t they get together at the end?” (Incidentally, imdb.com lists “Robert Darin” in the bit part of a waiter; one wonders whether Sandra Dee used her clout at the studio, such as it was, to get her then boyfriend, later husband Bobby Darin into the film.)

Sirk had previously remade another Stahl film, Magnificent Obsession (Stahl, 1935; Sirk, 1954) [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/02/universals-magnificent-obsessions-1935.html] and had much surpassed the original; here, though it was a nice try, the compromises in the civil-rights and female empowerment angles severely, though not fatally, hurt the Sirk version. What’s left are some nice social comments about the evanescence of trying to live one’s artistic dreams; Gavin’s character talks about being an art photographer and exhibiting in the New York Museum of Modern Art, but settles for a job taking pictures for an ad agency and ultimately becoming a well-paid and outwardly successful but inwardly unfulfilled advertising executive. There’s also a stunning scene at Annie Johnson’s funeral in which Mahalia Jackson is shown singing “Trouble of the World” (she’s showcased brilliantly, and she was enough of a draw for white audiences she gets her own card in the opening credits) and at the end Susan Kohner is shown literally rushing to her mom’s coffin, telling her (a bit too late!) how much she always loved her and essentially embracing her Black identity after having spent the whole movie trying to deny it. There’s one scene in which her boyfriend, played by a young Troy Donahue, literally beats her up on screen when he finds out he’s been dating a Black woman: a scene of open male-on-female brutality rare in a 1959 film. As I noted in my review of the 1934 Imitation of Life, “[T]he vigor with which [the Black mother] and Bea (who joins her in her crusade to find her daughter) keep ‘outing’ her becomes uncomfortably cruel after a while.”