The original version of the story many people probably know better as the Douglas Sirk weepie from 1959 starring Lana Turner.
Kudos to the 1934 "Imitation of Life" for giving movie audiences a fairly progressive story about two women, one white (Claudette Colbert) and one black (Louise Beavers), who go into business together without a man in sight. Subplots find Beavers' daughter passing for white and disowning her black mother and heritage while Colbert's daughter moons over her mom's new love interest (Warren William). Far too much time is spent on the amours of these boring privileged white people while far too little is spent on the race problems, but this was 1934 and the fact that the racial story line is there at all is something at least. The Sirk version corrected that somewhat and made the two story lines far more equal.
I don't know what to think about "Imitation of Life." Should I commend it for trying to show positive images of black people at a time when those were hard to come by, and to suggest that blacks can and should be proud of their heritage? Or should I cringe at the way it portrays black people as being happily subservient to the whites in their lives, content to exist in the background as long as there's a nice white lady present to take care of them? I guess the answer is I can have both reactions at the same time, which makes delving into historical cinema (or historical anything really) such a fascinating exercise. I think audiences should watch movies in context of the times in which they were made, but I also think it's fair to hold them up to contemporary scrutiny and see what they got right and what they got wrong. "Imitation of Life" falls into the latter category more than the former for me, which is why I can't give it a higher rating.
Grade: B-
Kudos to the 1934 "Imitation of Life" for giving movie audiences a fairly progressive story about two women, one white (Claudette Colbert) and one black (Louise Beavers), who go into business together without a man in sight. Subplots find Beavers' daughter passing for white and disowning her black mother and heritage while Colbert's daughter moons over her mom's new love interest (Warren William). Far too much time is spent on the amours of these boring privileged white people while far too little is spent on the race problems, but this was 1934 and the fact that the racial story line is there at all is something at least. The Sirk version corrected that somewhat and made the two story lines far more equal.
I don't know what to think about "Imitation of Life." Should I commend it for trying to show positive images of black people at a time when those were hard to come by, and to suggest that blacks can and should be proud of their heritage? Or should I cringe at the way it portrays black people as being happily subservient to the whites in their lives, content to exist in the background as long as there's a nice white lady present to take care of them? I guess the answer is I can have both reactions at the same time, which makes delving into historical cinema (or historical anything really) such a fascinating exercise. I think audiences should watch movies in context of the times in which they were made, but I also think it's fair to hold them up to contemporary scrutiny and see what they got right and what they got wrong. "Imitation of Life" falls into the latter category more than the former for me, which is why I can't give it a higher rating.
Grade: B-