Thoughts from the committee
The much-lauded king of the Hollywood melodrama, Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows) spent the 1950s in Hollywood making a string of influential films. We featured several of his most high-profile works in our 2015 season, and now he returns to our programme with the last film he made in Hollywood, and one of his most complex and absorbing melodramas, Imitation of Life.
Instead of merely focusing on one subject, Sirk’s film pulls as many different issues into its plot, several of which could be conceived as ‘playing the part’. Not only is this an examination of Lora (Lana Turner)’s struggles to make it in the theatre, it is also a study of a fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, and a tale of romance found, abandoned, and found again. Some of the film’s most compelling scenes, though, are between Lora’s friend and housekeeper, Annie (Juanita Moore), and her biracial daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner). Able to pass as white, Sarah Jane distances herself from her mother in increasingly tragic ways.
Critics at the time dismissed the melodrama as a shallow genre, appealing only to the interests of simple audiences (by which they mostly seemed to mean ‘women with free time to go to the movies’). Such a perspective fails to acknowledge how difficult it is to make an audience cry, and how easy it is to aim for tragedy and wind up with farce. Sirk’s films are the conclusive response to that criticism, and nowhere is Sirk more genuine and insightful than Imitation of Life.
“Sirk’s cool, elegant style – smooth as silk on top, jagged and hot with feeling below – has rarely been joined to a more perfect subject.” — Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune