Imitation of Life

A B-list 80s popstar introduced the movie: "It's fabulous...But...Someone should just slap Sandra Dee." And how.

Douglas Sirk's 1959 masterpiece, Imitation of Life, the only one of his films to make significant money, is the melodrama to end all melodramas. But wait! It is not just a melodrama--that would be far too easy. It's a melodrama with the extra special Sirk bonus of biting social commentary: Race and Money and Sex, oh my! Perhaps the most interesting element of the commentary is the very meta commentary on the nature of cinema, especially in context of race (see Lana Turner's Scarlett O'Hara comment towards the end of the movie, for example).

The plot? Very broadly, it concerns a rising star (Turner), her daughter, her black maid, and the maid's light-skinned daughter. Lora, the Turner character, of course does all of the things that any rising star must do in the movies; her maid, Annie, looks after 'Miss Lora'; Sarah-Jane, the maid's daughter, rebels, pretends to be white, becomes a burlesque dancer; Sandra Dee whines a lot and wears ugly clothes. And it's brilliant.

Furthermore, vicious fight scenes overwhelmed by sinister jazz scores and funerals with casts of hundreds really must make a comeback.