Imitation of Life

Bea has lost her husband, is alone with a small daughter and needs to earn. Delilah comes to her door looking for work, and she has a daughter too. Delilah moves in, does the housework and gets a place to live in return. One day Bea tries her pancake recipe. The recipe works. First a shop, then a brand, then a product sold across the country. Bea becomes rich. Delilah refuses her share of the partnership and stays in the same house. Delilah's daughter Peola looks white and does not want to acknowledge her mother. John M. Stahl directs. Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers, Warren William, Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington are in the cast. The film is adapted from a novel by Fannie Hurst. It is an American production. The film was nominated for the best picture Oscar. The matter it treats is race and visibility; Peola's decision to pass as white is at the centre, and that subject was very rarely handled on screen at the time. The film shows the question of the partnership plainly; the product is Delilah's and the money is Bea's. Louise Beavers's part was written in the moulds of its period and is uncomfortable today; even so her performance is the strongest thing in the film. Peola, played by Fredi Washington, is the most contested and the most alive line in it. The narrative sets two mothers and two daughters against each other. The ending closes on a funeral. The same novel was filmed again twenty five years later. Its limit is point of view; the narrative looks at the question through the white character and draws Delilah as too submissive. Who it is for: viewers curious about classic Hollywood melodrama and the representation of race in film history. Who it is not for: it is dated, its representations are troubling, and the ending bitter.