Imitation of Life (1959)

 Imitation of Life (1959)

As the introductory title song explains, a life without love is merely an imitation of life. The film the goes on to show a handful of characters who are denied love, or, for multiple reasons, who deny their love to others.

No need to go over what I already did in my review of Magnificent Obsession.

I’ll just add that there’s a certain point in this story of an ambitious, single White mom actor who by happenstance ends up best friend and roommate of an African-American single mother of a light-skinned Black daughter who passes for White, which starts with their chance meeting at a beach when the girls are still young, and advances to years later when she finally meets with success, that you’ll immediately recognize the element that attracted John Waters enough to base nearly his whole career working with Divine on it.

Like Magnificent Obsession this is also a melodrama with much ironic appeal. How can you not but laugh with sheer delight at the extreme circumstances this film presents, even when they are clearly tragic to its characters?

From this source, John Waters based a whole series of characters trapped in a world they never made and against which they have no recourse but to rebel.

It’s not till later in the story that we realize the film has cheated by not presenting Annie's rich social life, (which she must certainly have shared with her daughter,) and instead shows her and her daughter isolated in a White society which accepts her daughter only as long as it doesn't realize she has a Black mother.

Not only that, but her supposed life-long friend and companion is utterly unaware of it, (as is the audience alongside her, thus forcing us to identify with the leading White actress character instead of with anyone else.)

Had the story even slightly focused on Annie’s (and her daughter’s) social life outside of their White home, the extended sequences might have allowed her daughter the support she is clearly missing and which she is instead seeking in a society in which she is doomed to find only rejection.

Despite cheating, this is also a recently screened film with a social conscience, even if a quite a bit misguided, (don’t equal partners and ‘best friends’ merely become servant and mistress based solely on their contrasting skin color? No wonder the girl rebels!)

The obvious social problem it’s addressing is racism, and while most characters recognize it and are perfectly aware of it, they all passively accept it as a fact of life, except for the one. The film presents this character as ‘the bad girl’, but John Waters immediately recognized who he identified with and wanted to be.

When the other option is to be complacent, being bad is not only good, but it's also the only acceptable option, even when it might lead to one’s personal downfall.

Author Danny Peary insightfully points out:

"...When Turner chastises Kohner for insinuating she's been treated differently at home, Kohner acquiesces that Turner and Dee never showed prejudice toward her - but the script should have had her attack Turner for treating Moore as her servant.

Moore is made into Kohner's whipping post, but that might be different if she had suggested to her daughter not to go to a black teachers' college but to break down some racial barriers, be defiant, and improve the lot of her race rather than to be satisfied with the hand dealt her.

Moore may be the nicest woman in the world (which is why Kohner can't help loving her) but she makes no attempt to teach Kohner pride in being black.

The script is also infuriating because when Turner, Gavin, and Dee are nice to Moore and Kohner or act without prejudice, white audiences are expected, in a self-congratulatory gesture, to weep about the white characters' nobility, their refusal to act high-and-mighty toward people who have none of their advantages.

The most honest scene has white Troy Donahue brutally beating date Kohner, who he has learned is black..."

Required viewing to understand Water’s filmography, but it's a trashy riot all by itself.