Stories · Film · 1934
Imitation of Life
A studio melodrama puts a Black daughter who can be read as white at the emotional center of the story, and the film cannot fully contain her.
John M. Stahl's film, from Fannie Hurst's novel, follows two widowed mothers. Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) is white. Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) is Black. They build a business together from Delilah's family pancake recipe, and the business makes Bea rich. Each woman raises a daughter. Delilah's daughter, Peola, is light enough to be taken for white. As she grows up she wants that reading of her to be the whole truth, even if it means leaving her mother.
Peola was played by Fredi Washington, a Black actress who, in a Hollywood that routinely cast white performers in such roles, brought her own experience of being misread to the part. Her performance is restrained and angry, and it is the part of the film audiences remember. The movie's economics are lopsided in ways it only half sees: the white partner gets the fortune, and the Black partner gets devotion.
The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 2005. Douglas Sirk remade it in 1959, and the two versions are often watched side by side.
Why it still matters
The film tried to be sympathetic and still treated Peola's choice as a daughter's betrayal. Watching it now means watching both things at once: a real performance of a real dilemma, inside a story that would not let the dilemma be anyone's fault but hers.