--- title: "Imitation of Life" year: 1959 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/imitation-of-life" fi1m_score: 86 critics_score: 78 critics_reviews: 8 published: "2026-09-19T22:38:55.156952+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T22:39:09.665724+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Imitation of Life (1959) Directed by Douglas Sirk · 2h 05m · MPA NR · Drama, Romance **Fi1m score: 86** · Critics 78 from 8 reviews *In a sentence:* Lana Turner gets the gowns and the staircase; Juanita Moore, in an apron, quietly walks off with the film > Douglas Sirk’s last Hollywood film is a glossy Broadway weepie with a much harder film about a black housekeeper and her light-skinned daughter running underneath it. Lana Turner’s half is thin; Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner’s half is the reason it has lasted. ## Synopsis Coney Island, the summer of 1947. Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a widow who has come to New York to be an actress, loses her six-year-old daughter Susie (Terry Burnham) on the crowded beach. She finds her under the boardwalk with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black widow whose own daughter Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker), aged eight, is light-skinned enough to be taken for white. A photographer, Steve Archer (John Gavin), snaps the four of them together. By evening Annie and Sarah Jane have moved into Lora’s cold-water flat, Annie keeping house in exchange for a bed. Lora chases auditions and modelling jobs and meets the agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda), while Sarah Jane starts at school and tells nobody there who her mother is. ## Review Coney Island, the summer of 1947. Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a widow who has come to New York to act, has lost her small daughter on the beach. She finds Susie (Terry Burnham) under the boardwalk in the care of Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), another widow, whose own girl Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker) is playing beside her. A photographer, Steve Archer (John Gavin), takes their picture. By nightfall Annie and Sarah Jane have moved into Lora’s cold-water flat, Annie keeping house for a bed and no wages. Douglas Sirk’s last Hollywood film, a remake of the 1934 picture from Fannie Hurst’s novel, starts from that accident and follows the household for ten years. We think it is a fine film and an odd one. It is two pictures in one frame. Lora’s is the glossy one: the agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) who expects payment in more than commission, the playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) who gives her a part, the staircase, the gowns, the telegrams. Annie’s happens in kitchens and doorways at the edge of Lora’s scenes, and it is the one that matters. Sirk knows which of the two we have paid to watch, and keeps drifting the camera to the other. Sarah Jane is light-skinned enough to pass for white, and at eight she has already decided to. Karin Dicker plays her as a child who has worked out how the world is arranged. She refuses the black doll Susie offers her. She tells the class her mother is somebody else. Then Annie turns up at school on a wet afternoon with a raincoat and galoshes, and the teacher says there must be some mistake, there is no coloured child here. It moved us more than we expected, and not because of the girl running out into the rain. It was Moore in the doorway with the little coat over her arm, understanding in about two seconds what her daughter has been doing and deciding, for now, to say nothing. Russell Metty photographs it in colours no real room has ever had. Lora’s flat is the yellow of a paperback; her later house has a white staircase wide enough for a musical and mirrors in which people talk to reflections rather than to each other. Frank Skinner’s score, with Henry Mancini also credited, swells on cue every time, and Milton Carruth cuts to the tear before it falls. Sirk had made *All That Heaven Allows* and *Written on the Wind* in the same manner, and the title tells you what the manner is for: everything Lora acquires is shown to us as a shop window. You may find that cold. We found it cold and then, about an hour in, found it working. Juanita Moore is the reason to see it. She plays Annie almost without raising her voice, as a woman who knows more than anyone in the house and has learned not to show it. Susan Kohner takes over Sarah Jane at eighteen and gives her a hard, bright, frightened surface; her scenes with Moore are the best in the film and we will not say where they lead. The rest is weaker, and much of it is Lana Turner. She is playing a woman who cannot stop performing, and in her scenes with John Gavin’s Steve it is hard to tell the character’s acting from the actress’s. Gavin is handsome and immovable and asked to be nothing else. Sandra Dee’s Susie at sixteen is handed a storyline in the last third whose purpose we could see and did not believe for a minute. One reviewer in 1959 dismissed the whole thing as a tear-jerker, and on the evidence of Lora’s half we would not argue very hard. Most critics since have come round to it, and so have we. The last quarter of an hour is famous and we will not describe it. It is staged on a scale the rest of the film has been saving up for, and we cried in a way we slightly resented and then stopped resenting. At 125 minutes the film is patient about getting there. Watch it with someone who thinks old Hollywood melodramas are safe, and see how long they last. *Fi1m score 86, published 19 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics take Imitation of Life for a melodrama that knows exactly what it is doing. The praise clusters on Sirk’s direction: the Technicolor surfaces, the open manipulation, and the way the weepie machinery is turned against the racism and commercialism it appears to serve. Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, as the mother and the light-skinned daughter who rejects her, draw the warmest notices, and their subplot is repeatedly named the strongest thing in the film. Nearly everyone mentions the funeral. The spread is narrow at the top and then drops sharply. Seven of eight reviews are positive; the one dissenter is The New York Times, writing on release, which finds a shameless tear-jerker with banal dialogue and overacting. Later critics tend to read that excess as deliberate, and Collider notes the film was dismissed as soap before being recognised for its boldness on race, class and gender. Variety, also at the time, is warmer but measured: a solid remake, with Lana Turner outstanding. ### Reviews we read (8) - **Empire**, Ian Freer (5/5): The critic calls it a consummate display of populist weepie-making that edges out the 1934 version thanks to Sirk's ersatz style and masterful manipulation. Standout praise goes to the performances of Moore and Kohner, especially their hell-for-leather confrontation scene. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/imitation-life-review/) - **Slant Magazine**, Ed Gonzalez (90/100, inferred): Sirk's film is a sardonic melodrama that exposes the deranged surfaces and racial realities of American society through its story of ambition, passing, and maternal sacrifice. The critic praises its rigorous mise-en-scène, Brechtian distancing, and sensitive handling of the light-skinned daughter's rejection of her mother as a subversive critique of white America's relationship to people of color. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/imitation-of-life/) - **The New Yorker**, Richard Brody (90/100, inferred): Sirk unleashes a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life including racism, commercialism, and puritanism. The grand finale funeral is a trumpet blast against social façades. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/imitation-of-life) - **Time Out**, GA (85/100, inferred): Sirk's final Hollywood film is a coldly brilliant weepie that undercuts romantic sentimentality with racial tension and the breakdown of family bonds. The critic highlights a key moment where emotional payoff is undercut by the daughter's rejection of her mother and the unforgettable funeral scene that reveals underlying hopelessness. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/imitation-of-life) - **Little White Lies**, Sophie Monks Kaufman (80/100, inferred): Sirk's 1959 melodrama is a perfect vehicle for encoding awareness of racial injustice in America through emotional arcs and Technicolor surfaces. The piece singles out Juanita Moore's performance as Annie for embodying the tragedy of a Black woman navigating subservience and limited aspirations in a racist society. [Read](https://lwlies.com/articles/imitation-of-life-douglas-sirk-in-praise-of/) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): The film is a solid remake with Lana Turner outstanding as the ambitious actress. The subplot of the light-skinned daughter passing as white, played memorably by Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore, emerges as the strongest element. [Read](https://variety.com/1958/film/reviews/imitation-of-life-3-1200419391/) - **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (30/100, inferred): The remake is another shameless tear-jerker in the soapy vein of the 1934 version, with hackneyed encounters, banal dialogue, and excessive acting. A funeral scene provides the final emotional pull but the whole is marked by bathos and banality. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1959/04/19/archives/detergent-drama-imitation-of-life-in-familiar-soapy-vein.html) - **Collider**, Liam Gaughan (80/100, inferred): The critic views Imitation of Life as a controversial yet progressive masterpiece that was initially dismissed for its melodrama but later recognized for tackling race, class, and gender more boldly than most Old Hollywood films. They single out its complex portrayal of biracial identity and Sarah Jane's struggles as a key element that influenced later directors like Todd Haynes. [Read](https://collider.com/imitation-of-life-movie/) ## Details - **Director:** Douglas Sirk - **Director:** Douglas Sirk - **Screenplay:** Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott - **Novel:** Fannie Hurst - **Cinematography:** Russell Metty - **Editor:** Milton Carruth - **Music:** Frank Skinner, Henry Mancini - **Producer:** Ross Hunter - **Cast:** Lana Turner as Lora Meredith; John Gavin as Steve Archer; Sandra Dee as Susie (16); Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane (18); Robert Alda as Allen Loomis; Dan O'Herlihy as David Edwards; Juanita Moore as Annie Johnson; Karin Dicker as Sarah Jane (8) - **Runtime:** 2h 05m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 17 March 1959 - **Genres:** Drama, Romance - **Budget:** $1 million ## Where to watch in the US - Apple TV: rent $3.99, hd - Apple TV: buy $14.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-19.* Also available in: AU, BE, CA, CH, ES, FR, GB, IE, IL, NZ, TH, US, VN. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1960: Best Supporting Actress (nominated) ## If you liked this - *Far from Heaven* (2002), Fi1m 87: Todd Haynes rebuilds Sirk’s colours and manners and lets the cracks show on purpose — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/far-from-heaven.md) - *All That Heaven Allows* (1955): Sirk again, a widow and a gardener, and a television set as the villain - *Passing* (2021): Rebecca Hall’s black-and-white Harlem story about two women and one lie, told quietly - *Ali: Fear Eats the Soul* (1974): Fassbinder takes Sirk’s cleaning woman and shows what Munich thinks of her - *Mildred Pierce* (1945), Fi1m 83: Joan Crawford works herself up from waitress to ruin for an ungrateful daughter — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/mildred-pierce-1945.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/imitation-of-life