On the other hand, you may yearn for her to simply burn the church down as it stands as a symbol of a misguided subservient life that led straight to the grave. I love ya… I love ya more than you can guess! There are a couple of very significant differences between the book and either adaptation: (1) in the book, the white mother loses the man she loves (I believe he’s actually her assistant, shades of MAN WANTED) to her daughter. That’s probably because the stuff that would titillate current audiences– Colbert’s apparent control and domination of a then-modern baking empire– is swept under the rug in favor of the usual romantic gloss and cheese. Sirk found his niche with lush melodramas that were hugely popular at the time but critically ignored and dismissed as “weepies” or “women’s films”. You get the feeling from her that she’s waited years to take this stereotype and layer something deeper, something tragic to it. Imitation of Life (1934) Plot Summary (3) A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter; the two women start a successful business, but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! There’s another interesting little piece of social commentary when Jessie returns from college and segues into dropping out because she’s met a boy. She’s going away, and she’s never coming back. The character of Aunt Jemima was, as I’m sure you already knew, inspired by a minstrel show performance in 1889, where an Aunt Jemima was played by “. You can’t ask your mammy to do this! Peola, played by real life light skinned black woman Fredi Washington, has a real rage brimming under the surface that few actresses got the chance to demonstrate. Vadim Rizov at Mubi puts this better than I ever could: The main issue in both [this film and the remake] in the black story is the light-skinned daughter’s desire to pass for white. Writer, broadcaster, film critic, public speaker and film programmer. But what makes Imitation of Life so interesting is the subversive and ironic touches that Sirk includes. Not many people know that the actual inspiration for Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life came from a road trip to Canada that the author took with her friend Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed black short-story writer and folklorist who wrote Mules and Men (1935), a non-fiction study of black culture in Florida, and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), a novel about a black preacher. Sirk began his career working in theatre and film during Germany’s Weimar Republic but like so many other filmmakers in Germany at the time, he left for Hollywood when the Nazis seized power. He beat his fists against life all his days. But once the pancake empire took off, and Beavers claimed she didn’t want any money for it because it was soooo awesome to live in the basement & cook for Colbert, I felt the movie lost its way.