This is a better adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel than Douglas Sirk's overrated 1959 version. All the "gloss" that producer Ross Hunter put into Sirk's remake is thankfully absent from this classic, elegant melodrama. As played by Claudette Corbett, Bea Pullman (renamed Lora in Lana Turner's vehicle) is a sexy widow and hard-working woman, not a past-her-prime glamour queen becoming a superstar, while all the racist elements are stronger and more interestingly portrayed, since all prejudices are taken as the norm, for granted. The central characters are just what the "American dream" of yore pretended them to be: Delilah, the typical Mamie; Peola, a sad mulatta; and Bea, a woman who waits 20 years for the right man and ends putting him in hold, as the Hays Code demanded. Very good.
Review of Imitation of Life
