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Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life (1958)

tomatometer

67

Average Rating: 5.8/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 2

No consensus yet.

audience

91

liked it
Average Rating: 4.2/5
User Ratings: 9,013

My Rating

Movie Info

This glamorized remake of the 1934 film Imitation of Life bears only a passing resemblance to its source, the best-selling novel by Fannie Hurst. Originally, the heroine was a widowed mother who kept the wolf from the door by setting up a successful pancake business with her black housemaid. In the remake, Lana Turner stars as a would-be actress who is raising her daughter on her own. She chances to meet another single mother at the beach: African-American Juanita Moore. Moore goes to work as

Unrated,

Drama, Classics

Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott

Jan 7, 2003

Universal Studios

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All Critics (23) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (20) | Rotten (4) | DVD (4)

Imitation of Life is still a potent onion. When passed before the moviegoer's eyes, it may force theater owners to install aisle scuppers to drain off the tears.

May 20, 2011 Full Review Source: TIME Magazine
TIME Magazine
Top Critic IconTop Critic

While this device lends more scope, it also results in the overdone busy actress/neglected daughter conflict.

March 19, 2009 Full Review Source: Variety
Variety
Top Critic IconTop Critic

This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.

March 25, 2006 Full Review Source: New York Times
New York Times
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Forget those who decry the '50s Hollywood melodrama; it is through the conventions of that hyper-emotional genre that Sirk is able to make such a devastatingly embittered and pessimistic movie.

February 9, 2006 Full Review Source: Time Out
Time Out
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Douglas Sirk's 1959 film was the biggest grosser in Universal's history until the release of Airport, yet it's also one of the most intellectually demanding films ever made in Hollywood.

January 1, 2000 Full Review Source: Chicago Reader
Chicago Reader
Top Critic IconTop Critic

You'll be horrified at how this hokum manipulates you, but the best strategy is to just surrender and enjoy it.

May 20, 2011 Full Review Source: TV Guide's Movie Guide
TV Guide's Movie Guide

A consummate display of populist weepie-making.

May 20, 2011 Full Review Source: Empire Magazine
Empire Magazine

[VIDEO] Set in postwar New York, "Imitation of Life" is a wonderfully deceptive film.

April 29, 2011 Full Review Source: ColeSmithey.com
ColeSmithey.com

What [the characters] need most from their maker is something he couldn't have given them at the time: the 1960s.

August 20, 2009 Full Review Source: City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul

Glossy soaper ahead of its racially themed time.

September 25, 2005
Video-Reviewmaster.com

Douglas Sirk's last Hollywood film is the jewel in his crown, a visually audacious, powerfully acted melodrama, with Lana Turner and Juanita Moore in top form, that was misunderstood and dismissed at the time as just a weepie or soap opera.

June 12, 2005 Full Review Source: EmanuelLevy.Com
EmanuelLevy.Com

Sirk immediately and deliberately acknowledges the film's metaphoric, almost pathological obsession with surfaces.

July 3, 2003 Full Review Source: Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine

Review Imitation Of Life is another of those Douglas Sirk melodramas that no critic had a good word to say about at the time of their release but are now widely considered movie masterpieces.

May 24, 2003 Full Review Source: Film4
Film4

The film is a biting critique of American race relations in the Fifties and a complex study in contrasts and paradoxes.

March 10, 2003 Full Review Source: Austin Chronicle
Austin Chronicle

The ultimate Sirk film, the contradictions breaking the back of the melodrama genre for all time and Sirk gobbling up and spitting out his Hollywood career like a badger devouring its young.

August 27, 2002 Full Review Source: Filmcritic.com
Filmcritic.com

Audience Reviews for Imitation of Life

A sweet and sour pie of the morality and values of it's time. Tasty, colorful in the outside, with so much hipocrisy, prejudices lurking inside. Its deep sensitive core could only be reached by Sirk's nobility. His lyrical and non judgemental treatment , helped by one of the best cinematographers that ever was, Mr. Russell Metty, and amazing performers, beginning with a surprisingly good Lana Turner (This and "The Bad and the Beautiful" were without a doubt her finest acting moments).
March 23, 2008
pier007

Super Reviewer

Imitation of Life is sentimental without being sappy. It's also boldly allegorical without being preachy. I'm tempted to say that it was ahead of its time but, by 1959, it was long overdue.
January 21, 2009
flixsterman
Randy Tippy

Super Reviewer

    1. Lora Meredith: I'm going up and up and up. And no one's going to pull me down. [ambitious actress telling husband she's no housewife]
    – Submitted by rick b (13 months ago)

Discussion Forum

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Foreign Titles

  • Solange es Menschen gibt (DE)
  • Mirage de la vie (FR)
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