Imitation of Life (Blu-ray)

THE CRITERION COLLECTION

Melodrama master John M. Stahl (Magnificent Obsession) brings his exquisite restraint and almost spiritually pure visual style to this devastating, enduringly relevant story of mothers and daughters.

Imitation of Life explores the friendship between two struggling single mothers: one (It Happened One Night’s Claudette Colbert) a working class white woman who ascends to the top of the business world, the other (Beulah’s Louise Beavers) her Black housekeeper, whose life is shattered by the rejection of her rebellious, white-passing daughter (One Mile from Heaven’s Fredi Washington). It is this latter relationship—attuned to America’s bitter racial realities and heartbreakingly enacted by trailblazing Black performers Beavers and Washington—that lends the film its transcendent emotional power.

This first adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s best-selling novel boldly confronts the complexities and contradictions of racial identity, economic exploitation, and the limits of the American dream