Imitation of Life (1934) on Netflix
Widow Bea Pullman sells maple syrup door to door. Delilah Johnson and her daughter Peola arrive at the wrong house, and Delilah offers to keep house for room and board.
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- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bea Pullman is a widow with a two-year-old daughter, Jessie, and the maple syrup she sells from door to door brings in very little. Delilah Johnson, a housekeeper who has been turned away because she has a child, mistakes an advertisement and arrives at the wrong address. While Bea is upstairs pulling Jessie out of the bathtub, Delilah fixes breakfast. She introduces her daughter Peola, whose light complexion hides her ancestry. Bea says she cannot afford help, so Delilah proposes keeping house in return for room and board, and the four live together as a family. The household especially enjoys Delilah's pancakes, made from a family recipe she keeps secret. Bea then persuades a landlord to refurbish a boardwalk storefront and living quarters on credit, and the two women open a pancake restaurant, cooking in the front window.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Imitation of Life (1934)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Hays Office censors made Universal fight for approval of its script: Joseph Breen objected to the story's miscegenation as a violation of the Production Code and "very dangerous", and rejected the project, saying Hurst's novel violated the miscegenation clause "in spirit, if not in fact".
- Censors also objected to language in the script and to a scene in which a young black man is nearly lynched for approaching a white woman; Breen kept refusing to approve the script until July 17, by which time the director had already been shooting for two weeks.
- Universal first wanted Paul Lukas for the male lead, but instead borrowed Warren William from Warner Bros. for the part.
- Fannie Hurst's inspiration for her novel Imitation of Life was a road trip to Canada she took with her friend, the African-American short-story writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.
- Fredi Washington reportedly received a great deal of mail from young black people thanking her for expressing their intimate concerns so well; the film's casting of a black actress in such a part was unusual and became a Hollywood stereotype of sorts.
