Plot
White widow Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and her daughter Jessie (Juanita Quigley as a toddler, Marilyn Knowlden as an eight-year-old) take in black housekeeper Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) and her daughter, light-complexioned Peola (Sebie Hendricks) — exchanging room and board for work, even though Bea is struggling to make ends meet herself. Delilah and Peola quickly become like family to Jessie and Bea. They particularly enjoy Delilah's pancakes, made from a special family recipe. Five years later, Jessie and Peola prove to be challenging children to raise: Jessie is demanding, not particularly studious, relying instead on her charm, and is the first person to call Peola "black" in a hurtful way, making it clear that their childhood idyll is doomed. Peola does not tell her classmates at school that she is "colored" and is humiliated when her mother shows up one day, revealing her secret.
Bea finds it difficult to make a living selling pancake syrup (as her husband had done). Using her wiles to get a store on the busy Atlantic City boardwalk refurbished for practically nothing, she opens a pancake restaurant on the boardwalk (with Delilah cooking in the front window). Later, at the suggestion of a passerby, Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks), she sets up an even more successful pancake flour corporation, marketing Delilah as an Aunt Jemima-like figure. She gives Delilah a 20% interest in the business but Delilah continues to act as Bea's housekeeper. As a result, Bea becomes a wealthy business woman, but all is not well as the story advances ten years.
Eighteen-year-old Jessie (Rochelle Hudson), home on college vacation, falls in love with her mother's boyfriend, Stephen Archer (Warren William), who is unaware at first of her affections. Meanwhile, Peola (Fredi Washington), ashamed of her African-American heritage, attempts to pass as white, breaking Delilah's heart. Peola runs away from her Negro college and takes a job as a cashier in a white store. When her mother and Bea track her down, she is again humiliated to be identified as black and ultimately tells her mother that she is going away, never to return, so she can pass as a white woman without the fear that Delilah will show up. Delilah is literally heartbroken and, in a melodramatic scene, takes to her bed and dies, murmuring Peola's name and forgiving her. The black servants are glimpsed singing a spiritual as she passes, Bea holding her hand at the end. Delilah's last wish had been for a large, grand funeral, complete with a marching band and a horse-drawn hearse. Just before the processional begins, a remorseful, crying Peola appears, begging her mother to forgive her.
Peola returns to her Negro college and presumably abandons her efforts to pass as white. The film ends with Bea breaking her engagement with Stephen because of the situation with Jessie and doesn't want to hurt her feelings while being with him; although Bea promises to come find him once Jessie has forgotten him. The movie ends with Bea embracing Jessie while remembering Jessie's insistent demands for her toy duck (her "quack quack") back when she was a toddler.
Read more about this topic: Imitation Of Life (1934 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)