7:00 p.m.	Imitation of Life Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1959)

Antonia Lant is the editor of the anthology Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema; she joins us to sign copies of the book and to discuss the research behind it. Her presentation will illuminate the ways in which the critical debate around John Stahl’s 1934 melodrama Imitation of Life created a context for Douglas Sirk’s 1959 version.

Massive and flawed, its faults overcome by the very largeness of its successes, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life is deeply moving and deeply American. Sirk subtly induces the audience to turn against the bland respectability of Lana Turner and Sandra Dee, the nominal leads, and draws us into an underworld of backstairs, neonized gutters, and assembly-line chorus-lines with an exploited black maid (Juanita Moore) and her passing daughter (Susan Kohner). (Both Moore and Kohner received Oscar nominations.) The film’s true emotional dynamics burst forth at the end in a Sirkian apocalypse, a lament for lost chances and futile desperations.

Red Velvet Seat is available in the Museum Store for $39.95, paperback. Purchase a copy at the screening and receive a 10 percent discount!

• Written by Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott, from the novel by Fannie Hurst. Photographed by Russell Metty. With Lana Turner, Sandra Dee, Susan Kohner, Juanita Moore. (124 mins plus 30 mins lecture, Color, 35mm, From Universal Pictures)