An undercurrent of subversion flowed like a Stygian river through American films in the self-satisfied '50s but usually through degraded genres like the psychotic Anthony Mann westerns, the consumer-culture comedy-spewing mashups of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, and jittery subterranean B-noirs. But Douglas Sirk was the only incendiary director who managed to burrow deep inside Citadel Hollywood, exploding big budget weepers like a suicide bomber.

Imitation of Life -- Sirk's final Hollywood film -- is 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. Imitation of Life stars the walking oak tree John Gavin and white-bread movie star phony Lana Turner (who performs an excellent nightclub impersonation of Lana Turner, daughter Sandra Dee admonishing her, "Oh mama! Stop acting!") in a moldy plot about a career woman who demands showbiz success while rejecting love and family.

But like Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall in Sirk's Written on the Wind, the mundane movie star civics lesson is subverted by the rolling, pestilential supporting players Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, who introduce a nasty subtext of racism, hopelessness and despair that makes even Todd Hayne's homage Far From Heaven look like High School Musical 3. Turner's struggling actress character Lora Meredith, raising her beautiful daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) as a single mom, gets a benediction from God when the eternally good and persevering black woman Annie Johnson (Moore) agrees (for no charge!) to be her housekeeper. But Annie is freighted with her sour and dour daughter Sarah Jane (Kohner), who is light-skinned and passes for white as long as it's in the sleaziest sections of town. This termite subplot explodes the works.

Imitation of Life over-inflates the screen with baroque Sirk compositions that relentlessly undercut whatever the characters express, and with racism and oppression front and center, skewering their half-baked liberal pretensions. The miasma climaxes in a spewingly ornate black funeral mass complete with a Cinemascope tabernacle, a blaring brass band, four adorned white horses, and Mahalia Jackson. After a rocky two-hour ride through the bejeweled bowels of Sirk, Lana Turner's sickly limp remark, "It's funny the way things turn out," becomes the height of lunk-headed understatement in a belligerently overstated film.



Let's pretend these are real sandwiches, too.