John Stahl is the master of the thirties family melodrama (and it's fitting that three of his films, including this one, were remade by fifties master Douglas Sirk). Stahl's Imitation of Life, alongside Vidor's Stella Dallas, is the most remarkable in that cycle, more for its bald questions of race than for those of woman's place. But with four troubled women-two mothers and two daughters-there's sufficient suffering to go around. The twenty-year saga begins as widow Claudette Colbert teams up with her maid Louise Beavers to market a home-tested pancake recipe. Consciously no doubt, the premise is liberal, with its black/white friendship virtually unknown elsewhere in thirties film. However, the "woman's weepie" conventions of self-sacrifice reach new depths when doubled with the self-sacrifice of an Aunt Jemima-ish black stereotype. Though it's Beavers' recipe that has made them both rich, she opts to retain her maid-like role in the business and household. Asked by Colbert to name her one desire, it's "a nice funeral." And yet...and yet...the film is much more complex than this description suggests: Stahl's bright, open visual style is not at all naive, and provides pointed comments on the upstairs/downstairs separation of the races. Less ambiguous is the cautionary tale about women in business (on which Mildred Pierce a decade later provided the last word). Neglecting, apparently, their full-time roles as mothers, their daughters grow into wilful brats, eager to steal Mom's lover, or, worse "pass" for white. (Unavailable for several years in any film or video format, Imitation of Life will be debuted tonight in a new 35mm print from the Library of Congress.) Scott Simmon