A struggling young actress with a six-year-old daughter sets up housekeeping with a homeless black widow and her light-skinned eight-year-old daughter who rejects her mother by trying to pass for white.
Aspiring actress Lora Meredith meets Annie Johnson a homeless black woman at Coney Island and soon they share a tiny apartment. Each woman has an intolerable daughter, though Annie's little girl Sarah Jane, is by far the worse. Neurotic and obnoxious, Sarah Jane doesn't like being black; since she's light-skinned (her father was practically white), she spends the rest of the film passing as white, much to her mother's heartache and shame. Lora, meanwhile, virtually ignores her own daughter in a single-minded quest for stardom.
Written by alfiehitchie
Lana Turner took a much smaller salary, than her usual $25,000 per week and worked for 50% of the film's profits, which earned her over $2 million (setting a record for an actress at the time).
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Goofs
Revealing mistakes:
Susan Kohner's bedroom clock radio is unplugged throughout both its scenes, although she switches it on to music in the second scene.
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Juanita Moore, who plays Annie, is billed with the credit "And Presenting
Juanita Moore as Annie Johnson", even though she had already appeared in
many films.
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