 Aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) meets Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) 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 (Karen Dicker and, later, Susan Kohner), 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 (Terry Burnham and then Sandra Dee) in a single-minded quest for stardom. Legendary movie director Douglas Sirk s last American film.