In this period piece, Barbara Stanwyck, having escaped small-town housewifery ten years earlier, comes home to Riverdale, Wisconsin, after a failed career on the New York stage. Lying in wait are her would-be actress daughter; her old lover, still interested; and her husband, still uninteresting. A "happy ending" was tacked on by producer Ross Hunter over Sirk's protestations; however on a visit to PFA in 1979, Sirk handily convinced a packed Wheeler Auditorium that this ending was anything but happy. As he also notes in Sirk on Sirk, "Stanwyck doesn't get her love again-there is something blocking her. This was a pre-study of the 'actress' in Imitation of Life. She comes back from an imitated life...with all her dreams-and she finds nothing but this rotten, decrepit middle-class American family."