Sirk's last film and his farewell to Hollywood. The story of two kinds of imitated life: that of a white actress insensibly working her way to the top, and of a young black girl trying to pass for white. "Imitation of Life-which could be subtitled 'The Death of Sisyphus'-is Sirk's most titanic film: massive and faulted, its faults overcome by the very largeness of its successes. It is also one of the most moving American films ever made. Sirk subtly induces the audience to turn against the bland respectability of Lana Turner and Sandra Dee, the nominal leads, and draws us into an underworld of back-stairs, neonized gutters, and assembly-line chorus-lines with an exploited black maid (Juanita Moore) and her daughter (Susan Kohner). (Both Moore and Kohner received Oscar nominations.) The film's true emotional dynamics burst forth at the end, and the extravagant concluding funeral procession is Sirk's apocalypse-a black mass for all the lost chances and futile desperations that form the core of his films" (PFA Calendar, Sirk Tribute, 11/79).