Hitchcock's adaptation rearranges the plot of Noël Coward's play to begin and end in divorce court, where the camera peers through the dour judge's monocle at the accused, Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans). Wrongly convicted of “misconduct,” Larita flees from her reputation to the South of France, where she meets and marries an Englishman. Unfortunately, her ever-so-proper in-laws read the Tatler, and when they discover her identity, she can only fulfill their scandalized expectations. Hitchcock enlivens this lesson in the brutality of British polite society with bits of business such as a marriage proposal played out entirely in the reactions of an eavesdropping telephone operator.
—Juliet Clark