Wyler's 1940 version of the Somerset Maugham play set in Malaya, where the expatriates rage, contains some of the most forceful craftsmanship Hollywood had to offer: only the strength of a performance by Bette Davis could balance the unrelenting atmospheric control of Wyler's direction and the persistent undercurrent of Max Steiner's "fate" music. The result is an insightful, sometimes subtle work of art. Davis, the indomitable wife of a rubber plantation manager (the ever-dominated Herbert Marshall), is suspected of adultery after the murder of an intruder while her husband is away. To suppress incriminating evidence, she weaves a web of lies (the thread picked up by Tony Gaudio's camera), which are believed by her husband but not by her lawyer (James Stephenson). Even more than in the scenes between Davis and Marshall, which smoke; more than in her passionate outbursts about "the man I killed," which only boil over; it is in the scenes between Davis and lawyer Stephenson that the film's true impetus is revealed as a seething, inexpressible sexuality. Maugham's play presented a problem to Hays Code Hollywood, with a murderess and an adultress who goes "free"-to live a fate worse than death with a man she does not love. The film's invented retribution ironically serves to reverse the sentence.