“If Somerset Maugham's novel was very much a book for men, the film version was very much a Kitsch picture for women. Maugham's idealistic hero, Larry Darrell...is glamorized out of recognition in the starry-eyed person of Tyrone Power.... Despite (this and) improbable decors, the film succeeds. Edmund Goulding's work is immaculate. Each performance reflects the suave intelligence of a director whose sophistication matches Maugham's own.... Gene Tierney was again admirable as Isabel Maturin, rich and heartless prototype of the American woman of the Twenties.... Elliott Templeton - the brittle Twenties snob whose greatest boast is that he has lured two ex-kings to lunch - is brought faultlessly to life by Clifton Webb, Herbert Marshall plays with beautiful discretion as Maugham, and Anne Baxter, though not quite sympathetic enough for the part, captures the agony and confusion of the pathetic Sophie. In a film full of carefully balanced and tailored scenes, one stands out: the death of Elliot Templeton, directed to perfection from the opening shot of a nurse reading a phrase of Vigny to the demise of the arch-snob, his mouth falling open after declining an invitation to the biggest party of the season.” --“Hollywood in the Forties”