Review – The Painted Veil (1934)

Not even Greta Garbo can do much to save this strangely-paced production of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel about infidelity and cholera. The first half of the movie is squandered on the lead-up to the unfaithful wife’s transgression, leaving a lot of plot to be packed into the last 40 minutes or so. The production values are also largely lavished on the beginning, with elaborate set work in the Shanghai sequences giving way to mediocre recreations of the Chinese countryside. Both the 1957 and the 2006 versions of the tale are superior to this telling. Mildly amusing