The critics are unanimous that this is Bette Davis’s film, and most say it is one of her finest hours. Every review returns to the performance: the socialite who moves from denial and anger through to resignation, the delicacy of the scenes in which her sight fails, and the final close-up, which several single out as the moment the whole picture has been building towards. Edmund Goulding’s direction draws praise too, particularly for shooting in sequence so that Davis could build the decline in order.
The reservations cluster around everything that is not Davis. Radio Times calls the story codswallop and finds Humphrey Bogart miscast as the stable hand; The New Yorker finds the plotting banal and George Brent perfunctory; Empire agrees about Brent and adds Max Steiner’s score to the list of weaker elements. Eye for Film concedes it may look overblown and sentimental to modern eyes. The spread is narrow, from good to excellent, with nobody dissenting from the view that the star carries it.