The film starts bad and ends even worse. You have hopes for Janet Munro in the beginning, and you do hope she will make it and come out all right, especially when the sympathetic John Stride takes care of her and even is willing to marry her although she expects a child with another, his patience and tolerance is magnificent, but she always wants something else, and that's what brought her down the wrong lane from the beginning. Her acting is superb, and so is everyone else's, while Alan Badel puts the final stamp of doom on her fate by his mere mesmerising presence. The story is bleak, like a naturalistic documentary from the minds of Zola or Flaubert, her character is very much like Madame Bovary's, and it is not a cheerful saga and too common to become a real tragedy - curiously enough, from the beginning she detests everything common, but that's actually where she ends up.