On the surface this is a tearjerker about an extramarital affair.But Lana Turner also turns in a thoughtful performance touching on more difficult themes including fears about getting old, selflessness, and self-respect.The affair between Lily and dapper, married Steve (Ray Milland) is convincing, although they never are shown so much as kissing in this black-and-white weepie from 1950. However, nothing much has changed in the dynamics of trying to be happy at someone else's expense.It's interesting to see the beautiful Ms. Turner not winning the man in the end. Here she winds up lonely but stronger and wiser. I don't mind a message now and then and this one's a goodie.

As usual ,George Cukor directs his actresses masterfully;not only Lana Turner -who was rarely as good as here ,except for Sirk's ,Garnett's and Minelli's works)but also Ann Dvorak as a jaded aging model and Margaret Philips as the disabled wife who steals every scene she is in;on the other hand ,Ray Milland does not seem to be very interested in his part (I could mention at least ten movies in which he is much better than here ).The script is average- for Cukor whose standards were often high-, borrowing from an older movie by John M.Stahl ,the prince of the thirties melodrama :"when tomorrow comes "(1939) later remade by Sirk as the mediocre "Interlude"; the trick of the sick wife was a bit hackneyed even in 1950.This is a rather talky movie,with an interminable final conversation between Turner and Barry Sullivan to make the viewer understand that now the model is in the same situation as Mary,which we already knew.

Tale of a woman coming from Kansas to New York only to hit it big as a model, but unable to capture the man she loved.Lana Turner is that woman and at the beginning of the film, she acts just like that girl who had been discovered in a drug store sipping soda some years before.There is one terrific performance by Ann Dvorak, an aging model, whose life is on the skids. Dvorak represents what can happen to women as they get older and are not able to cope with the changes that it brings. Miss Dvorak is the embodiment of that discontented woman, bitter and not knowing what else life will bring her. Unfortunately, her appearance in the film is a brief one, as she commits suicide.The rest of the story is devoted to Turner falling in love with Ray Milland, a wealthy married man whose wife is wheel-chair bound due to a car accident that he caused.When love blossoms between the two, Turner becomes hard-boiled in her intentions to tell the wife of what is going on. Of course, kindness and reality set in when Turner sees how dependent the wife is.Louis Calhern is very good as the man about town with a heart and Barry Sullivan is quite adequate as a gigolo, who knows what life can be all about.

Years ago, movies of this type were called "women's movies". The label wasn't intended to demean, just identify the niche the film fit into. My mother, bless her heart, would faithfully troop down to the matinée and suffer along with Joan or Barbara or, in this case, Lana as they faced up nobly to what only a woman in those days could appreciate. In short, a programmer like this had a ready-made audience, and I suspect MGM was counting on that when they put marquee names up front and then let them coast through the production. The consensus from other reviewers is dead-on. The principals—Turner and Milland—are indeed miscast and lethargic, while even the normally sparkling Cukor-touch appears flat and uninvolved except for the energetically choreographed opening. As others point out, what interest there is surfaces at the margins, especially with the superbly shaded performance from an unknown Margaret Phillips as the invalid wife. A role like that can easily descend into the depths of bathos and parody. Nonetheless, Phillips manages to be appealing without being pathetic—quite a challenge for an unsung actress who deserved more than a brief TV career. Even though the film is clearly a second-rate effort, I expect it still made money, thanks to the star-power of its principals and a ready-made audience that, nevertheless, deserved better.