The Painted Veil

A Viennese woman marries a bacteriologist almost as soon as she meets him and goes with him to China. Alone there, she begins an affair with a diplomat. When her husband finds out, he takes her as punishment into the interior region where cholera is tearing through the population and where he has taken up his post. From that point her story stops being a drama of adultery and becomes the story of someone looking, in the middle of an epidemic, for a use for herself. This was the first major Hollywood version of Somerset Maugham's novel and one of Greta Garbo's films from the period when the Hays Code came into full force. The studio built its China entirely in Los Angeles, and that set-bound China and the way the parts were cast are what the film is most argued about now. Against that, Garbo carries the guilt she feels toward her husband in looks rather than lines. Herbert Marshall plays the doctor without ever dropping his distance. A new adaptation with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton followed in 2006.