Such a pity that Detlef Sierck was unable to realise his wish to film Anton Checkhov's 'The Shooting Party' whilst working at UFA Studios, even more so in that, as Douglas Sirk, he eventually turned out this homogenised Hollywood version.
Mr. Sirk's visual sense is evident here and it is nicely shot by Archie Stout but the whole enterprise is studio bound, pedestrian and utterly devoid of passion.
The film's poster is designed to show the physical attributes of ravishing Linda Darnell who plays the first of her sultry temptresses. Her beauty wreaks havoc in the lives of her woodcutter husband played touchingly by Hugo Haas whose East European accent makes his character refreshingly idiomatic; the blinkered, hedonistic and utterly loveable aristocrat of veteran scene stealer Edward Everett Horton and the judge of George Sanders. Although Russian by birth, Gentleman George in his first of three films for this director, is far too urbane to convince in such a passionate role whilst his scenes with Miss Darnell lack the necessary fire.
In retrospect, with the notable exception of Clarence Brown's 'Anna Karenina', Hollywood's attempts to film Slavonic literature must be accounted a failure. The cultural gap is simply too vast.
