His art teacher tells him his work lacks talent, so he returns to London to become a medical doctor, but his moodiness and chronic self-doubt make it difficult for him to keep up in his schoolwork.

Philip falls passionately in love with tearoom waitress Mildred Rogers, even though she is disdainful of his club foot and his obvious interest in her.

Philip begins to forget Mildred when he becomes involved with Norah, an attractive and considerate romance writer working under a male pseudonym.

At a dinner party celebrating their engagement, one of Philip's medical student friends, Harry Griffiths, flirts with Mildred, who somewhat reciprocates.

A second time, Philip again finds some comfort in his studies, and with Sally Athelny, the tender-hearted daughter of one of his elderly patients in a charity hospital.

Things take a turn for the worse when Mildred moves in, spitefully wrecks his apartment, destroys his paintings and books, and burns the securities and bonds he was given by an uncle to finance his tuition.

Instead of Barthelmess, Cromwell's attention was drawn to Bette Davis, whose portrayal of a femme fatale brought to mind the slatternly waitress Mildred in W. Somerset Maugham's 1915 novel Of Human Bondage.

After reading it and learning RKO held the screen rights, she implored Jack L. Warner to lend her to the rival studio.

[3] Warner finally relented only because Mervyn LeRoy wanted RKO contract player Irene Dunne for Sweet Adeline, the screen adaptation of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical, and the two studios agreed to trade actresses.

"[7] Film historian Kingley Canham observes that Leslie Howard, in the "gentlemanly understatement" of his performance, served as a counter-balance to Davis’ frequent domination of her less-talented male co-stars.

"[7][10] Nervous about audience reaction to her performance, Davis opted not to attend a preview of the film in Santa Barbara, although her mother Ruth and husband Harmon O. Nelson went.

After watching the film several times, they felt the Max Steiner score was to blame, and the composer wrote a new one that included a motif for each of the principal characters.

It may not possess any great dramatic strength, but the very lifelike quality of the story and the marked authenticity of its atmosphere cause the spectators to hang on every word uttered by the interesting group of characters."

[11] Also that year, a reviewer in Life magazine called Bette Davis's performance the greatest ever recorded on screen by an actress.

"[12] The generally rave reviews upset Warner executives, who were embarrassed one of their contract players was being acclaimed for a film made at another studio, and they tried to exclude its title from any publicity about Davis.

A loud faction heralding Davis's performance ended up with the academy allowing "write in" votes in addition to the official nominees that year.

Price Waterhouse was hired to count the votes and initiated the custom of keeping the results a secret the following year,[5][7] when Davis was named Best Actress for Dangerous.

Original pre-print materials are not known to survive, but the film was preserved by the Library of Congress from archival 35mm elements and this version was released on US DVD and Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in 2013.

The movie title is never revealed but the tagline "There’s a fool like him in every family — and a woman next door to take him over" is mentioned and the plotline is described in detail over three pages in the first chapter of the novel.