Based on the 1925 novel The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, with a screenplay by John Meehan, Salka Viertel, and Edith Fitzgerald, the film is about a woman who accompanies her new husband to China while he conducts medical research.
The film score was by Herbert Stothart, the cinematography by William H. Daniels, the art direction by Cedric Gibbons, and the costume design by Adrian.
After her sister Olga marries and leaves home, Katrin Koerber, the daughter of an Austrian medical professor, fights loneliness and dreams of a more exciting life outside Austria.
As soon as the newlyweds arrive in Hong Kong, however, Walter becomes consumed with his medical work, and Katrin becomes the romantic target of Jack Townsend, the unhappily married attaché to the British embassy.
He tells her that he still loves her and will end her suffering by sending her back to Hong Kong, while he prepares to leave for a remote river village that has been identified as the root of the epidemic.
[1] Andre Sennwald of The New York Times critic enthused over Garbo's performance while recognizing weaknesses in the story: “She continues handsomely to be the world's greatest cinema actress in this...drama...Tracing its ancestry to Somerset Maugham's novel, which it resembles only in the casual surface qualities...(It) allows Miss Garbo to triumph once more over the emotional rubber-stamps that the studios arrange for her...She is the most miraculous blend of personality and sheer dramatic talent that the screen has ever known and her presence in The Painted Veil immediately makes it one of the season's cinema events.
Watch her stalking about with long and nervous steps, her shoulders bent and her body awkward with grief, while she waits to be told if her husband will die from the coolie's dagger thrust.
Watch the veiled terror in her face as she sits at dinner with her husband, not knowing if he is aware of her infidelity; or her superb gallantry when she informs him of what it was that drove her into the arms of his friend; or her restlessness on the bamboo porch in Mei-Tan-Fu with the tinny phonograph, the heat and her conscience.