It was directed by Jean Negulesco and produced by Frank Ross from a screenplay by Merle Miller, based on the 1937 novel The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield.

The film stars Lana Turner, Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Joan Caulfield and Michael Rennie with Eugenie Leontovich.

In India to purchase some horses, British aristocrat Lord Esketh (Michael Rennie) and his wife Edwina (Lana Turner) come to the town of Ranchipur at the invitation of the elderly Maharani (Eugenie Leontovich).

Their marriage is an unhappy one, and Lord Esketh announces his intention to return to England and begin divorce proceedings.

She renews in Ranchipur an acquaintance with an old friend and former lover, Tom Ransome (Fred MacMurray), once a brilliant engineer, now a dissolute alcoholic.

She also meets and attempts to seduce a distinguished Hindu physician, Dr. Rama Safti (Richard Burton), a decent man who is the elderly Maharani's personal choice to succeed her someday.

At the end of the reception welcoming Lord and Lady Esketh to Ranchipur, the Maharani, who prepared for Edwina’s arrival by reading newspaper clippings, sees that she has already begun to seduce Safti and confronts her.

Safti admits his love and Lord Esketh, now sympathetic toward this good man's plight, describes their marriage in blunt terms.

He apologizes and tells her the truth about himself: a disillusioned idealist who grew sick of the postwar world and hid in Ranchipur and the bottle.

After the first tremors, Safti runs for the hospital, leaving Edwina in a frenzy, partly caused by the fact that she is sick.

The writer and producer, both friends of mine, tactlessly, unkindly and repeatedly informed me that their script was infinitely superior to the one Julien Josephson and I had written, which they dismissed as too old fashioned and corny for our purposes.

Unfortunately for them, in the process they eliminated the most important event of all, the naughty lady's death, thereby violating the very essence of author Bromfield's original design.

They turned a noble tragedy, corny or not, into a mere romantic interlude and thus achieved what they deserved: a resounding flop.