"The Monthly Film Bulletin" praised the "technical quality" of the film and called the acting "good," but thought that the ending was "brief and not very satisfactory" and that it was "often difficult to know quite what is getting at, whether he is making a profound protest against war and senseless murder or just presenting simple melodrama." B. R. Crisler of "The New York Times" disliked the film, praising Peter Lorre for his performance as "one of the most amusing and somehow one of the most wistfully appealing trigger men since Victor Moore," but criticizing technical aspects such as "inexpert camera technique" and "strangely uneven sound recording." He also thought Madeleine Carroll was a "waste" in her role. Writing for "The Spectator" in 1936, Graham Greene gave the film a poor review, characterizing it as a despoilment of Maugham's "" and dismissing it as "a series of small 'amusing' melodramatic situations". According to Greene, these "melodramatic situations" are built perfunctorily "paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities[, and then drop[ped:] they mean nothing: they lead to nothing". Greene jokes that the element of humour may have at least livened the film with laughter.