.... hackneyed story of the tinseled but tarnished prostitute who thinks she has finally discovered the silver lining for her life in Mr. Right. But, of course, there are serious complications. For one thing, he has a wife, a generous and understanding woman who weighs upon his conscience heavily. For another, he tends, in jealous rages, to remind his light of love of what she's been. For a third, she also is unable, in the stillness of the night, to forget. And so there is really no hope for her; she can never find happiness. She is trapped in a jurisdictional battle and must pay the wages of sin....By the odds, it should be a bomb. But a bomb it is not, let us tell you.... the ending is absurd. But so is most of it for that matter. It's the living it up that gets you in this film.

Alterations made on John O’Hara’s 1935 novel by the scenarists (among other things, they have updated it from the Prohibition era, spectacularized the ending and refined some of the dialog) have given Butterfield 8 the form and pace it needs, but the story itself remains a weak one, the behavior and motivations of its characters no more tangible than in the original work.