There are too many films and stories like this, all being true stories, all being equally pathetic going irrevocably from bad to worse without exceptions, and the wallowing in pathetic alcoholism gradually makes your empathy dry out - like Michael Strange, John Baarymore's second wife and mother of Diana Barrymore, you are brought up to callousness, and although you'll never hate the alcoholic, yoiu will the more hate his self-destructiveness, which really isn't an illness as much as a failure and bankruptcy of self control and self discipline. Like Vincent Bryant (Efrem Zimbalist Jr) you find the only answer to the problem is hard work.
The film is too long, while the two great credits of the film is Errol Flynn (who knew John Barrymore well and described the same decline and fall from greatness) and the music by Ernest Gold which is strikingly good from the very beginning, like from any great romantic film of the 40s, showing her budding as a school girl to eventually grow up to a Barrymore family star in the 40s to then follow in her father's footsteps into alcoholism, decline and fall -- she died the year after Errol Flynn at 39. Susan Hayward made a similar film in 1955 ("I'll Cry Tomorrow") which is much better and more interesting and also more human, where there is full space for empathy, that can't run out. This is just a slow, long and painful ordeal of a pitfall that never ends, and the happy end of the film was just some kind of a temporary solution - like in "Tle Lost Weekend", perhaps the most classic of drunkard films, where Ray Milland finally is saved, while the real author ceventually committed suicide. Sorry, the topic is hopelessly not constructive and never can be.