La route de Singapour

Not-especially-interesting romantic melodrama, from a play, of a triangle in the tropics. But it's one of the earliest demonstrations of William Powell in full William Powelldom. As a rich, unscrupulous playboy living a hedonistic existence in Khota (why Khota is never made clear), he's all polished consonants, dapper clothes, and upper-class charm. You can see why Doris Kenyon, unhappily married to dull, work-obsessed doctor Louis Calhern, would respond to his flirtations. And you can see why her younger sister, Marian Marsh, would be similarly captivated. It's a bit clichéd and more than a bit casually racist (when displeased with a servant, kick him), but it's lifted up by a) some spiffy early-talkie camera-work--love the long take panning from Calhern's to Powell's bungalow!--and b) engagingly pre-Code morality, where the callow hedonist isn't entirely punished for his devil-may-care attitude. It's swift, and the ending may surprise you a little.

"The Road to Singapore" is a rather old fashioned movie that must have seemed pretty scandalous back in the day when it was a play and later, this film. It's old fashioned in its portrayals of female roles as well as its tacit acceptance of British colonialism. Today, the film would definitely be seen as quite dated.

The story begins on a cruise ship headed to Singapore. Philippa (Doris Kenyon) is a nurse who is going to Singapore to marry a doctor she once worked with back in Britain. On the ship is also Hugh (William Powell), a major rogue who has a reputation as a bad boy--a despoiler of women. He does his best throughout the cruise to get to know Philippa better and she rebuffs him repeatedly. After all, she doesn't want a one night stand and has a husband waiting for her.

Once she arrives in Singapore, Hugh doesn't let up and he's obviously a man who thinks no might mean yes. In contrast, however, once Philippa marries Dr. March (Louis Calhern), she discovers he's pretty much the opposite...almost sexless and completely detached from her. He also is a man who seems to have lost his humanity and he's cruel to the locals, as he feels they are beneath him. Add to this mix Dr. March's very young and horny sister, Rene (Marian Marsh). She likes the idea of having a rendezvous with Hugh. To her, he's exciting, sexy and dangerous. You just know at some point a major confrontation, or worse, is going to occur between Dr. March and Hugh...and you aren't sure if it's over Philippa or Rene...or both!

So is this any good? Well, it's okay. But it did seem odd that the film showed you two options...a detached jerk of a husband and a womanizing jerk of a lover! You really wonder why Philippa didn't just hop aboard another ship and head back home and leave the two jerks to themselves. Back in the day it just seemed titillating...but now it seems dated. This was especially true in the big confrontation scene at the end....which was amazingly talky. Entertaining....but dated.

By the way, if you do watch this, note the really nice cinematography....far better than you'd expect to see in 1931.

The Road to Singapore is based upon a play and is therefore limited in its settings. That setting is the British colonial Far East (Khota - on the shipping line between Colombo and Singapore) and involve the Gymkhana Club and its members. Hugh Dawltry has been expelled from the club. He is a cad, a bounder, an unmitigated reprobate who steals other men's wives. But he falls for Phillipa on the steamer and they soon find themselves involved ashore. Phillippa is a former nurse who has come to the colony to join a doctor as his wife. The main plot involves whether she will cast off her cold husband and succumb to the heat wave of the tropics and the assault by Hugh. Complications exist in the form of the doctor's younger sister who is coming of age and of interest in men (pre-Code). The best shot in the entire movie is when the two star crossed lovers are each looking out windows across the divide between their homes -- it alone is worth the price of admission. Two characters waling through with inane arguments (Reggie and Simpson) don't come close to Caldicott and Charters. A somewhat satisfying ending - recommended.

Based on a novel aptly entitled "Heat Wave," and a stage adaptation which was a 1929 London success starring Herbert Marshall and a 1931 Broadway flop with Basil Rathbone, "Road to Singapore" is the type of story one would usually associate with W. Somerset Maugham: British rubber planters in southeast Asia (in this case the fictional outpost of "Khota") and their social rivalries, served up with cocktails, cigarettes, and card games, along with bungalow and club room banter and the inevitable gun shot or stabbing. And of course the heat, not to mention native drums stirring passions in the night.

The above-the-title star is William Powell, with a "mid-lantic" accent, in the Marshall-Rathbone role as a local cad with a fondness for other men's wives (and, like his "Thin Man" character, for prodigious quantities of hard liquor that seems to have little or no degenerative effect on his looks or bearing). Supporting him are Louis Calhern, with his own "mid-lantic" accent, as an absurdly stuffy local doctor and Doris Kenyon as Calhern's new wife who immediately regrets her marriage to the workaholic martinet in the suffocating backwater. Marian Marsh is Calhern's younger sister who develops an adolescent crush on Powell.

Colin Campbell and Douglas Gerrard provide silly comic relief, strolling through the proceedings at intervals as veddy British stereotypes named "Reginald" and "Simpson," respectively, who constantly argue about the real meaning of what they've just said to each other. Tyrell Davis, so memorable as "Ernest" in the 1933 film version of Maugham's "Our Betters," despite billing in the opening credits, is wasted, appearing in only two or three group scenes and speaking one minor line. Ethel Griffies also gets practically nothing to do. Alison Skipworth as an overbearing matron has a couple of heavy-handed flirtations with both Powell and Calhern.

Most of the male characters spend a good deal of time mopping sweat from their faces, which is no surprise given the suits and ties most of them wear; Powell dresses as if he's on his way to the opera at the height of the fall season in London and Calhern sleeps in full length pajamas under blankets no less. The females are better off in this regard and occasionally wear loose dresses with short sleeves while daintily fanning themselves.

The producers went to some length to provide convincing atmospherics. When bride-to-be Kenyon arrives at Khota, she is greeted by a downpour that turns the dirt road into a river of mud through which she trudges until Powell, whose linen suit is drenched through, rescues her by giving her a lift on his native-driven rickshaw. (Needless to say, not a trace of dirt can be seen on her footwear, nor a wrinkle in his garments, afterward.) There is a celebrated tracking sequence through the jungle that separates Kenyon's house from Powell's, which starts at her face in closeup and ends on his in closeup and then alternates between the two, all to the rhythmic pounding of drums in honor of the local "love goddess."

As for the "natives," Calhern slaps one of them for drinking on the job and another, gleaming with sweat, is seen puffing a cigar while leering at the newly-arrived Kenyon, who is the real star here, always convincing, despite being a bit long in the tooth for the type of innocent-young-thing role she's playing, and magnetic from every angle. At different moments this barely remembered holdover from the silent era evokes Constance Bennett, Tallulah Bankhead, Thelma Todd and even Marlene Dietrich in her "Shanghai Express" period, even though she predates them all.

William Powell and Doris Kenyon star in this colonial melodrama, supposedly set in a Ceylon built at Warner Studios, which has a distinctly African feel.

Also noteworthy are the young and beautiful Marian Marsh (then only 18 years old) and Louis Calhern, in supporting roles.

A reformed alcoholic playboy and the wife of a neighboring doctor fall in love in a colonial and moralistic micro society.

Nothing that would excite today's audience, but certainly a scandal in the puritanical North American society of the early thirties.

A simple curiosity for film buffs with a taste for the history of the seventh art.