La route de Singapour

Loved watching this really dated film...William Powell in 1931 had already perfected his suave, self-assured persona on screen, and in this filmed play, he presents the wonderful self-assured and beautifully dressed image he gave us later in Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man series he's so well remembered for. Louis Calhern is the weak, career obsessed doctor who marries Doris Kenyon, a former nurse It's interesting to watch the young Calhern play the emotional, naive, career obsessed, wife-neglecting doctor, because we always knew him as an older actor, dignified and mustached in the 40's and 50's. Powell steals the movie as the hard drinking seducer of other men's wives, which of course, includes the doctor's bored bride. What's fun is how the film depicts the hot and humid tropics, complete with incessant jungle drums, as a place where passion can overheat the idle rich and cause near-tragic troubles for all. Doris Kenyon, whom almost no one remembers today, but may be best known for her role with Rudolph Valentino in the silent, Monsieur Beaucaire, holds her own, was 34 in this film and is quite the blonde beauty though one of her gowns, a black and white number, comes off as almost comical today. See this one for Powell, for the way he dresses and comports himself, and for those incessant drums.

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.

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.

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.

... and if I had a more fine grained voting scale I'd probably make this one a 5.5 versus a 5/10.

Hugh Dawltry (William Powell) is returning to Khota, a British colony in southeast Asia, after having been ostracized there for breaking up a home and then abandoning the woman afterwards. Phillippa Crosby (Doris Kenyon) is going to Khota to marry her long time fiance Dr. George March (Louis Calhern). Dawltry pretty much earns his reputation as a bounder during the first fifteen minutes as he is attracted to Phillippa on the ship to Khota, is rebuffed, and then when the ship docks, takes advantage of the fact that she doesn't know what Marsh's house looks like to take her to his house instead, where he continues to try and seduce her. It doesn't help that the servant Dr. March sent to retrieve Phillippa from the ship decided to get drunk instead. Things get straightened out, Phillippa and George get married as planned, but it soon becomes obvious that her husband is consumed by work, just got married because it was time for "family values", and is completely lacking in romance. Suddenly Dawltry's spiel is looking good to Phillippa versus her cold as ice husband.

This is one of those films that is very hard to review because it is just so average and lacking in originality. It doesn't do anything so badly that it is "so bad it is good", but it is not memorable either. The best thing about it are the performances, and the minute you see that Calhern is the prospective bridegroom you know this is not going to be a marriage made in heaven. Calhern never played the heroic or admirable type after all. This was William Powell's first film at Warner Brothers after leaving his long time studio of Paramount, and you would have thought that WB would have made this first film a special effort, but they didn't. I will say that the pounding of the native drums at the end do a good job of building suspense. I'd recommend this one for hardcore William Powell fans who want to see everything in which the actor appeared.