La route de Singapour

Philippa Crosby March (Doris Kenyon) arrives in Singapore set to marry Dr. George March. Dashing playboy Hugh Dawltry (William Powell) sets his sights on her. Her marriage is disappointing and her eyes start drifting. One night, the drums start pounding at the native village. It's a love festival.

This is a pre-Code romance melodrama. There is a bit of exoticism with the drumming love-fest. It's jungle fever. I'm not in love with this coupling or even this love triangle, but I am a little intrigued. The ending is a little unsatisfying although I can accept it. I want the drama to be elevated.

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.

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.

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.