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Voyage of the doomed, "it has its humorous side." A mobile camera in a Hong Kong honky-tonk, lingering on the coin tossed into the spittoon next to a trio of rotund singers, panning across a bustling saloon counter and coming to rest on a bartender whipping up a Paradise cocktail ("You gotta wait a minute and let the oil sink in"). Drops of the spilled drink introduce the terminal swells, gentlemanly murderer headed for the gallows (William Powell) and socialite elegantly fading from incurable malady (Kay Francis). A fragile seduction aboard the ocean liner, Frisco by way of Honolulu, every moment counts. "Death ain't tough enough. He's got to fall in love." Tay Garnett's tragicomic marvel, "the world and time" compressed to little over an hour, as lambent as Borzage. The figure of fate is a figure of fun, the truculent flatfoot (Warren Hymer) not unmoved by the situation but with manacles always at the ready. (His weariness at embodying the law is matched by the melancholy masquerade of Aline MacMahon's counterfeit countess, their new beginning contrasts with the main couple's emptying hourglass.) Observing it all is the tippling pickpocket (Frank McHugh), "wanted everywhere and welcome nowhere." Up on the deck and down in the brig, the iris shot of a porthole, cigarette embers in the Hawaiian sand. Above all, the crossed stems of shattered champagne glasses as the lovers' private ritual of defiant union. "Remember our first?" "We thought it was our last. You never can tell." The view of the Bay Area means the Golden Gate but also Alcatraz, an old hymn remembered before the separation. "Auld Lang Syne" in Aguascalientes for the miracle, a drop of Mizoguchi in a gagman's evocation of transience and eternity. "Forgive me if I'm going poetic on you." With Frederick Burton, Douglas Gerrard, Herbert Mundin, Roscoe Karns, Dewey Robinson, and Stanley Fields. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |