CHINA PASSAGE (1937)

Adventurers Baldwin and Dugan are hired to deliver the valuable Soo diamond to a man named Chang in Shanghai. But that's the easy part: at Chang's house of Chang as they hand over the diamond, shooting breaks out in the streets. Soldiers set off gas bombs to subdue the unruly crowd and in the middle of the fuss, a figure in a gas mask makes off with the diamond. The police round up some civilian stragglers in the street and coincidentally, all of them wind up on the SS Asiatic, headed to San Francisco. Baldwin and Dugan are warned that they must retrieve the diamond or pay with their lives, so the two book passage on the Asiatic as well. The suspects include Mrs. Collins, a flighty Southern lady; Barton, who is constantly drunk and who thinks the ship is headed to Sydney—or is that befuddlement all an act?; Durand, a British mystery novelist; the possibly sinister Dr. Fang Tu; and attractive American Jane Dunn, who, we find out, is actually a secret U.S. customs agent. Baldwin flirts with Dunn who is slow to respond, but after she discovers her box of chocolates has been poisoned, and as other suspects begin winding up dead, the two work together to find the culprit.

This B-movie starts out well but becomes a bit of a slog halfway through when [Spoiler!] its most charismatic actor is killed off. The main character, Baldwin, is played by the rather low-energy Vinton Hayworth. He went on to have a lengthy career playing uncredited bits in films and supporting roles on television (he had a recurring role as General Schaeffer on I Dream of Jeannie) but as a B-leading man, he lacked that indefinable something that would have made audiences want to spend time with him—no twinkle in the eye, no bluster, no intensity, no comic touch. In a smaller role he might have fared better, but he stands out in no way at all here. His sidekick, Dugan, is played by the very appealing and energetic Gordon Jones (who later played the Green Hornet in a 40s serial and he keeps things fairly lively until he's bumped off around the 30-minute mark. Unfortunately, there's no one else in the cast to keep us invested in the proceedings; it's a shame that the two actors didn’t switch roles. Philip Ahn is appropriately mysterious as Fang Tu but he has little to do until the climax; Dick Elliott (the man on the porch who says "Youth is wasted on the wrong people" in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE) rather overdoes the drunken bit; Constance Worth, as Jane Dunn, is only slightly more animated than her leading man. I kept watching due to the (rather mild) momentum of the whodunit plot and there is a satisfying conclusion, but I can't whole-heartedly recommend this except to fans of Gordon Jones (pictured to the right of Hayworth). [TCM]