I’ve come late to appreciating Tay Garnett’s comedies, of which One Way Passage is probably the best. Garnett, who was once a darling of French cinéastes, is most remembered nowadays for his exotic action and war films like Slave Ship and Bataan and the noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. He also made fine comedies, among them Love is News, Joy of Living, Seven Sinners, and Stand-In, all of them neglected gems in the Hollywood comedy canon. Garnett was considered a “man’s man” director, like his good friends William “Wild Bill” Wellman and John Ford, an adventurous spirit who sailed his own schooner around the world and liked to work in exotic settings. But unlike Wellman and Ford, Garnett also had a subtle, refined sensibility and a romantic touch to go along with the joy of brawling. His comedies are never pure; they combine elements of melodrama, thriller, and especially adventure, balancing genre complexities as smoothly as anyone in Hollywood.
William Powell and Kay Francis made One Way Passage in the same year they made William Dieterle’s sublime confection, Jewel Robbery, and a couple of years before Powell’s Hollywood fate was forever changed in The Thin Man. On the surface, the story is simple. Set mainly on an ocean liner on its way from Hong Kong to San Francisco, Joan Ames (Francis), a wealthy, independent young American beauty, meets Dan Hardesty (Powell), a debonair William Powell-type, and they’re immediately smitten with each other.
But such things can’t run smooth. They both have secrets. Joan is ill, dying, while Dan is a recently escaped convicted murderer bound for death row in San Quentin. The murder was justified, but that’s irrelevant, since the death-sentence is on the books and his escape is doomed. Despite a couple more attempted breaks, Dan can’t escape his fate. And there’s no breakout from Joan’s terminal illness. There’s no way out, period. For either of them. The audience learns about their secrets early, but the lovers learn late. By itself, this is pure melodrama — one can see versions of it in later films like Leo McCarey’s Love Affair and Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory.
Some commentators call One Way Passage a weeper, but it’s a marvelously buoyant weepie. Garnett recounts that during a meeting with producer Harry Joe Brown he was told about the script of a film titled Transatlantic, a Grand Hotel on an ocean liner, that had been in script-revision mode for years, and appeared to be unfilmable. (Transatlantic was ultimately made in 1931, not by Garnett, but One Way Passage shows its cinematic influence.) Garnett told Brown that if he were helming it, he’d make it as a comedy. The wit of the dialogue in One Way Passage, oscillating between high and low, is lively. There are a couple of fine comic supplemental plots that are so organically tied up with the romance that the film stays smart and never becomes dark. A petty pickpocket, Skippy (Frank McHugh), a friend from Dan’s past that he bumps into in Hong Kong, also boards the ship, where he runs into an old grifter associate, Barrel House Betty (Aline McMahon), who is masquerading as the wealthy “Countess Bettina de Barilhaus.” Skippy is a drunken clown, but Betty is working on a long con. (It’s interesting how much the shipboard grifter was beloved in Hollywood comedies of the time.) Dan had helped Betty out of a big jam in the past, and she feels she owes him a save in return. That will be needed, because Dan is shackled to Steve Burke (Warren Hymer), a surly, oafish cop sent out from the States to recover the fugitive and deliver him back to his fate. Burke eventually also comes to feel he owes Dan a solid, since Dan saves him after they both fall overboard, handcuffed together. (A plunge that Dan had engineered for an escape attempt.) As things happen, Burke is smitten with The Countess, and she works out a plan to distract him and help Dan escape. In the end, Betty comes clean to Burke and wants to go straight, and Burke decides he no longer wants to police good fellows like Dan. In a genial stroke of irony, it appears that Burke and Betty will be the ones celebrating the expected happy ending. As for Dan and Joan, we see spectral traces of them celebrating a New Year’s Eve together in a bar called Agua Caliente (get it? Hot Water). We infer that they have departed the real world, but are still enjoying the drink that brought them together, the Paradise Cocktail.
The simplicity of the story opens lots of space for lyricism. The opening scene establishes several of the lyrical motifs that will bind things together better than words. First, alcohol and its servants, the bartenders. Before any of our main characters, it’s a bartender who’s introduced, mixing a Paradise Cocktail, a concoction he brags his customers will be able to tell their grandchildren about. (The magical bartender is played by Mike Donlin, who was most famous as a major-league baseball player; he ended his fifteen year career with a .333 batting average and a .386 on-base percentage.) He is the first of four bartenders that will set up scenes and deliver ambrosia. At the Hong Kong bar, the refrains are in place like a Viennese schlager: glowing glances, a spilled draught of paradise, two intentionally shattered crystal glasses left with stems crossed, and an “auf wiedersehn.”
Garnett’s proclivities toward adventure scenes come out when Dan attempts his first escape. With designs on the handcuff-key he knows is in Burke’s pocket, and learning that Burke can’t swim, Dan pulls the cop overboard. Fruitlessly attempting to push the flailing Burke under the water while fishing for the key, Dan sees a crowd of passengers watching from the ship’s deck, including Joan, and, seeing his dark plan foiled, he turns into Burke’s rescuer. Dan may be a romantic well-dressed man, but he’s no softie. He wants to survive. And if offing the cop won’t work, maybe securing an obligation from him will.
If James Harvey’s claim in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges is right that Lubitsch did not imagine romance as adventure, full of risk and transformation, then Garnett is his opposite. In One Way Passage, the stakes are at their highest, and the lovers are not only at risk, but close to the moment of final truth. The ship represents a parenthesis. While they are in mid-ocean, they might as well be outside of time. But from another angle, it is the vessel that inexorably sails them to the final shore. The adventure is compounded by Dan’s existential bind, torn between his need to escape his death and his sudden attraction to Joan. Francis and Powell play it with absolutely no mawkishness; they are invigorated. Joan’s and Dan’s re-meet at the ship’s bar seals their new, temporary life. The lyricism pays out: the glances, the shattered cocktail glasses, and the gorgeously romantic moonlit deck. (Producer Zanuck was worried that Francis, who had a pronounced lisp, would ruin the mood. Garnett assured him that he would write the dialogue in a way that would avoid her specific speedbumps. And he did.)
The move from the merely giddy to the solidly comic comes when Skippy encounters “The Countess” at an upscale soiree in the ship’s salon, and the verbiage shifts from romantic suggestion to grifters’ slang. The dialogue throughout is a thing of beauty. The writing team involved Robert Lord (a formidable Hollywood writer and eventually producer, who won an Oscar for the film’s “story,” the category that became “screenplay” in the ’40s), Garnett himself (who is said to have composed most of the script), the venerable Joseph Jackson, and most intriguing of all, Wilson Mizner, a legendary lowlife wit and raconteur whose adventurous career as a true con artiste the Hollywood macho directors could only envy. I haven’t found much written about the writing of the film. Mizner may have only been hired to do punch up, but I’d guess that Garnett transported a lot of his storytelling language into the dialogue. Dan surely can speak Betty’s and Skippy’s language, but it’s sure bet that Joan cannot.
In a great scene, Betty and Skippy hunker down in her cabin to go over old times and fresh plans. McMahon, who would be the guiding daemon of Gold Diggers of 1933 in the following year, is brilliant as she oscillates between Barrel House Betty and La Contesse de Barilhaus, between “Parlez-moi d’amour” and gin straight from the bottle. The dialogue is pure Mizner.
BETTY: Play dead, chump. Tail me to my joint.
++++
BETTY: Say, uh, who’s the mug with Dan Hardesty?
SKIPPY: He’s a copper. The toughest one out of Frisco.
BETTY: Pinch?
SKIPPY: Nothin’ else.
BETTY: Tough rap?
SKIPPY: The toughest.
BETTY: Murder?
SKIPPY: If you can call it murder for croakin’ the dirtiest heel that ever lived.
BETTY: Well, any chance to beat the rap?
SKIPPY: No, no. He’s already been sentenced.
BETTY: Well, then, how’s he–?
SKIPPY: He broke. He broke when they were takin’ him to San Quentin.
BETTY: The rope.
SKIPPY: The rope.
BETTY: Whew. He’s a swell guy, too. Gee, he came to the front for me in Singapore when I was in wrong. And I was in wrong. Took a long chance for me. Certainly wish I could pay him back the same way.
Betty and Skippy hatch a plan to ensnare Burke, who is besotted with The Countess. She’ll play The Lady in Distress, while Skippy plays The Distress.
The ship is scheduled to stop over in Honolulu for a day. It will be Dan’s last opportunity to escape. Joan, still totally unaware of Dan’s identity, plans a romantic picnic for the two of them, but Burke gets wind of it, and locks Dan in the ship’s brig.
Betty and Skippy stay true to their plan to facilitate Dan’s escape with a key trick of their own. Skippy releases Dan from the brig as Betty and Burke go ashore for a day trip. The coast is clear for Dan’s getaway. Except for Joan.
The centerpiece of the film is a glorious romantic scene on a moonlit Hawaiian beach. Garnett’s background in the silent era was mainly in comedies, but visually the scene evokes the great love scenes of the silents. And silence pervades more than the visuals. Neither Joan nor Dan have revealed to each other their star-crossed fates as they imagine, each in their own way, an eternal love. The deepest silence of all is Dan’s dilemma, unfolding on his face and never spoken, whether to forego his escape attempt or to spend a few more days with Joan. It’s one of Powell’s finer moments on screen.
As they return to the ship from their idyll, Dan confesses to Joan that he won’t be returning, after all. Before he can give his fatal reason, Joan collapses.
Soon after, Joan’s doctor, who has been attending her on her voyage, confides to Dan that Joan won’t survive until they reach San Francisco if she suffers another shock. It’s in Dan’s hands now. The situation is extreme: if he tries to save his own life, Dan will cause Joan’s death.
Burke and Betty parody Dan’s and Joan’s romantic moment as Betty comes clean about her true identity, and Burke proposes that they forget about their pasts. They will go on to a life on their chicken ranch, as Joan’s and Dan’s fates close in on them.
The finale of One Way Passage is one of the great endings of the era. As Burke leads Dan away down the gangplank in San Francisco, Joan hurries to find him for one last goodbye, and then collapses. The final scene is of New Year’s Eve at the Agua Caliente, the night Dan and Joan promised to celebrate together with another Paradise Cocktail. The last bartenders are astonished to hear glasses being broken, and crossed stems left on the bar.
The logic behind the great charm of One Way Passage really becomes clear only during a second viewing. The film slowly develops the great romantic myth of the death-enduring love affair, step by step, deftly using cliches that for lovers always seem fresh, toward an unexpected, but absolutely fitting climax. The real, all-consuming fantasy of eternal love transcends itself, and passes into a fantastic reality. The spectral lovers, in Paradise no doubt, are still sharing cocktails.