One Way Passage - 1932

Released October 21, 1932

Directed by Tay Garnett, starring Kay Francis and William Powell.

An American man and woman meet in Hong Kong by sheer chance, then travel together by ship for a nearly month-long trek across the Pacific Ocean. She's a terminal case being nursed by a companion doctor and he's on his way back to the states (escorted by a determined, no-nonsense cop played by Warren Hymer) to be hung at the gallows in San Francisco.

One Way Passage has a "doomed" plot line, but is really a cruise-ship romance padded with humor despite the grim undertone presented with the plain, in your face style of the pre-code era. Some light comedy is tossed in regularly by Aline MacMahon and Frank McHugh as two con-artists working the cruise ship lines whose paths cross that of our two main characters.

Warren Hymer is a stoic brick-house police sergeant getting the convicted murderer (played by WM. Powell) back to San Francisco, but he also has time to dream about a modest future that draws in the almost ethereal simpatico dreaming of the hardened, veteran crook played by Aline, and that future-dreaming of those two opposites-attracting helps underline how much our two main principals of Powell and Kay Francis are in love on borrowed time.

One Way Passage was made in the heart of the American Depression, and has the unusual situation of our two stars doomed from the outset. The resulting romance is made epic when Powell's character deliberately blows his chances for escape so that he can care for the rapidly deteriorating Francis. Kay plays doomed love well, and Powell is his usual dapper, snappy self, cheerily heading toward death because it's what a gentleman crook does in these circumstances. From Four Key Kay Francis Films