La mujer de Singapur

Brenda Marshall in the part that Bette Davis got an Oscar for - aw c'mon fellers!

The art department wheel out the tropical foliage they are used to rigging, and the verandah from THE LETTER. However despite occasional bursts of production value like the opening dockside activity, the seedy Crows Nest bar brawl or a dozen extras tin mining, most of the film is Miss Marshal in awful Damon Giffard outfits emoting about the jinx that makes her destroy the lives of the men in the support cast. She gets to smash her mirror reflection with a liquor bottle too.

Negulesco on his first feature is trying but he's got a long way to go to the excellence of JOHNNY BELINDA and HUMORESQUE. Featured players are a drab lot with the good people making fleeting appearances - Tony Warde, Ian Wolfe and (you have to be quick) Alexis Smith.

It's 1941 Singapore. Rubber plantation owner David Ritchie (David Bruce) and his western friends walk into a bar on the bad side of town. The gals want to experience some exotic thrills. David notices a familiar drunk gal in the corner. She is Vicki Moore (Brenda Marshall), a rich girl from Hong Kong. He recounts their last encounter which ended with her first of many tragedies. She has been brought low and considers herself jinxed. David is engaged to Claire Weston (Virginia Field).

I watched this movie and kept waiting for it to end with the Japanese invasion. I thought that would be her final jinx. It's almost to the end when I realized that the Japanese don't invade until 1942. It's a whole different movie if this has another year. I'm not sure if I am convinced of their chemistry. To be fair, he has no chemistry with Claire either.

The movie's problem isn't the reuse sets or the reused plot. The new settings and the old plot are fine. The problem is that a down and out Brenda Marshall still looks better than most women do when they are dressed up. In "Dangerous" when Bette Davis is on the skids, she looks it. Brenda Marshall was meant to play society dames not drunks in sleazy bars drinking straight gin. She is not believable. Her attempt to channel Bette Davis's abuse from "Of Human Bondage" doesn't ring true.

Her recovery from alcoholism is too abrupt and her constant changes of mood leave one reeling. This could have been a much better movie with a character actress in the lead.

Brenda Marshall's father was a rubber plantation supervisor in Malaysia. Then he died and everything went to pot. The current manager, David Bruce, has scraped together enough money to buy the needed equipment when Miss Marshall descends on him, wrecking a bar in town and captivating him. She won't commit, though. She knows she's a jinx.

Jean Negulesco's first feature is a switched-location version of DANGEROUS, with set design by Charles Novi and a good-girl-bad-girl dichotomy that might make you think it's an early example of film noir. It's not. The ropes and scrims soon vanish, letting you know it's intended as the closely allied genre of magical realism, albeit one with a surprisingly feminist slant. Even that vanishes in the end with a rushed and silly ending, sending Negulesco back to musical shorts for the next three years. With Virginia Field, Jerome Cowan, Rose Hobart, Heather Angel, and Dorothy Tree.

Singapore Woman stars Brenda Marshall in the eponymous role, from 1941, directed by Jean Negulesco.

Said woman is Vicki Moore, who considers herself a jinx, with good reason. Her father's tin mines were flooded and rendered useless, her husband was lost at sea, and a suitor kills himself.

On night an associate (David Ritchie) of her father discovers her soaking up gin in a cheap waterfront bar. He decides to help her get her life back.

The dark, exotically beautiful Marshall was Mrs. William Holden for 30 years. She's not really photographed to her best advantage in parts of this film. Nor is she surrounded by top Warner stars.

Nevertheless, it's a kind of Singapore riff on Dangerous, and she's interesting to watch.