Based on a novel aptly entitled "Heat Wave," and a stage adaptation which was a 1929 London success starring Herbert Marshall and a 1931 Broadway flop with Basil Rathbone, "Road to Singapore" is the type of story one would usually associate with W. Somerset Maugham: British rubber planters in southeast Asia (in this case the fictional outpost of "Khota") and their social rivalries, served up with cocktails, cigarettes, and card games, along with bungalow and club room banter and the inevitable gun shot or stabbing. And of course the heat, not to mention native drums stirring passions in the night.
The above-the-title star is William Powell, with a "mid-lantic" accent, in the Marshall-Rathbone role as a local cad with a fondness for other men's wives (and, like his "Thin Man" character, for prodigious quantities of hard liquor that seems to have little or no degenerative effect on his looks or bearing). Supporting him are Louis Calhern, with his own "mid-lantic" accent, as an absurdly stuffy local doctor and Doris Kenyon as Calhern's new wife who immediately regrets her marriage to the workaholic martinet in the suffocating backwater. Marian Marsh is Calhern's younger sister who develops an adolescent crush on Powell.
Colin Campbell and Douglas Gerrard provide silly comic relief, strolling through the proceedings at intervals as veddy British stereotypes named "Reginald" and "Simpson," respectively, who constantly argue about the real meaning of what they've just said to each other. Tyrell Davis, so memorable as "Ernest" in the 1933 film version of Maugham's "Our Betters," despite billing in the opening credits, is wasted, appearing in only two or three group scenes and speaking one minor line. Ethel Griffies also gets practically nothing to do. Alison Skipworth as an overbearing matron has a couple of heavy-handed flirtations with both Powell and Calhern.
Most of the male characters spend a good deal of time mopping sweat from their faces, which is no surprise given the suits and ties most of them wear; Powell dresses as if he's on his way to the opera at the height of the fall season in London and Calhern sleeps in full length pajamas under blankets no less. The females are better off in this regard and occasionally wear loose dresses with short sleeves while daintily fanning themselves.
The producers went to some length to provide convincing atmospherics. When bride-to-be Kenyon arrives at Khota, she is greeted by a downpour that turns the dirt road into a river of mud through which she trudges until Powell, whose linen suit is drenched through, rescues her by giving her a lift on his native-driven rickshaw. (Needless to say, not a trace of dirt can be seen on her footwear, nor a wrinkle in his garments, afterward.) There is a celebrated tracking sequence through the jungle that separates Kenyon's house from Powell's, which starts at her face in closeup and ends on his in closeup and then alternates between the two, all to the rhythmic pounding of drums in honor of the local "love goddess."
As for the "natives," Calhern slaps one of them for drinking on the job and another, gleaming with sweat, is seen puffing a cigar while leering at the newly-arrived Kenyon, who is the real star here, always convincing, despite being a bit long in the tooth for the type of innocent-young-thing role she's playing, and magnetic from every angle. At different moments this barely remembered holdover from the silent era evokes Constance Bennett, Tallulah Bankhead, Thelma Todd and even Marlene Dietrich in her "Shanghai Express" period, even though she predates them all.
