Harry Baur is the skipper of a ship. Nominally, it belongs to a respectable shipping company based in Dunkirk. In reality, he is a freebooter, smuggling arms into Shanghai, double-crossing the man whom he's supposed to sell them to, getting drunk, shanghaiing Dalio out of a bar, and adored by his first mate Albert Préjean and his crew of roughnecks. The company plans to fire and blacklist him, but when the followers of the man he cheated start an unstoppable fire aboard ship, the company pretends he is a hero; otherwise they won't collect the insurance for the ship.
But now that he's back home, he falls under the power of the people who hate him: his wife, Gabrielle Dorziat, the weak, political Pierre Renoir, who doesn't understand ships and the men who sail at them, and the whole stinking apparatus of respectable society.
It's written by O. P. Gilbert from his own novel, with some dialogue by Charles Spaak, but with Harry Baur in the lead, everything else washes out; it took a stronger director than Robert Siodmak to order Baur about, but who would want to? It's a profane, bawdy, rough house movie that could not have been made in the United States since the imposition of the Code, and it's probable that only Baur could have played the part.
But now that he's back home, he falls under the power of the people who hate him: his wife, Gabrielle Dorziat, the weak, political Pierre Renoir, who doesn't understand ships and the men who sail at them, and the whole stinking apparatus of respectable society.
It's written by O. P. Gilbert from his own novel, with some dialogue by Charles Spaak, but with Harry Baur in the lead, everything else washes out; it took a stronger director than Robert Siodmak to order Baur about, but who would want to? It's a profane, bawdy, rough house movie that could not have been made in the United States since the imposition of the Code, and it's probable that only Baur could have played the part.