Maybe not one of W. Somerset Maugham's more complex stories, but it still gives us a chance to watch Robert Newton, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester give us a bit of the reverse "Sadie Thompson". It's the unlikable "Ginger Ted" (Laughton) who manages to upset the rather puritanical "Martha" (Lanchester) and her minister-brother "Owen" (Tyrone Guthrie). She demands that local magistrate (Newton) throw the book at him after his latest drunken outburst, but the wily old administrator sees an opportunity to ensure peace breaks out by managing to have the pair stranded on a remote island amidst his Indonesian archipelago - and maybe the two can get past their initial mutual loathing and find some common ground? It's a bit too long, even at ninety minutes, and much of it struggles against a background of ropey production and poor editing, but there are some funs scenes between an on-form and perfectly plausible Laughton and a Lanchester whose character you would cross at your peril - even if you were completely sozzled. It does rather peddle the superiority of the Christian faith as against those more pagan traditions held by the natives, but in it's aggressive piousness lies some of it's best humour - especially now it's eighty-odd years later and we can use new eyes to poke fun at it's daftness. Newton's accent isn't the best, but fans of characterful cinema might enjoy these three - and Erich Pommer - having a bit of fun in the sun (though clearly nowhere near the actual South China Sea!).
Two missionaries come into conflict with the authorities when they turn their missionary into a parrot farm. The Bishop of Maracaibo calls them his 'black sheep' and the Monsignore has been called to check on their behavior. Like usual, our heroes help the poor to defend themselves and provoke some funny fist fights in the process.
At the start of the First World War, in the middle of Africa’s nowhere, a gin soaked riverboat captain is persuaded by a strong-willed missionary to go down river and face-off a German warship.
Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces firsthand.
An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.
Gambler Nathan Detroit has few options for the location of his big craps game. Needing $1,000 to pay a garage owner to host the game, Nathan bets Sky Masterson that Sky cannot get virtuous Sarah Brown out on a date. Despite some resistance, Sky negotiates a date with her in exchange for bringing people into her mission. Meanwhile, Nathan's longtime fiancée, Adelaide, wants him to go legit and marry her.
Three young boys drunkenly rape a woman named Emiko, the wife of a man they've developed a friendship with. She dies of heart failure during the attack. Her chicken farmer husband, incapable of dealing with her death tends to her corpse as though it were still alive completely unable to accept her demise.
Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat USS San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the 'rice-bowl' system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat's presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission.
Macarthy is a country town football champ who is kidnapped in a neon lit helicopter by tyrant Colonel Ball-Miller, the tycoon president of the South Melbourne football club.
Fast Eddie Felson is a small-time pool hustler with a lot of talent but a self-destructive attitude. His bravado causes him to challenge the legendary Minnesota Fats to a high-stakes match.
A transgender woman takes an unexpected journey when she learns that she had a son, now a teenage runaway hustling on the streets of New York.