Singapore Woman

This is one of the love triangle stories that takes place in a faraway exotic land, but it's really the hollywood lot. David ritchie gets caught up in a death at the moore household. Roy bennet is dead, and his widow puts a curse on the moores. Of course, david meets up with vicki moore again in singapore, where he's trying to start up a rubber plant operation. Is the curse still on them? Released in may 1941, even before the united states was involved in the war. It's pretty good. Pretty low budget stuff. Check out the trivia section for connections to the 1940 version of the letter, and the 1935 version of dangerous! Directed by jean negulesco. Worked with some huge stars, made many HUGE familiar films. River of no return, how to marry a millionaire, three coins in the fountain.

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.

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.

Usually, I'm a fan of the early forties films of Jean Negulesco (i.e. "Mask Of Dimitrios", "Threee Strangers", "Humoresque") but this first offering from him is a dull exception. It's basically W. Somerset Maugham with a lobotomy as we sluggishly make our way through a silly, overplotted story with stiff, stilted dialogue and marginal acting from the two leads, both deservedly more famous for their off screen achievements (she married Bill Holden and he was best friends with Errol Flynn). With the notable exception of good art and set decoration that at least gives this thing a properly decadent far Eastern look and a well staged bar brawl nothing even mildly holds one's interest. Solid C.

Off slumming one night in a dive on the Singapore waterfront, a group of colonials spot a familiar face off in a corner. It's one of their own (Brenda Marshall), come to gin and hard times because of a curse hurled at her by the widow of a suicide supposedly lured to his death because of this rich, spoiled temptress. Having had their cheap thrills, the party moves on, all except David Bruce, who stays behind to play the Good Samaritan.

He whisks her off to his plantation and sobers her up, though she's all but given up on herself. Surprise, surprise, they fall in love. There are a couple of obstacles looming, however: Bruce's bland, blonde fiancee, and Marshall's husband, long presumed dead....

Coming in at just over an hour, Singapore Woman is a quick-and-dirty programmer, a romantic melodrama with all the trappings of its East-of-Suez predecessors from Rain to The Letter: rubber plantations and monsoons, The Raffles Hotel and rickshaws. But Negulesco, who in his early career was largely confined to Big-Band shorts, digs into this exotically seasoned stew with gusto. He makes every minute count and makes the movie look good, too.

Out of Marshall he draws a startlingly strong performance, equally good on the skids and in the frothier scenes of redemption. This actress, born in the Philippines, appeared as a Eurasian or Hispanic beauty in several 40s movies, and starred in Anthony Mann's Strange Impersonation five years after this film; though she lived until 1993, she made the last of her films in 1950 -- a loss to cinema.

There's not a great deal of depth or resonance in Singapore Woman, but it's satisfyingly put together, and gives a preview of the talent Negulesco would later lavish on The Mask of Dimitrios, Humoresque and, his masterpiece, Road House.