Early on in his star career Jeff Chandler once said this film was one of his favourites because he got to play a regular guy as opposed to an exotic - an Indian, an Israel freedom fighter, etc. It's a perfectly serviceable Universal action adventure tale whose most irritating feature is that it isn't in colour when it so cries out to be.
The plot has Chandler as a ships captain in Macau who is determined to remain honest and not go into smuggling. He gets hired by Evelyn Keyes, who winds up getting him involved in shonky gold. It's the sort of movie you'd expect Bogard to make at Warners or Alan Ladd at Paramount and Chandler doesn't suffer in comparison; he looks great, has a forceful presence with that magnificent voice.
Evelyn Keyes isn't very good. She must have been great value in real life, with all those lovers, but her quality doesn't really transfer to film (at least not in this movie). And the movie suffers for it because this role is crucial to the plot - she's a femme fetale with the heart of gold etc etc.
There's location footage of boats plus back projection. The photography on the edition of the film I saw lacked the crispness and skill you saw in the best of these sort of movies at Paramount and Warners - but like I say maybe it was just the copy of the film I watched.
There's all the elements you need for a south sea movie - a lugger, underwater diving sequences, islands, Chinese pirates, dingy bars in Macao, casual racism, an American expat hero, buried treasure, treacherous white crooks. I kept thinking of the Ken Hall film Lovers and Luggers. It passes the film. Just needed colour really.
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