THE CHINESE BUNGALOW/ THE CHINESE DEN
UK, 1940, 72 minutes, Black-and-white.
Paul Lucas, Kay Walsh, Jane Baxter, Robert Douglas, Wallace Douglas.
Directed by George King.
This is the third film version of the play by Matheson Lane, The Chinese Bungalow. The first was a silent film in 1926, starring Lane. There is also a 1930s version, again with Lane in the central role but with Jill Esmond and Anna Neagle as the women.
This films from 1940, made in England by British Line and directed by George King who worked for them as with The Case of the Frightened Lady.
Paul Lucas had emigrated from Hungary and was very popular in Hollywood films, occasionally romantic hero, frequently. Character actor. He was when the Academy award in three years after this film for Watch on the Rhine. This was also a star vehicle Kay Walsh, a prominent character actor in British films, appearing in This Happy Breed and Oliver Twist as Nancy, directed by her then-husband David Lean.
The setting is reminiscent of some of the Somerset Maugham stories like The Letter which was about to be filmed in Hollywood. The initial setting is Singapore and then moving into the jungles of Malaysia.
The film is somewhat colonial in its screenplay, the focus on to brothers at a club in Singapore, one going to a rubber plantation, glad to see an English woman singing in the club. However, she catches the attraction of a Chinese millionaire banker who also has a plantation. He is played, with some make up and with his broken English accent, by Paul Lucas. He was the young woman and takes her to the plantation where she discovers she will be alone.
The banker is concerned and brings his wife’s sister, Jane Baxter, out from England to be a companion for his wife. In the meantime, she has met one of the brothers at the plantation and begins an affair with him. The plantation brothers other brother, a captain on the boats on the river, Robert Douglas, also becomes involved, a romantic attachment to the sister. The banker, in the meantime, disgusted with his wife, set his eye on the sister.
The matters are somewhat lurid but treated in a 1940s style, rather reticent in the screenplay. However, everything comes to a head when the banker puts poison in one glass but does not see which one, offering a glass to the captain, a game of chance.
As might be expected, the banker is poisoned, praying before the border as he dies.
