They Met in Bombay

One of the movies TCM ran in the "meet cutes" romantic comedy spotlight last month was They Met in Bombay. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I decided to DVR it and watch later to do a post on it.

Clark Gable plays Gerald Meldrick, whom we see right off the bat is a less-than-honest man. He's having a replica of a famous jewel, the Star of India, made for him. That jewel is owned by the Duchess of Beltravers (Jessie Ralph) who is going to be in Bombay for Empire Day and wearing that jewel. Meldrick passes himself off as an agent of Lloyd's of London who have insured the Star of India, and presents himself at the Duchess' hotel, which is obviously all part of a plot to replace the original jewel with the fake.

Also showing up at the hotel is Anya Von Duren (Rosalind Russell), whom we see reading a book about the Beltravers nobility and trying to memorize it. This is a sign that she's a con artist who is going to use that knowledge to get into the Duchess' confidence and then steal the Star of India. You can probably guess that Anya and Meldrick wind up meeting and have a friendly rivalry over the jewel that lasts for the rest of the movie.

You'd be half right. They steal the Star of India about a third of the way into the movie and are about to get on a boat out of India when the authorities discover what has happened and start going after Meldrick and Anya, who have to team up out of necessity only since they're both implicated in the heist. But they can't get on a regular ocean liner because they'll be caught, so they have to beg passage with cargo ship captain Chang (Peter Lorre). He's going to Hong Kong.

Of course, Chang cares more about money than anything else. He wouldn't care whether he's got two jewel thieves on board if they pay him enough for the passage. But the authorities are offering a much bigger reward, and the venal Chang is more than willing to turn them over for that reward. Meldrick and Anya, under fake names, have to beat a hasty escape into a dinghy and hope they won't get noticed in Hong Kong.

Meldrick has a good plan to get the two of them out of Hong Kong, too. Posing as a Captain Houston, a Canadian soldier in the British Army, he plans to commandeer some men on leave to steal the contents of a safe at a company under criminal investigation by the authorities: evidence, don't you know. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it were for those meddling... Japanese? Well, this is a 1941 movie, and the Japanese had already invaded China proper and were ready to take Hong Kong. All military officers are pressed into emergency duty, including "Captain Houston".

They Met in Bombay is three movies in one, and an odd little mix at that. The jewel heist plot does get resolved, but other than that, the parts of the movie don't quite mesh. Still, the movie was professionally made, another example of the way studios churned out movies at the time. Gable and Russell are appealing individually and as a pair. The supporting cast is generally good too, and the production values are quite good as befits an MGM movie. There's nothing spectacularly memorable here, however, unless you count the odd mixture of story lines.

If you just want to sit back and be entertained, you could do worse than to watch They Met in Bombay.