Mandalay

In the early days of the movies, it was really expensive to go to exotic locations to film stories, even if the movie-going audiences wanted the escapism of stories in faraway places. So we get a few establishing shots and a lot of either backlot stuff or California locations being asked to double for someplace else in the world. Such is the case with the pre-Code movie Mandalay.

Mandalay is the second-largest city in Burma, which at the time the movie was made was under British colonial rule. It was also the former royal capital, while the British moved the capital to Rangoon (now Yangon) much closer to the coast along the Irawaddy River that flows between the two cities. So almost all of the action in the movie takes place in either Rangoon or on the river. Tony Evans (Ricardo Cortez) has been plying his trade along the river, returning to Rangoon where he has a girlfriend in Tanya (Kay Francis) who fled the Russian Revolution.

But Tony is more or less persona non grata with the British authorities, so he has to beat a hasty escape, leaving Tanya alone in Rangoon and having to work at a nightclub run by Nick (Warner Oland) that seems to serve everybody in much the same way that Rick's café did in Casablanca. The authorities have their eye on the place and even more so on Tanya, eventually deciding that she should be deported because she's a cause for trouble and not British.

Tanya beats the authorities to the punch, getting a fake identity and getting on a boat going upstream to Mandalay. On that boat, she meets Dr. Burton (Lyle Talbot), who's got problems of his own, committing some sort of medical malpractice that he feels compelled to punish himself for, in this case by going upstream into the hinterlands of Burma where there's a disease outbreak and as with The Painted Veil. The two of them eventually begin to fall in love.

But of course Tony is going to show up again, and wouldn't you know that he wants Tanya back. The authorities are still after him, so he comes up with a devious scheme. Tanya has some medicine that's for external use only, and Tony decides to make it look like he's taken some of it internally which would kill him; then he goes and hides in the hold of the ship. Of course, this also makes it look like Tanya may have killed him, leaving her open to a murder rap.

As I said at the beginning, I think that viewers 90 years ago liked exotic locations since the world was much less accessible then. But the story in Mandalay isn't that much, and could have been set pretty much anywhere. It's not bad, but it feels like the sort of thing that's not overly original and that one's seen before if one watches a lot of 1930s films.

Having said that, Francis and Cortez put the slight material over and make Mandalay a movie that's worth watching even if it's not great. Worth a watch if you can find it.