BEFORE: This is the 2nd of the Hitchcock films released under two titles - the IMDB calls this one "East of Shanghai", so that's what I'm calling it. The original UK title was "Rich and Strange", which comes from a passage from Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Linking from "The Skin Game", John Longden was also in another Hitchcock film, "Young and Innocent", with Percy Marmont, who appears in this one. (Hitchcock, however, does not.)
THE PLOT: Believing that an unexpected inheritance will bring them happiness, a married couple instead finds their relationship strained to the breaking point.
AFTER: This seems like Hitch's attempt at a romantic comedy, but I just don't think he had the mental software for it. The plot concerns a couple who inherit money from a relative who is still alive - I'm not sure why this is mentioned so prominently, the relative never appears so why does it matter if he is deceased or not? Perhaps because Hitchcock used the "dead relative" gambit in "Juno and the Paycock", and didn't want to repeat himself, but people inherit money from dead relatives all the time, right? And people inherit money from living relatives, like, almost never.
The couple heads straight for Paris, and are shocked by what they see at the Folies Bergere - my guess is a certain director wanted to see this, too. Then they decide to take a cruise around the world - Port Said, Jakarta, Colombo and finally somewhere east of Shanghai, I'm guessing. Emily, the wife, is a typical Hitchcock heroine - meaning that 5 minutes after her husband is laid up in bed with seasickness, she's spending time with another man. For once, however, a husband is just as unfaithful, for when he recovers from his illness, he falls in love with a princess who happens to be on board. Because princesses often travel on ships with commoners, they don't have their own ships or anything like that.
By the time they reach Singapore, the marriage is essentially dissolved, but one contrivance after another manages to put them together again. Because the healthiest marriages are formed by two people who have run out of other options. They're left with only enough money to book passage back to England on a tramp steamer. This is another ill-fated decision, because the steamer manages to ram into another ship and starts to sink.
The manner in which they manage to survive and return to London is even more contrived than what has gone before. Fans of 1970's TV may remember that every episode of "The Love Boat" was legally obliged to carry very small print in the closing credits that read, "based on a film by Alfred Hitchcock". Same goes for all of those Benny Hill sketches where he was surrounded by beautiful women and kept trying to avoid ending up with the old maid.
Also starring Henry Kendall, Joan Barry (last seen in "Blackmail"), Betty Amann, Elsie Randolph
RATING: 4 out of 10 rickshaws
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