One Way Passage (1932)

At 68 minutes, One Way Passage is reduced to just the essentials and all the more powerful for that. A series of romantic gestures presented with considerable restraint by Tay Garnett and made even livelier by his smart use of comic counter point. The less it does, the…

Filipe Furtado

“Always the most precious, the last few drops.” By far the best movie that Kay Francis and William Powell have turned out as a team. Believe it or not, it’s a romantic ghost story—and it’s swell stuff. —October 1932 issue of PhotoplayHail and farewell, Hong Kong, Honolulu,…

Gentry Austin

I love this film, and it means more to me every time I watch it. E.B. White in The New Yorker, December 29, 1934: "Though it's not quite time for it, we can hear in our inner ear the savage and beautiful noise the town makes at midnight of Dec. 31st. This roar is…

irmavep

Pure cinema in the form of two broken champagne glasses - there is sweet romance and there is slapstick comedy, there is tenderness and there is violence, there is murder and theft and love and forgiving but above all there are so many wonderful gestures. Perfectly…

Diogo Serafim

Not all love stories are about the happily ever after. ONE WAY PASSAGE (1932), the sixth pairing of stars William Powell and Kay Francis, proves love can be just as powerful in fleeting moments, as their romance of inescapable paths, are just as strong as those fairytale…

Jon Peters

She's heading to a sanitarium in San Francisco to try to arrest a fatal disease, he's being sent back to Alcatraz in handcuffs to be executed, they meet on board the steamer and fall in love. They have a choice, to spend their final days together, or to stay away, and maybe…

threepenny

#24 of the Films of Kay Francis. Thanks to trolley for the recommendation! This is a keeper if ever I saw one. I've always liked William Powell, although I haven't seen anywhere near enough of his films, particularly from the Pre-Code period. Here he's clearly a…

loureviews

A pair of broken champagne glasses, two discarded cigarettes. Love is fleeting and dreams can last as long as a boat ride from Hong Kong to San Francisco, but like life, all will come to a bitter end. A powerfully bittersweet, unsentimental romantic comedy with a serious…

Derek Smith

the cinema was invented with the promise that a film like one way passage would some day be made: this twilight voyage of love blossoming between two doomed souls shares an archetypal simplicity also found in curtiz's casablanca and von sternberg's morocco, it does not take…

comrade_yui