Dangerous Crossing (1953): An Ocean Cruise with a Noir Twist

Ruth Stanton Bowman is on a honeymoon cruise with her new husband John Bowman in Dangerous Crossing. The last thing she expects is to lose him on the ship. They met four weeks and two days earlier, so they really don’t know each other very well. That’s the first clue that something may not be quite right. After they board, John leads Ruth to their cabin, Cabin B-16, where she admits that she was a mess when he first met her—the second clue that trouble might be looming. John leaves Ruth in their cabin to stash some money with the purser’s office—and then disappears. Ruth spends the remainder of the film looking for her missing husband and trying to solve the mystery about how he—how anyone—could disappear on a ship at sea.

Ruth looks for John when he first disappears but doesn’t see him anywhere. When she returns to Cabin B-16, their cabin, the door is locked. She asks the steward to unlock it, but the cabin is now empty, and he tells her that the cabin has not been booked for this crossing. She doesn’t have the key; she doesn’t have the tickets. The steward gets the purser, and while Ruth is alone in the empty cabin, she thinks to herself: “I knew it couldn’t last. . . John, what have they done? Why did I let you get mixed up in all my troubles?”

(This blog post about Dangerous Crossing contains spoilers.)

Ruth faces another problem: Is she a flighty, hysterical woman, as everyone is beginning to suspect? When the steward and the purser return to Ruth in Cabin B-16, the purser finds that Ruth is checked into Cabin B-18 under her maiden name. When they arrive in the new cabin, she finds her own luggage, but not her husband’s. The purser plans to call the ship’s doctor, but Ruth protests. When she leaves Cabin B-18 to look for John again, she is frightened inexplicably by a man walking with a cane and collapses. When Ruth comes to, the purser; the ship’s nurse, Nurse Bridges; and the ship’s doctor, Dr. Paul Manning, are in her cabin.

All the people that she can remember seeing before her husband disappeared claim never to have seen him. Second Officer Jim Logan saw her at the gangplank, but he doesn’t remember seeing Ruth with anyone else. Anna Quinn, the stewardess, did see both Ruth and John in Cabin B-16 when they first arrived, but she claims that she was never in Cabin B-16. Ruth now wants to see the ship’s captain, and the ship’s doctor accompanies her.

Captain Peters orders a search of the ship. He discovers that Ruth has no passport and no tickets, and she is not wearing a wedding ring. The doubts about her sanity begin in earnest. Captain Peters offers to let Ruth leave the ship on a pilot boat and return to New York City. She refuses to leave the ship until she finds her husband. After she leaves the captain’s quarters, Dr. Manning tells Captain Peters that he wants to check her story and verify what she says. Captain Peters wants the doctor to keep an eye on Ruth because he can’t have her running around the ship and disturbing the other passengers.

In the meantime, John calls Ruth in her new cabin, Cabin B-18. (How does he know the cabin number?) He tells her, “We’re in terrible danger, Ruth. I’ll tell you more when I can. All I can say now is, don’t trust anyone. Not anyone.” He promises to call the next night, at 10 p.m. When he doesn’t, Ruth fears for his safety.

Dr. Manning tells her that the search of the ship ordered by Captain Peters is complete. John Bowman is not onboard the ship. But Ruth doesn’t believe this and wants to continue searching for her husband.

Ruth trusts her husband John completely. The number of people that she doesn’t trust is long. It includes crew members and other passengers: Anna Quinn, the stewardess; Key Prentiss, a fellow passenger who introduced herself to Ruth before the ship even set sail; Captain Peters; Dr. Manning; Second Officer Jim Logan, who saw her but not her husband board the ship; the male passenger with a cane; and Nurse Bridges. Dangerous Crossing does a good job of building the suspense. When the film reveals the true villain, I was surprised because, unlike Ruth, I didn’t trust anyone at all and suspected everyone, including her husband.

The film also highlights the predicament of women in the 1950s. In addition to Ruth’s inability to keep her emotions in check when she is most in need of keeping her wits about her, others are quick to judge her negatively. Except for Dr. Manning, no one is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she just lost her newlywed husband. Captain Peters is especially guilty of this, and Dr. Paul Manning is a bit doubtful, too, although he professes to be well-meaning. Ruth does not have the cruise tickets or her passport because she left them with her husband John. She is penalized for leaving her important documents with her husband during a period like the 1950s when that kind of submissive behavior was expected of women. In other words, she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

Dr. Manning and Ruth slowly become attracted to one another: They start to spend a lot of time together while Ruth looks for John and the doctor investigates Ruth. Ruth becomes hysterical when Dr. Manning shows her a radiogram stating that people she knows at home in Philadelphia don’t know of any John Bowman and don’t believe that Ruth is married. Ruth gets so hysterical that Dr. Manning slaps her across the face. He may have come across as well-meaning in 1953, but I thought he was a little bit creepy and a little bit sexist by 2025 standards. And slapping Ruth across the face isn’t the only example.

Dr. Manning helps Ruth search for her husband John in places where admittance to passengers is prohibited. Ruth decides that she wants to know more about Dr. Manning while he takes her on this tour of the ship. She learns that he has never been married and that he enjoys his job as a medical doctor aboard a cruise ship: “I’ve saved the lives of people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. I don’t know which it is I like more, the feeling of responsibility or the feeling of power. I don’t know many men who could play God so many times in the course of a year.” Dr. Manning professes to Ruth and to Captain Peters that he wants to help Ruth, but this conversation didn’t strike him from the suspect list for me.

Dr. Manning is tending to Ruth in her cabin when Captain Peters arrives to tell them that the stewardess, Anna Quinn, gave a full confession: She and John Bowman, who married Ruth using an alias, were working together to get rid of Ruth and steal her inheritance. The captain tells Ruth: “After we talked to her [Quinn], we found these . . . . Your passport and your marriage certificate.” Dr. Manning is quick to intercede: “I’ll take those, Captain, until she needs them.”

After Captain Peters leaves, Dr. Manning continues his position of authority over Ruth, and Ruth says nothing to Dr. Manning about him taking her documents, and she even lets him leave her cabin with them. Ruth Bowman doesn’t learn her lesson, which makes Dangerous Crossing even more noir than, I believe, the original filmmakers intended. When Captain Peters hands her passport and marriage license to her, she should never have let Dr. Manning grab them. Leaving them in the possession of her husband John Bowman is what got her into trouble in the first place. She sure as heck shouldn’t have allowed Dr. Manning to leave her cabin with those documents. But this is the world of film noir. And few questioned women’s place in the world in 1953.

Dangerous Crossing may seem a bit dated today, but the film is still fun to watch, especially if you like a puzzle with a lot of pieces. I rooted for Ruth all the way, and I think viewers are meant to. The story is told from her point of view, so viewers believe her perceptions and what she is going through. Jeanne Crain gives a wonderful performance as the put-upon Ruth Bowman, who doesn’t have enough opportunities to enjoy her honeymoon cruise.

And if you are a fan of Carl Betz, Dangerous Crossing is worth a look because of his performance. He’s not on-screen much after his character disappears mysteriously, but I thought he made the most of his screen time. I am used to seeing Betz in The Donna Reed Show reruns, and it was a real treat to see him in Dangerous Crossing. And not just for his acting abilities, by the way. In one scene, he is shirtless; in another, he is dressed in a uniform. He carries off both scenes—and all his others—quite nicely!

This article about Dangerous Crossing (1953) is my entry for the Hit the Road Blogathon hosted by Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In. Click here for the complete list of blogathon participants and links to their blogs. The list is updated each day of the blogathon, from August 29 to September 1, 2025.

August 1953 release date  •  Directed by Joseph M. Newman  •  Screenplay by Leo Townsend  •  Based on the radio play Cabin B-13 by John Dickson Carr  •  Music by Lionel Newman  •  Edited by William H. Reynolds  •  Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle

Jeanne Crain as Ruth Stanton Bowman  •  Michael Rennie as Dr. Paul Manning  •  Carl Betz as John Bowman  •  Mary Anderson as Anna Quinn  •  Marjorie Hoshelle as Kay Prentiss  •  Willis Bouchey as Captain Peters  •  Yvonne Peattie as Nurse Bridges  •  Max Showalter (aka Casey Adams) as Second Officer Jim Logan

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox  •  Produced by Twentieth Century Fox

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai is one of those films that I find a little intimidating. It is directed by Orson Welles, and almost everyone, especially if they are film noir fans, has seen it. It also has a well-deserved reputation for a plot that is hard to follow, and many claim that it doesn’t make sense. It didn’t do well at the box office when it was first released in 1947, but its stature has grown in the years hence. And apparently audiences in France have loved it all along. The film does have a convoluted plot, perhaps more convoluted than other films noir. Today, audiences can rewatch the film several times on DVD or Blu-ray (as I did), and the plot does make more sense with repeat viewings, which is so true of many films noir.

The narrative begins in New York City, where Michael O’Hara (played by Orson Welles) spots Elsa Bannister (played by Rita Hayworth) riding past him in Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage. He is immediately smitten with her, and he tells viewers as much in his voice-over narration using an adopted Irish brogue. In this narration, he admits to not being in his right mind for quite some time after seeing Elsa Bannister and that once he saw her, he wasn’t thinking except to think of her. Elsa Bannister’s carriage is waylaid by three men in Central Park, and Michael O’Hara is there to save her.

Michael soon learns that Elsa is married to Arthur Bannister, who calls himself the greatest criminal lawyer. Now, Michael wants to avoid her, and he refuses her invitation to work on her yacht. He goes to the pier to find work on a boat sailing out of New York City, but Arthur Bannister comes looking for him, determined to hire him as part of his yacht crew. He and his wife are traveling to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. Michael refuses at first, but Arthur Bannister gets drunk with Michael and two of his sailor friends, and Michael and one of his friends, Chaim (Goldie) Goldfish, are forced to take the too-drunk Arthur Bannister to his yacht.

The trip aboard the Bannisters’ yacht in The Lady in Shanghai ends in San Franciso with many on-location shots. Click here to visit “Reel SF: San Francisco movie locations from classic films” for comparisons (then and now) of various location shots for The Lady from Shanghai. The list is extensive, both for The Lady from Shanghai and for the other movies spotlighted at the website. Click on MOVIE LIST at the top right of the site to see the full list of films.

When they arrive at the yacht, Elsa comes to Michael, claiming to need help and protection. Michael doesn’t know what to make of her, but Goldie is anxious to get work, and he convinces Michael that both of them could probably be hired to work for the Bannisters. Michael reluctantly agrees; he is hired as bosun, and Goldie is also hired as part of the crew.

It doesn’t take long for the tense atmosphere aboard the yacht to be revealed, especially after the arrival of Arthur Bannister’s law partner, George Grisby. Grisby appears to be baiting Michael and also seems smitten with Elsa. Arthur Bannister repeatedly calls his wife Lover, although it is implied that he and she no longer have sex, if they ever did. (Arthur has braces on both legs and walks with two canes.) Elsa tells Michael that Sidney Broome, the yacht’s steward, is not a steward at all but a private detective hired by her husband to spy on her so he can cut her off without any money if they ever get a divorce. When the yacht stops in Acapulco, Mexico, George Grisby offers $5,000 to Michael to kill him, Grisby. And according to Michael, the story just gets crazier and crazier as time goes on.

Michael O’Hara’s voice-over narration continues at times throughout the narrative, and Michael tells his story in hindsight. The entire film could be called a flashback, and flashbacks are one of the many features of film noir. The story is told by Michael from his perspective, and he relies on his own memory to tell it. He starts by telling viewers that he wasn’t in his right mind once he met Elsa Bannister, and this theme of insanity is repeated throughout the film.

The Blu-ray that I watched came with three audio commentaries, one of them by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, who mentions that Orson Welles showed the expressionistic film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to the cast. He wanted something off-kilter and fantastic, which is definitely true of this expressionistic German film. Welles wanted insanity, characters acting like somnambulists, and a break with reality. Smith also mentions that the interior amusement park scenes at the end of the film were created by Orson Welles himself, and he was inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari once again and by modern art. So the next time that I watched The Lady from Shanghai, I decided to focus on the theme of insanity, which I think is one of the reasons the plot seems so convoluted.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another great film that explores the theme of insanity. It utilizes expressionistic techniques to tell its story, and German expressionism is a large influence on film noir in general. Click here to learn some basics about German expressionism, and click here to see my blog article about the film.

(This article about The Lady from Shanghai contains spoilers.)

The theme of insanity and not being in one’s right mind is mentioned directly several times in The Lady from Shanghai. Michael O’Hara saying at the start of the film that he is not in his right mind after seeing Elsa Bannister is just the beginning, and this particular example is easy to dismiss because many people would use Michael’s words to describe the feeling of infatuation and even love. In this example, not being in one’s right mind could be taken as a euphemism. After he and Goldie set sail on board the Bannisters’ yacht, however, things start to change. Michael says to Bessie, another member of the crew who is also the Bannister’s domestic servant on land, “Talk of money and murder. I must be insane. Or else all these people [the Bannisters, George Grisby] are lunatics.” Michael is a little unnerved at this point, but more insanity is ahead.

When the yacht makes a stop in Acapulco, Michael tells a story to Elsa, Arthur, and George Grisby about fishing “off the hump of Brazil.” He caught a shark in a sea that was already dark with blood. The shark got loose and bled into the sea, and the blood drove the rest of the sharks mad. They started attacking and killing each other, which, he tells the Bannisters and Grisby, reminds him of them.

Michael at least is aware that things aren’t right and that the Bannisters and Grisby aren’t telling him everything they know. He tells Elsa about Grisby’s offer to pay him if Michael will kill him (Grisby), and he also tells her, “I’m sure he’s out of his mind.” After Grisby and Broome are murdered, Michael begins to have some doubts about almost everything: “I began to ask myself if I wasn’t out of my head entirely. The wrong man was arrested. The wrong man was shot. Grisby was dead and so was Broome. And what about [Arthur] Bannister? He was going to defend me in a trial for my life. And me, charged with a couple of murders I did not commit. Either me or the rest of the whole world is absolutely insane.”

Michael escapes from the courthouse where his murder trial takes place by pretending to take some of Arthur Bannister’s painkillers. He takes more than he intended to and passes out in a theater in Chinatown. Li Gong, another of the Bannisters’ servants, and his Chinatown gang take him to the Crazy House at the amusement park, which is closed for the season and thus a perfect place to hide him. When Michael comes to, he is disoriented at first, but he is able to regain his senses: “Well, I came to . . . in the Crazy House! And for a while there, I thought it was me that was crazy. After what I’d been through, anything crazy at all seemed natural. But now, I was sane on one subject: her [Elsa Bannister] . . . I knew about her.”

Out of all the main characters—Elsa and Arthur Bannister, George Grisby, and Michael O’Hara—Michael is the only one alive at the end of the film. His story, his metaphor, about the sharks and their feeding frenzy was more accurate than he could have predicted earlier in the story. The insanity is finally over, but at great cost. Perhaps the cost was inevitable. The Bannisters’ and Grisby’s murderous insanity would have continued forever, it seems, if they hadn’t been stopped. Elsa Bannister admits this to Michael as she lays dying in the Crazy House. Michael, on the other hand, tells her that he refuses to play a part in any more insanity.

As I noted, the Blu-ray version of The Lady from Shanghai, published by Kino Lorber in 2023, comes with three audio commentaries: one each by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, novelist and critic Tim Lucas, and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. I have to be honest: I have never been a big fan of Bogdanovich or his films, and I found his commentary to be the least interesting of the three. He literally reads from his notes and recorded conversations that he used for a book about Orson Welles, which was published after Welles’s death. And he also reads from a long letter from Welles to Harry Cohn at Columbia, the studio responsible for distributing The Lady from Shanghai. He did make some interesting points, such as Welles liked on-location shooting because he liked surprises and dealing with challenges. (In contrast, the director Alfred Hitchcock preferred studio shooting because he could control everything.) But Bogdanovich glosses over Rita Hayworth’s childhood abuse and its effect on her marriage to Welles, and he tries to make the case that Welles did his best to deal with it, but Welles and Hayworth were married for only four years. It’s probably best to remember that Bogdanovich thought of Welles as a personal friend.

But the other two commentaries by Smith and Lucas provide lots more information and details. Imogen Sara Smith’s commentary focuses mostly on the film’s production, background, and shooting. Tim Lucas’s focuses quite a bit on the novel, If I Die Before I Wake by Raymond Sherwood King, which is the basis of the film. Both commentaries are well worth a listen because of all the detail they provide. Here are some highlights from each.

Blu-ray audio commentary by film historian Imogen Sara Smith

◊ Orson Welles always intended the film to be offbeat, but Columbia wanted a vehicle for Rita Hayworth, their biggest star.

◊ Rita Hayworth wanted to work with Orson Welles, even though they were no longer living together. They were still married but living separately.

◊ Suicide is another recurring theme in the film.

◊ The court scenes in which Michael O’Hara is tried for the murders of George Grisby and Sidney Broome are staged as a circus. The audience is raucous, and its members are looking to be entertained.

◊ The Lady from Shanghai is told mostly from Michael O’Hara’s point of view, and viewers are just as confused as he is. Disorientation is a feature of film noir.

◊ George Grisby ogles Elsa Bannister. Smith wonders if this is perhaps a comment on studio executives. The scene with him watching her through a telescope while she sunbathes and dives is funny, but it is pushed to the extreme. Hayworth was abused by her father, and her first husband tried to bolster his career by sending her to studio executives.

◊ George Grisby mentions the end of the world and nihilism, which is a reference to the atomic bomb. Welles is one of the first filmmakers to mention the atomic bomb and nuclear destruction in a film. Grisby wants to escape nuclear destruction by moving to a South Sea Island, but the United States tested the bomb on a South Sea Island: Bikini Atoll.

Blu-ray audio commentary by novelist and critic Tim Lucas

◊ Tim Lucas gives a lot of background information about Raymond Sherwood King and the publication of his novel If I Die Before I Wake. He talks about its long path to publication and to its adaptation first as a radio play before it was put on film by Orson Welles. The novel was originally published in May 1938.

◊ The film’s release date in the United States was April 14, 1948. Its release was delayed by one year after production.

◊ Orson Welles refused to take credit or responsibility for the film. There is no credit for the director.

◊ There is no mention in the film’s credits of which novel by Sherwood King is the basis of the film.

◊ The novel takes place only in New York and on Long Island. The film goes from New York to Acapulco, to San Francisco.

◊ The characters in the film are more sinister than they are in the novel. In the novel, Elsa Bannister is portrayed like a lost child. In the film, she is more cunning and conniving. She is really the femme fatale of the film.

◊ Lucas erroneously states that the group of well-dressed Asians listening to the biased radio broadcast about Michael O’Hara and his murder trial seemingly have no link to the courtroom drama, but they do foreshadow the subsequent scenes in Chinatown and at an amusement park, where one of them works. But Tim Lucas is wrong about one thing: one of the Asian men, Li Gong, works for the Bannisters, and he and his gang take Michael O’Hara to the amusement park at the request of Elsa Bannister.

◊ Elsa Bannister’s last scene, her death scene, shows that Rita Hayworth was a good actress.

The Lady from Shanghai is not the only film noir to have a convoluted plot. It’s true that its plot seems more opaque than those of other films, but I have written many times before about other films noir needing repeat viewings to catch all the details and make sense of the plot. And the same can be said for The Lady from Shanghai. It’s well worth the effort. It is a remarkable story and an amazing example of Orson Welles’s particular style of filmmaking. And it is a great chance to see Rita Hayworth meet the challenge of a difficult role. So many films noir have complicated plots that reward repeat viewings, and The Lady from Shanghai is no exception. I have seen the film several times now, and I enjoy it more and more each time.

December 24, 1947 (France), April 14, 1948 (United States), release dates  •  Directed by Orson Welles  •  Screenplay by Orson Welles, William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle  •  Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Raymond Sherwood King  •  Music by Heinz Roemheld  •  Edited by Viola Lawrence  •  Cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr, Rudolph Maté, Joseph Walker

Rita Hayworth as Elsa (aka Rosalie) Bannister  •  Orson Welles as Michael O’Hara  •  Everett Sloane as Arthur Bannister  •  Glenn Anders as George Grisby  •  Ted de Corsia as Sidney Broome  •  Evelyn Ellis as Bessie  •  Gus Schilling as Chaim (aka “Goldie”) Goldfish  •  Erskine Sanford as the judge  •  Carl Frank as District Attorney Galloway  •  Louis Merrill as Jake  •  Harry Shannon as the cab driver  •  Wong Chung as Li Gong  •  Philip Morris as port steward Officer Peters  •  Anita Kert Ellis as the singer dubbed for Rita Hayworth

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Mercury Productions