Pleasure Cruise 1933

Andrew Poole, Roland Young, loses his wealth during the Depression as his personal estate heads for the auction block. With no immediate prospects on the horizon, he considers releasing his fiancée, Shirley Poole, a woman who is played by Genevieve Tobin. Shirley, however, refuses to go along with a quiet goodbye and insists they marry right away. She offers to support them with her salary while he completes a novel, and he agrees. The pair wed, and the plan is set: they’ll subsist on her earnings while he chases his writing, hoping to weather hard times together.

A year passes, and Shirley throws herself into her work, while Andrew becomes a nagging, jealous househusband who fixates on the life she leads outside the home. The climate between them grows tense, pushing them to try separate vacations to cool off. Shirley ends up boarding a cruise ship, and Andrew quiets his suspicions by taking a job as the ship’s barber in order to watch—and occasionally disrupt—her social whirl on the high seas.

On the voyage, Shirley’s flirtation with passenger Richard Orloff, portrayed by Ralph Forbes, intensifies. Orloff asks Shirley to leave her cabin door unlocked for a secret rendezvous on the night of a grand party. A little tipsy, Shirley does forget to secure the door. Seizing the opportunity, Andrew locks Orloff’s cabin door from the outside and slips into Shirley’s room in the dark, determined to observe her interactions with other men.

The next morning, Shirley is mortified when Orloff apologizes for not keeping the tryst. She also notices that her engraved cigarette case is missing and begins to eye the other passengers’ cases with growing unease, wondering who might have been in her room.

Feeling the tension rise, she decides to cut the cruise short and return home. Orloff arrives at the Poole residence just before Andrew does, creating an awkward moment that underscores the tension their marriage has endured. When Andrew finally reveals the cigarette case, the truth of the affair seems laid bare. Shirley catches sight of the case as well and, feigning that she’d known all along that Andrew had been aboard, coyly advises her husband to knock the next time he enters a lady’s room. With that quip, she withdraws to her room, leaving Andrew standing in the doorway and the ship’s corridors echoing with unspoken implications.