Out of Singapore

Charles Hutchison's 1932 Goldsmith Productions pre-Code sea melodrama stars Noah Beery as first mate Woolf Barstow, a man with a reputation for sinking the ships he serves. He poisons Captain Carroll, plots with a Singapore restaurateur to collect cargo insurance, and is undone by Concha (Dorothy Burgess), the dancer he jilted, who locks him in a cabin and dances for the crew until the dynamite goes off. Reissued in 1941 as Gangsters of the Sea. Beery's brute authority, and a climax that treats a woman's revenge as both spectacle and suicide.