One Way Passage is the most fulfilling moment of the career of Tay Garnett, in which Garnettian exuberance confronts all the fervour and cowardice of melodramatic romanticism. On an ocean crossing, a man condemned to death (William Powell) meets a woman (Kay Francis) who is herself terminally ill. The pair are as improbable as they could ever be in a Hollywood film – and for this reason alone they are made for each other Neither of them at first knows the destiny of the other, and then, as they come to suspect and then arrive at full awareness, the subject must not be touched upon either in words or in gestures. In this resonant situation emotions are born, shattered, but then in time persist. The pervading prospect of destruction could without doubt easily be oppressive but this does not happen, not even for a moment. On the contrary, it lifts the emotion to a pure and fresh level. The melodramatic aspect and even the directly comic element – the background of degenerate characters, typical of Garnett – ele­vate the composition in a supreme fashion above the world and its stupidities, to a true world of rediscovered innocence.

From their first meeting Powell and Francis make a habit of breaking their champagne glasses to celebrate their fragile moment. In the final incomparable image of the film, two glasses are shattered, even though the two no longer exist, without explanation but in a defini­tive manner. The enigmatic happy ending, because this is how Tay Garnett directed it, puts to the test the viewer’s benumbed sense of justice, given that respectable people do not “get together” – and perhaps because Tay Garnett, director of this film about goodness, after all wished to give the last word to life.

Jean-Charles Tacchella catches this impression well when he writes: “In Garnett there is a rare quality, at times even uncanny, as in Lubitsch and Borzage. The great directors are those who transform some fragments of their film until they create something more real than real life. Tay Garnett, who worked in the artificial Hollywood uni­verse of easy stereotypes, had this talent of expressing in his inimitable manner the happiness and the charm of the lived moment. He resolutely turned his back on dramatics and exaggerated sentimentality – and even on death, as if he would wish to ignore it entirely.”

Peter von Bagh