Faye is a nightclub singer running away from a murder charge and posing as a Russian emigre on a train going to Shanghai. She meets Baxter, a newspaperman who drinks the way newspapermen are supposed to drink, heavily and noisily. When bandits attack the area ahead and the train detours,
Faye seeks safety in the American consulate and Warner soon follows. Winninger runs the consulate in his customary believable manner, but that's about all that's believable in this rag-tag film that's been edited so deeply it's hard to guess what they had in mind when they began shooting. The rest
of the picture has to do with American missionaries being rescued, bandits, shootings, chases, sieges, the President of the United States personally calling Baxter back, and Faye planning to marry Baxter after she clears herself of a murder charge (not innocently, as so often happens in melodrama;
Faye really did kill the guy). The sidebar stories about BARRICADE are more interesting than the film. For example, it was never really finished, and editor Dennis took a handful of disparate scenes (as we know, movies are not shot in sequence, except on rare occasions) and put them together in an
attempt to make a story. Faye's hairstyles change in mid-sequence sometimes; Schildkraut and Bromberg, two of the best character men of the period, were in the movie but totally edited out of the final print. Treacher has fewer than five lines of dialog and received fourth billing, so we know he
had lots more to do in the original script. Two years earlier, cinematographer Freund won an Oscar for his work on THE GOOD EARTH and his sharp eye for China is again in evidence here.
