Pacific Liner

Pacific Liner is a 1939 American action/adventure film directed by Lew Landers. The film stars Victor McLaglen, Chester Morris and Wendy Barrie. Pacific Liner is primarily set in the engineering section of the vessel, where a stowaway has infected the crew with cholera. While passengers remain oblivious, the ship’s doctor (Morris) and nurse (Barrie) work to control the infection and heal their patients while the engineer (McLaglen)—who scoffs at “bugs”—keeps the stokers at their jobs filling the ship’s boilers with coal to make the best time to San Francisco. Plot In 1932, aboard the passenger ship, the S.S. Arcturus, engineer "Crusher" McKay (Victor McLaglen) runs a "tight ship", both beloved and feared by his men. The ship's doctor, "Doc" Tony Craig (Chester Morris), has signed on in Shanghai to be on the San Francisco bound trip. He wants to be near his former sweetheart, nurse Ann Grayson (Wendy Barrie). Crusher is also attracted to Ann but his clumsy courtship soon sets up a rivalry between him and the Doc. While under way, Crusher discovers a sick Chinese stowaway, below decks, but does not show him to Doc until morning. The man is dead, from “Asiatic cholera.” Doc injects everyone and institutes sanitation procedures, but Crusher is contemptuous. He has to be tricked into getting the injection and defiantly arranges a blowout in the engineering crew mess. The first case, Britcher, collapses there. The doors to the decks above are bolted shut, to maintain quarantine and so that passengers have no idea of what is happening below. While the upper-class is being sheltered, the disease spreads through the stokers down below.