[1] The screenplay concerns a young widow who remarries and accompanies her husband to his remote jungle rubber plantation.

It is based on the 1933 Broadway play Hangman's Whip, written by Norman Reilly Raine and Frank Butler.

Paramount remade the film in 1939 as Island of Lost Men, with Anna May Wong, J. Carrol Naish and Broderick Crawford in the roles originated by Lombard, Laughton and Bickford.

Judith has a chance meeting with wealthy but lonely rubber plantation owner Horace Prin, who she agrees to marry in order to escape deportation.

Judith travels inland to Prin's plantation, where she discovers the Malay workers are poorly treated and ill-fed, while the white foremen are fugitives coerced into working far from the reach of the law.