Rich and Strange begins with an extended sequence, mostly without dialogue, which introduces us to a man's life.  Fred is a white-collar minion of the paper-shuffling set, a worker bee among a swarm who buzz toward the office door at the stroke of six, into the dark, rain-swept streets, and descend into the bowels of the London underground to be packed like sardines in overcrowded subway cars.  

          Arriving home to a cramped flat--with a cat prowling the dinner table and his wife, Emily, sewing herself a new dress--Fred turns on the "wireless" for an evening's entertainment.  He is greeted by the announcement that, "Mr. Baker will give his twelfth talk on accountancy in three minutes".

          Something in Fred snaps.  "I want a change!" he declares, in a sudden burst of temper.  "Some life!   Life, I tell you!"

          Emily gently pats his knee.  "What you want, dear are some little liver pills."

          It's a brilliant sequence that sets the scene perfectly.  What a shame that the rest of this film isn't dispatched with nearly the same --and by that I mean none of the same-- economy and wit.  Rich and Strange is a slow boat to Singapore, and back again, with a sophomoric, under-realized tale of marital infidelity wandering about aimlessly in the vicinity of where one would normally expect to find a plot.  

           The boring lives of Fred and Emily Hill (played by Henry Kendall and Joan Barry, respectively) are interrupted by a rich uncle who has heard of Fred's growing ennui.  Rich Uncle decides to immediately hand over a large chunk of money to Fred, rather than make Fred wait to get it as an inheritance.  No explanation is given for Rich Uncle's sudden outburst of generosity, but I suppose that sort of thing happens all the time, over in England.

          Fred and Emily jump on the offer and are soon in Paris, where they get good and plastered.  Then it's off to Marseilles, where they board what turns out to be the SS Marital Infidelity.  Emily falls for lonely Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont), Fred for a gold digging adventuress posing as a princess (spicy Betty Amann). 

         The sexual intrigue is nowhere as interesting as it sounds.  Only late in the film does a shipwreck and subsequent rescue by a Chinese junk briefly enliven the story before it's back to the dreary old flat in dreary old England.  By then Fred and Emily are right back where they started, in more ways than one.