Allan Dwan's Black Sheep (1935)

From the Fairbanks period in the silents, to unassuming comedies in the thirties and forties, and to Westerns in the fifties, Dwan has been as active as he has been obscure.
--Andrew Sarris

I had to come back as a writer.  If you go in with material you are always welcome.
Allan Dwan speaking about Black Sheep.

I've written about Dwan films on July 11 2014, June 11 2015, Dec 4 2015
Dwan was one of the first directors whose work I saw in considerable depth, when Peter Bogdanovitch introduced Dwan and his considerable body of work at MoMA in 1971, coinciding with Bogdanovitch's interview book Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (Praeger, 1971). Dwan started directing in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961.  Of the 400 or so films he directed most of the silent films are lost but most of the sound films survive, many of high quality directed under difficult circumstances.

Many of even the best directors were tossed aside when sound came in but Dwan was trained as an engineer and was adept at solving technical problems (sometimes assisting D.W. Griffith), which put him in good stead during the sound era, when he often found ways of saving money.  Black Sheep, like many of Dwan's films, does not fit neatly into any genre or category:  it's something of a comedy, with strong soap opera overtones, about a gambler (Edmund Lowe) and a girl (Claire Trevor) who fall in love while crossing the Atlantic.  The plot gets quite complicated, with Lowe and Trevor rescuing a young man from wealthy gamblers and a thrice-divorced woman who has ensnared the young man to help her smuggle stolen jewels. Dwan was always quite class-conscious and emphasizes the class structure on the ship, with each class meant to stay on its own deck, as a mobile camera opens the film with shots of the first and second classes and the barriers between the two.  There is a lot of snappy patter --"dames are like measles, annoying but curable"--that covers up the melancholy of the uncertain and drifting Lowe and Trevor.

P.S. There is an excellent book covering Dwan's career in considerable detail:  Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios by Frederic Lombardi (McFarland and Company, Inc. 2013)