It all starts light enough: A band plays "Singin' in the Rain" in Chinese in a Shanghai nightclub while a supercilious playboy (Conrad Nagel) pursues a beautiful, if overly serious, member of the English aristocracy (Kay Johnson). A married couple (Holmes Herbert and Carmel Myers), fellow members of the smart set, proposes the lark of a lifetime: a leisurely three-month voyage to the States aboard a borrowed sailing yacht. The American playboy, English girl and her dowager aunt (Zeffie Tilbury) all enthusiastically agree, and a crew is hastily assembled. It's a haste the upper-class party will soon regret, as the ship's steward (Louis Wolheim) is secretly simmering with a psychotic hatred for the super rich. After a typhoon cripples the ship and sends them adrift, class warfare erupts into murderous mutiny, and the English girl may be all that stands between the sailing party and the sharks.