Victor Fleming (1932)
Dennis Carson (Clark Gable) runs a rubber plantation in Indochina. Gary Willis (Gene Raymond) is an engineer, eager to learn the ropes and devoted to his ladylike wife Barbara (Mary Astor). An unladylike prostitute called Vantine (Jean Harlow) fetches up on the plantation, on the lam from the authorities in Saigon. (The names are just right for the characters.) Both women take a shine to Carson – Vantine from the word go and Barbara while her husband is recovering from a tropical fever. In both cases, Carson returns the compliment. It’s monsoon season and the torrential rain, the wind and the lightning, and the rumbling thunder are very enjoyable (as is a cameo from a tiger). The moral of the story is that Gable and Harlow, both sexually forthright and daring, ‘belong’ in this environment in a way that the naïve Raymond and the exquisitely tortured Astor do not. The Willises eventually return home to America as Vantine reads Carson – who’s convalescing from a bullet wound from a gun fired by Barbara – a bedtime story (it’s a children’s story in a newspaper) ‘… about a chipmunk and a rabbit – say, I wonder how this comes out …’ The contrasts between the two men and, especially, the two women are very funny. It’s amusing too that Astor skilfully develops the sensual side of Barbara’s character but remains a pain whereas you root for the wisecracking Harlow however annoying Vantine is being. Red Dust was made before the introduction of the Hays Code so the film is more verbally suggestive and physically frank than you might expect. An especially good moment when the two women are on screen together sees Astor mooching around neurasthenically while Harlow, exposing a good deal of thigh, sits filing her nails at furious speed.
Jean Harlow was only twenty-one at the time (only twenty-six when she died) and, although Vantine has been around, Harlow’s face still seems to have the inchoate quality of a child’s, which makes her libidinousness very distinctive. Clark Gable’s particular skill of being confrontational and relaxed at the same time is strongly in evidence. (John Ford remade the material, based on a play by Wilson Collison, as Mogambo twenty years later, with Gable doing the same role, this time in Africa, with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly as the two other sides of the love triangle – and, of course, with the blonde and brunette character types reversed.) The screenplay by John Lee Mahin and the direction by Victor Fleming are fit for purpose – although the presentation of the Asian labourers on the plantation is appalling now, both in what Carson has to say about their idleness and untrustworthiness and in the way that Willie Fung has been made to play the main coolie (as a grinning idiot). With Tully Marshall, Forrester Harvey and Donald Crisp. The last-named is one of the few people on the plantation who, like Vantine, is under no illusions about the moral character of its owner-manager.
4 March 2010
