NFR Project: Gable and Harlow in 'Red Dust' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘Red Dust’

Dir: Victor Fleming

Scr: John Mahin, Donald Ogden Stewart

Pho: Harold Rosson, Arthur Edeson

Ed: Blanche Sewell

Premiere: October 22, 1932

83 min.

Adultery in the jungle!

That’s the basic thrust, as it were, in this sweaty melodrama that stars Jean Harlow and Clark Gable in the quintessential pairing that demonstrates their chemistry together.

This is definitely not a family values film. Gable plays a rough, tough rubber plantation manager in what is now known as Vietnam. Harlow is a whore on the lam from the authorities in Saigon. They get along beautifully, trading wisecracks in every exchange of dialogue and obviously enjoying themselves immensely with each other.

This ends when a new engineer comes to the plantation, a civilized and decent young man with a civilized and decent young wife played by Mary Astor. Gable promptly sends the husband off on a three-week surveying expedition, and proceeds to fall in love with the wife, who simply can’t resist his rakish, manly self.

Gable soon realizes he’s being a heel, so he goads the wife into shooting him, precipitating the abrupt departure of the married couple, who weren’t built for this climate of sexual lawlessness. By movie’s end, the adulterer and the whore are back together again, cackling merrily.

The movie’s smart-as-a-whip dialogue really makes this an above-average film. Harlow and Gable were more movie stars than actors – capable of projecting an indelible persona onto the screen rather than submerging themselves in roles. Movies were optioned for them on the basis of whether they sold the popular image of the actor or not. Here, the steamy bush is a perfect setting for Harlow’s flip delivery and Gable’s dirty grin.

The Production Code, a strict censorship regimen, was instituted in 1930 but not strictly enforced until 1934. This movie and others like it brought that enforcement on. Here, the virtuous couple are naïve fools incapable of functioning outside of the universe of middle-class values. It’s the tramps and the sluts who’ve got life’s number, and can roll with the punches. It’s as subversive a movie as you might like to see.

Once the Production Code was implemented, it would be three decades until Hollywood started portraying men and women as sexual beings again.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Scarface: The Shame of a Nation.