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‘Red Dust’: Lewdness amid the Rubber Trees

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Original poster.

Original poster.

One of the real treasures from the Pre-Code Era, “Red Dust” (Metro, 1932), is quite possibly the raciest picture Metro ever released during the twenty-seven years that Louis B. Mayer ran the place — I can’t think of another that even comes close. Clark Gable plays Dennis “Fred” Carson, the hard-driving, hard-drinking, womanizing overseer on a rubber plantation in Indochina. Harlow plays an on-the-lam whore named Vantine, who fetches up at the plantation one night. Here’s how they meet.

The passed-out drunk is Donald Crisp, cast against type: in this one, he’s a thoroughgoing swine. He’s not very good in the part, but it’s a relief to see him do something different from the insufferably dignified gentlemen he usually played. Gable’s partner, McQuarg, is played a fine old character actor named Tully Marshall.

Before I saw “Red Dust” for the first time, I never really understood Harlow’s appeal. In “Dinner at Eight,” for instance, the dumb broad she plays is so spoilt and bad-tempered and shrill, I find her far more irritating than amusing. (It doesn’t help that most of her scenes are with horrible Wallace Beery.) But she’s tremendously appealing and funny in “Red Dust,” and she steals every scene she’s in. In his own quiet way, however, Tully Marshall in this next scene gives her a run for her money. (Willie Fung is the racist cartoon of a houseboy. The ugly Asian stereotypes in “Red Dust” are pretty breathtaking by today’s standards.)

Whenever I’m in a bad mood, Tully Marshall’s performance — especially his reading of “If it was the summer of eighteen hundred and ninety-four, I’d play games with you, sister” — is always enough to chase the blues away. Marshall is the sort of old pro that makes me love old movies. Two years before he made this picture, he appeared with John Wayne in Raoul Walsh’s “The Big Trail,” which was shot in Mexico. During the shoot, Wayne was afflicted with a dose of la turista so terrible that he lost eighteen pounds in a single week; for the rest of his life, the memory of that awful week made him shudder involuntarily. When he was well enough to return to work, the first scene he shot involved Tully Marshall and a big jug of liquor. He entered with Marshall slung over his shoulder. According to Wayne, “I set him down and we have a drink with another guy. They passed the jug to me first, and I dug back into it. It was straight rotgut bootleg whiskey. I’d been puking and crapping blood for a week and now I just poured that raw stuff right down my throat. After the scene, you can bet I called him every kind of an old bastard.” Despite his notoriety as a world-class booze-hound, Marshall was in constant demand; he appeared in almost two hundred pictures, including “Ball of Fire” and “Grand Hotel.” Every time I see him, I think of how the old soak and his jug of San Juan possum juice almost turned “The Big Trail” into “The Last Run” for young Duke Wayne. Over the past year, it has become abundantly clear to me that good supporting performances like Tully Marshall’s are very often what I like best about the pictures that give me the most pleasure.

But in this particular case, it’s Harlow who owns the picture. Her combination of vulgarity, street smarts and sunny good-nature has never been surpassed. Like so many movie stars of the Studio Era (and unlike so many of today’s stars), her voice is as unmistakable as her face, but it’s also notable — especially for that era — for its foghorn ugliness. The advent of talking pictures ruined the careers of so many Silent Era glamour queens, yet Harlow’s career didn’t really take off until audiences got a load of the strident clamor that issued from her milk white throat. She rarely sounds perfectly natural — overemphasis and sing-song are two hallmarks of her vocal style — but her commitment to the material is absolute; her facial expressions and body language are so spontaneous and lively that her overtly artificial vocal mannerisms work in her favor (at least, they do in “Red Dust”). In her scenes with Gable, she’s clearly acting — putting on a show — but she’s not acting for us: she’s showing off for the guy she’s trying to hook. Look at how deftly she warms him up and wins him over in this next scene. He’s irritable and she’s exhausted, but she’s so attracted to him that she can’t stop flirting. The more she chatters, the madder he gets, but the more violently he tells her to shut up, the hornier she becomes — she’s impossible to insult. His steely hostility hasn’t a chance against her saucy vivaciousness. She and Gable make a brilliant team, but she’s the one who drives the scene, and she does it with great wit and verve.

This next clip is the best-known scene in the picture: Harlow takes a bath in a rain barrel. She did it topless. We don’t get a peek, but Gable sure did. At one point between takes, she stood up, gave the crew below a good look and said, “This is for the boys in the lab!” The film never left the set, however: Victor Fleming had it removed from the camera. He didn’t want it to turn up on the black market.

“Red Dust” certainly looks like a Metro high-gloss picture of the era: the glamorous lighting for Gable and Harlow, the familiar indoor jungle settings and the backlot shores of Metro’s Lot One Lake (where the early Tarzan pictures were shot) — everything about its look is unmistakably Metro. But it sure doesn’t act or think like a high-gloss Metro picture. The randy banter between Gable and Harlow is breezy and fun-loving, not passionate and earnest — and their complacence about sex is completely at odds with Metro’s fastidious primness. In fact, I can’t think of another American picture of its era in which adult sexuality, promiscuity and marital infidelity are treated with such buoyant nonchalance. Before the picture’s over, jealousy will lead to gunfire, but nobody gets killed or is even seriously hurt. The whole point of view is radically different from Metro’s strict moral code. In this picture, Gable has sex with Harlow the day they first meet; he carries on with her for a month, and when he’s ready to try a new flavor, he gives her a big wad of cash, slaps her on the ass and puts her on the boat back to Saigon. Then he promptly forgets about her — until her boat runs aground and she comes back for more. But when Harlow returns, Gable’s already busy seducing his new employee’s wife (Mary Astor), and treats Harlow badly. Gable carries on with Astor until he discovers that her husband (Gene Raymond) is a decent guy. Angry with himself and disgusted with her, he sends her back to her husband and tells them both to get lost: “You two pack your tennis racquets and go back where ya belong.” It’s hardly what one expects from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And through it all, we root for Gable. It’s not only the sexiest picture Metro ever made, it’s also the most subversive.

There’s something else that sets the sexuality in “Red Dust” far apart from other pictures of its era: sex looks like a lot of fun. Garbo, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Jack Barrymore and all the other famous screen lovers of the era made lust look horrible and serious — their idea of wantonness looks like my idea of a hanging judge as he pronounces sentence. But there’s nothing brooding or terrifying about the sexiness in “Red Dust”: it’s happy and fun; it’s a romp. Lust doesn’t make Gable, Harlow and Astor frown and smolder, it makes them light of heart and full of laughs. Me too.

‘Reunion in France’: Mein Kamp

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Lopsided Triangle: the Duke, the Dutchman and the Box Office Poison

Lopsided Triangle: the Duke, the Dutchman and the Box Office Poison.

Last week, a bout of insomnia drove me out of bed late one night and into the living room, where I turned on TCM and hoped to find some nicely soporific picture that would lull me back to sleep on the sofa. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a plush French Resistance melodrama called “Reunion in France” (Metro, 1942). I found it so hilariously ludicrous that I abandoned all hope of getting a good night’s rest, and instead, laughed my head off for the next hour, then ordered the DVD as soon as the picture was over.

“Reunion in France” is a camp melodrama — make that Camp with a capital C — and it brims with patriotism and propaganda, high dudgeon and low comedy: the adventures of a feckless Parisian socialite, Michele de la Becque (Joan Crawford), who returns to newly-occupied Paris after a long vacation on the Côte d’Azur, to find that her wealthy fiancé (played by Dutch actor, Philip Dorn, who doesn’t sound remotely French)* has turned Quisling. The shock of her lover’s transformation radicalizes Michele on the spot. His cooing rationalizations enrage her. She scowls, she snarls, she sneers, but she can’t budge him: he’s too much in love with his wealth and position. So she breaks off their engagement and goes to work as a shop assistant in the atelier of Mme Montanot (Odette Myrtil). Mme Montanot is the couturier who, till Michele’s sudden loss of social position, has always designed her dazzling gowns. As in dozens of pictures before this one, Crawford once again finds herself working behind a counter, selling expensive shit to spoiled bitches. Enter recently shot-down RAF flyboy, Pat Talbot (John Wayne) of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who’s on the lam from a Kraut Stalag. Pat and “Mike” (as he insists on calling the now penniless, but still elegant Mlle Michele de la Becque) meet cute one night after she closes up shop. Quicker than she can say “Je suis pressé, monsieur,” she finds herself helping him to outwit a Nazi spy (the reliably egregious Howard da Silva), after which they set up house temporarily. While he’s holed up in her flat, she connives to get him out of France and back to his comrades. This includes a lot of fancy double-agent footwork on her part, which requires her to play pattycake with a few Nazi Scheißkerle and, harder still, to keep a civil tongue in her head. And all the while she’s tricked out in an amazing assortment of furs, jewels, shimmering gowns and astonishing hats. Crawford was still considered box office poison when this picture was released; her next picture for Metro (“Above Suspicion” with Fred MacMurray) would be her last before she was released from her contract.
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* The accents and languages deserve special mention. Since it’s a Hollywood picture and the action takes place in Paris, English stands in for French. Fine. But the accents are all over the international map. Odette Myrtil, who was born in Paris, speaks her lines with a Parisian accent; most of the other Frenchies are played by Americans and Brits, who speak with their normal accents. This makes the Dutch-born Philip Dorn something of an oddity: though he pronounces the name “Martin” in the French manner, he sounds neither French nor Dutch when he speaks English (i.e., the stand-in for French): he sounds like a damned Jerry. Then there’s John Wayne, a Yank in the RAF. Is the English he speaks to Crawford supposed to be French? It’s hard to believe, but that seems to be the case. And finally, we have the Krauts (most of whom are played by Germans, Austrians and Czechs), who speak to the French characters in English with heavy German accents, but among themselves, they snarl away in German — without benefit of subtitles.
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The complications keep coming at you: car chases, executions, double-crosses. I won’t go into it all: it’s got to be seen to be believed, and possibly seen more than once to follow all the nuttiness. It’s one of the weirdest camp pictures I’ve ever seen — and highly enjoyable. I haven’t tried this yet, but I make no doubt it’s even better if you precede it with a meaningful cocktail hour, to loosen you up for the zaniness. I’m happy to report that, despite all the odds against him, John Wayne is really very good in a nutty, atypical part. He has so much presence and male authority that even Crawford seems to pay attention to him. It is a bit strange, however, to hear Big Duke Wayne comment intelligently on women’s fashions.

Joan Hears Die Meistersinger

In this clip, Michele has just returned to Paris, where she (and we) get the first intimations that her formerly patriotic fiancé has taken up with the Jerries.

First we see those Nazi hats . . . et alors, mon dieu, le Wagner maudit! Can the end of the world be far behind? Crawford is all a-tremble at the sound of Die Meistersinger, but now she must face a room full of Nazis, where she’ll deliver some of her own zingers. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marc Connelly (and one of George S. Kaufman’s first collaborators) co-wrote the screenplay. The head screenwriter was Jan Lustig. I’d like to think they were kidding (after all “lustig” is German for “funny”), but it’s impossible to know.

Jerries, Meet the Jerries


That’s John Carradine as the cadaverous menace; he’s one of the few American actors who play a Kraut in the picture. Natalie (Lovey Howell from “Gilligan’s Island”) Schafer is another. Her performance is hilarious camp. I only wish she had more to do.

Kraut Swine Go Shopping

These next two clips are like “The Women” with a cast of Krauts. The ugliness, obesity and barbarousness of German womanhood provide much of the fodder for low comedy in this flick — just look at them: they’re all built like gasoline trucks and have the manners of lady wrestlers. Even their sesquipidelian surnames are the subject for ridicule. God, I love it! Check out the surprise cameo in this clip.

That’s la jeune Ava Gardner as Marie the salesgirl. My God, how gorgeous she is! Yet it was another four years before she was cast in a role that got her career going (“The Killers,” 1946, where she was on loan to Universal).

Joan Seeks Employment


I especially like the overhead shot from the balcony where we see the beefy Hausfrauen shoving and shouldering their way up to the merchandise counter; seen from above, they look like a drift of swine rooting for truffles. Throughout the picture, the Kraut women are presented as extravagantly bad-mannered.

I’m partial to Odette Myrtil, who was a fashion designer as well as an actress. I first saw her in “Dodsworth,” in which she gives a lovely, subtle performance in a small role — also as a couturier. She has more to do in this one; she’s charming and very poignant. And, of course, we learn that she’s also a member of the Underground, who sticks it to the Krauts every way she can, always with a sweet smile on her lips.

Mendelssohn ist Streng Verboten!

More amusing propaganda in this scene. The violinist is playing the famous melody from the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64. The Nazis have forbidden the playing of Mendelssohn, but see how the foxy fiddle-player outwits the Krauts.

I cannot explain it, but it always makes me laugh when Joan Crawford talks about music. She’s got another great musical moment (with Hollywood’s feinste Nazi Teufel, Conrad Veidt) in “A Woman’s Face,” and “Humoresque” is full of howlers. But the combination of Crawford, French Resistance, Nazis and Hollywood is almost unbearably wonderful. That ubiquitous Nellie of Golden Era Hollywood, Henry Daniell — the queen I love to hate — is also on hand, but has, alas, not much to do.